The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944
Paddy Ashdown
From the bestselling and prize-winning author of ‘A Brilliant Little Operation’ comes the long neglected D-Day story of the largest action by the French Resistance during WWII, published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings.In early 1941, three separate groups of plotters – one military, one political, one intellectual – began to organise and plan on and around the forbidding mountainous plateau near Grenoble – the Vercors. The aims of the groups were the same: to hasten the departure of the German occupiers; to restore the pride of France after its fall and the humiliations of the puppet Vichy government which followed; and to build a new France. The overwhelming desire to get rid of the Germans would unite them. Their different views of the France they hoped for in the future would divide them.Over the next three years these sparks of resistance would grow to challenge the might of the hated German occupiers. As the Allied troops stormed the D-Day beaches, the Vercors rose up to fight the Nazis in a planned rearguard action. It was to prove not only the largest Resistance action of the entire war but also, in the severity of the German response, the most brutal crushing of resistance forces in Western Europe.For the men and women of Vercors, aided and abetted by the Free French forces of General de Gaulle and SOE operatives from London, the events on the Vercors took them on a journey from early idealism through hope, misjudgement, folly, despair, sacrifice and slaughter to a kind of cruel victory. The tragedy drew the attention of those at the highest level of the Allied war effort and placed the Vercors deep into the heart of the history of modern France in a way which resonates still in the country’s daily life and politics.Long overlooked by English language histories, this magnificent book sets the story in the context of D-Day, the muddle of politics and many misjudgements of D-Day planners in both London and Algiers, and – most importantly – it gives voice to the many Maquisards fighters who fought to gain a voice in their country’s future.
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COPYRIGHT (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers,
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
London W6 8JB
WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014
Copyright © Paddy Ashdown 2014
Maps by Harriet McDougall
Paddy Ashdown asserts his moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover photographs © Musée départmental de la Résistance du Vercors, Vassieux-en-Vercors
Maps by Harriet McDougall
Source ISBN: 9780007520800
Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007520824
Version: 2014-11-28
DEDICATION (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
To the boy in the white shirt
EPIGRAPH (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
In war, young men go out to die for old men’s dreams
Anon
CONTENTS
Cover (#u5dfbe8d0-a64f-5072-9847-a42297d81ea3)
Title Page (#ue05795d5-e6a3-5dcf-a067-e658235640ee)
Copyright (#ulink_a538962f-b41f-56f8-bfe0-896284787ea9)
Dedication (#ulink_9be68daa-0167-508d-a6c5-96ec3f4fa04c)
Epigraph (#ulink_dc25ff8b-301f-5988-a16d-ce0177f7b271)
A Note on Usages (#ulink_59a83361-7c7a-5b7c-8809-33a559ffbd03)
Preface (#ulink_546904ed-f108-5931-be0a-058dad379d17)
Dramatis Personae (#ulink_63448f52-dd5d-524c-9754-cb9d6e9a0678)
List of Maps (#ulink_fcfd0f1f-3f5c-5b07-95e2-fefc368449cb)
Prologue (#ulink_900dfaf7-c29a-55b4-9aa2-73c64030f9eb)
1 The Vercors before the Vercors (#ulink_4c76e24a-603f-5ceb-9fec-24caf345da3f)
2 France from the Fall to 1943: Setting the Scene (#ulink_0fadea0a-2169-5699-850d-cdf1ca5be85b)
3 Beginnings (#ulink_4d797c6c-610a-5cab-b910-1eba0f50ef4d)
4 The Army Goes Underground (#ulink_b6f1e6b4-81f8-5d2c-ba26-d89c41ff0353)
5 Camps and Plans (#ulink_d58fd6f4-95f1-592f-becf-2ebf0c7eb00b)
6 Exodus and Folly (#ulink_8f054b0c-0b53-5794-858a-9b73ceb3f7ea)
7 Expectation, Nomadisation and Decapitation (#ulink_8817a34b-8c0c-58df-9d44-6dc93debae35)
8 Retreat, Retrenchment and Reconstruction (#ulink_9989f829-4802-57b6-ae3d-2b311b74053c)
9 Pressure and Parachutes (#ulink_28a37818-0451-5ebd-989b-813933407887)
10 The Labours of Hercules (#ulink_f3794875-1e64-519b-ab2c-c7accc37f92d)
11 January 1944 (#ulink_b0802d61-ea6d-5aa2-bd63-a10e0c2bce66)
12 Of Germans and Spies (#ulink_231c654a-f856-5a5d-83d5-7488c4d7f4dd)
13 February 1944 (#ulink_6bdc6d92-9609-5d44-8c14-489fc199b658)
14 March 1944 (#ulink_143d9bed-63c3-5b68-adea-9e98e11f1e1a)
15 Weapons, Wirelesses, Air Drops and Codes (#litres_trial_promo)
16 April 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
17 A Basket of Crabs (#litres_trial_promo)
18 May 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
19 The First Five Days of June 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
20 D-Day: 6 June 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Mobilization (#litres_trial_promo)
22 The First Battle of Saint-Nizier (#litres_trial_promo)
23 The Second Battle of Saint-Nizier (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Respite and Reorganization (#litres_trial_promo)
25 A Damned Good Show (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Mixed Messages (#litres_trial_promo)
27 The Republic (#litres_trial_promo)
28 Action and Expectation (#litres_trial_promo)
29 Bastille Day: 14 July 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Pflaum’s Plans and People (#litres_trial_promo)
31 The Rising Storm (#litres_trial_promo)
32 The End of Dreams: Friday 21 July 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Fighting On: Saturday 22 July 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
34 The Final Battles: Sunday 23 July 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
35 Retreat and Refuge (#litres_trial_promo)
36 The Harrowing of the Vercors (#litres_trial_promo)
37 Resurgence and Revenge (#litres_trial_promo)
38 Aftermath and Afterlives (#litres_trial_promo)
39 Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)
Annex A (#litres_trial_promo)
Annex B (#litres_trial_promo)
Annex C (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Paddy Ashdown (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
A NOTE ON USAGES (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
In this text I have not included dialogue unless it comes from a source who I have reason to believe might have been present at the time or it has been noted down as dialogue in the course of taking testimony from a living witness.
Since this story concerns primarily military operations, I have used the twenty-four-hour clock throughout. In 1943 and 1944 all British forces in the European theatre used Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) plus one hour (UK Single Summer Time) from 16 August to 3 April, and GMT plus two hours from 4 April to 15 August (UK Double Summer Time). The time used in all German-occupied western European territories was Central European Time (CET), which in that era was UK Single Summer Time plus two hours. Since this story takes place primarily in France, all times in the text are given in, or adjusted to be consistent with, CET.
For a similar reason, units of measurement have been converted, where appropriate, to the metric scale.
Readers may want to know what the wartime franc was worth. Prices more than doubled during the four years of the German occupation of France, and inflation was very much worse on the black market. But one can get a rough idea of money values if one thinks of 1,000 francs in 1943–4 as the equivalent of 250 euros or £200 today.
Except where otherwise stated the translations of French source documents into English are those of the author. Where the original French was in a written formal document I have tried to make the translation as precise as possible. Where the original source is oral (for example, the oral evidence of witnesses) I have allowed myself greater latitude to cope with the differences in sentence formation between spoken French and English in an attempt to preserve the original sense and colour, while conveying this to the English reader in the most readable fashion.
The word ‘maquis’ has subtly different meanings in English and French. The word originates from the Corsican term for the dry scrub which covers the hills of southern and Mediterranean France, but even more so from a Corsican expression prendre le maquis, which means to shelter in the woods to escape the authorities or a vendetta (to go underground). Even today, the word is used by the French primarily to describe those who resisted the Germans by going into the countryside and especially the wilder places. They formed into groups which sometimes took the name of the area they operated in – for instance, le maquis du Vercors. The term maquisard in French denotes someone who belonged to a maquis cell, usually in a rural area. In French the term is not normally taken to apply to those who belonged to urban Resistance groups (for example, in Paris or Lyon). In modern English usage, however, the word Maquisard has become, for all practical purposes, synonymous with that of a Resistant, whether urban or rural. Since this is an English book the word Maquis is used in the English sense, except where it is plainly inappropriate to do so.
One of the problems with writing this book has been the story’s high degree of complexity and detail. In an attempt not excessively to confuse the reader, I have tried to keep the personal names of those who played a minor role in the story out of the main text. For those interested, these, where known, are given in the Notes. Similarly, I have removed from the main text as many of the military unit names as possible; these too can be found in the Notes. And finally, in the same endeavour, I have submerged some of the myriad organizations involved in both London and Algiers. Thus the main directing French organization in London, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), is referred to simply as ‘London’ or ‘de Gaulle’s headquarters in London’, while the main Algiers organization for directing the Resistance in southern France, the Special Projects Operations Centre (SPOC), becomes just ‘Algiers’.
For the same reason and in the hope it will make them more accessible to the reader, I have tried to simplify the references by providing abbreviations for the main archives which I have consulted (such as TNA for the British National Archives at Kew, and NARA for the US National Archives and Records Administration). A key giving each of these abbreviations can be found at the start of the Notes section.
PREFACE (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
I first became fascinated by the wartime epic of the Vercors in the early 1970s when I worked in the United Kingdom Mission to the United Nations in Geneva. I was drawn to it because of the tragedy and the horror of the story. But also because it struck me as a powerful example of a subject that has always fascinated me: the consequences for those on the front lines of conflict when those at the top know too little about the harsh realities of war, or think too little about what their decisions mean on the ground.
This is a French story, of course. But it is also a very human epic which has lessons for us all. The strong are not always wise. The simple not always stupid. The weak do not always lose. In most cases, the final determiner of outcomes rests, not with machines, or might, or well-laid plans, but with how individuals behave at the moment of trial.
This story has another function too. In this, the year of the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, it is as well to remember that the Normandy invasion was about more than what happened on the Normandy beaches, most of which is minutely documented and recorded. This is the hidden story of D-Day, when thousands of ordinary, untrained and in most cases crudely armed French men and women put their lives at risk quite as much as those who stormed the beaches, because they were determined to help throw out a hated occupier and join the fight to liberate their country.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
BENNES, Robert (BOB)* (#ulink_8a9c5576-7761-5edc-bf82-32b5cdf94193)
Zeller’s radio operator and commander of La Britière radio house.
BILLON, Francis (TARTANE)
Parachuted in with Tournissa. Injured. One of those shot at the Grotte de la Luire.
BLAIN, Léa
Cipher and coding assistant to Eucalyptus. Runner for Jean Prévost.
BLANC, Paul (JEAN-PAUL)
Commander of the Trièves Maquis unit on the Pas de l’Aiguille.
BOIRON, Victor
Tractor driver in Vassieux.
BOISSIÈRE, Gustave (BOIS)
Speleologist and liaison officer to the Eucalyptus Mission.
BORDENAVE, André (DUFAU)
Commander of 6th BCA.
BOURDEAUX, Louis (FAYARD)
Commander of a Maquis company in Royans.
BOURGEOIS, Maurice (BATAILLE)
Maquis leader who accompanied Vernon Hoppers on the Lus-la-Croix-Haute ambush.
BOURGÈS-MAUNOURY, Maurice (POLYGONE)
Military delegate of R1, then National Military delegate.
BOUSQUET, René (CHABERT)
Huet’s deputy.
BUCKMASTER, Colonel Maurice
Head of SOE’s F Section.
CAMMAERTS, Francis (ROGER)
SOE F Section Organizer of Jockey circuit.
CATHALA, Gaston (GRANGE)
Maquis leader in the west of the plateau.
CHAMBONNET, Albert (DIDIER)
Commander of the Secret Army in the Lyon area.
CHAMPETIER DE RIBES, Maude (DANIELLE)
Milice spy and mistress of Dagostini.
CHAVANT, Eugène (CLÉMENT)
(Le Patron) Political leader of the Vercors.
CONSTANS, Jean (SAINT-SAUVEUR)
Responsible for assistance to the Vercors in Algiers.
CONUS, Adrien (VOLUME)
Member of Eucalyptus Mission. Sent by Huet to get help from Bauges Maquis on 21 July.
COSTA DE BEAUREGARD, Roland (DURIEU)
Responsible for the northern sector of the Vercors.
COULANDON, Émile (GASPARD)
Resistance leader on the Mont Mouchet.
CROIX, Yves (PINGOUIN)
Eucalyptus Mission radio operator.
CROUAU, Fernand (ABEL)
Commander of Compagnie Abel.
DAGOSTINI, Raoul
Milice Chief.
DALLOZ, Pierre (SENLIS)
Conceived Plan Montagnards in 1942.
D’ANGLEJAN (ARNOLLE)
One of Huet’s staff officers. He organized the counter-attacks in Vassieux.
D’ASTIER DE LA VIGÉRIE, Emmanuel (BERNARD)
Senior French Resistance official in London and Algiers.
DARIER, Albert (FÉLIX)
Member of the Mens section of the Compagnie de Trièves.
DELESTRAINT, Charles (VIDAL)
General. Head of the Secret Army in southern France. Captured and died in Dachau.
DESCOUR, Jacques (LA FLÈCHE)
Marcel Descour’s son. Killed at Vassieux, 21 July 1944.
DESCOUR, Marcel (BAYARD and PÉRIMÈTRE)
Chief of Staff of the Secret Army in R1 and FFI Commander of Region 1.
DESMAZES, Marie Alphonse Théodore René Adrien (RICHARD)
Secret Army conspirator with Delestraint in Bourg-en-Bresse.
DROUOT, Jean (HERMINE)
FFI leader in the Drôme.
EYSSERIC, Gustave (DURAND)
Maquis commander at Malleval.
FARGE, Yves (GRÉGOIRE and BESSONNEAU)
Commissioner of the Republic.
FISCHER, Dr Ladislas
Doctor in Saint-Martin and Grotte de la Luire. He sometimes used the false identity Lucien Ferrier while in the Vercors.
GANIMÈDE, Dr Fernand
Doctor in Saint-Martin and Grotte de la Luire.
GARIBOLDY, Paul (VALLIER)
First leader of Groupe Vallier.
BLUM-GAYET, Geneviève (GERMAINE)
Early Vercors Resistant activist.
GAGNOL, Abbé
The priest of Vassieux.
GEYER, Narcisse (THIVOLET)
Maquis commander. Responsible for the southern sector of the Vercors.
GODART, Pierre (RAOUL)
Maquis commander at Malleval.
GRANVILLE, Christine (née Krystyna SKARBEK) (PAULINE)
SOE F Section courier for Jockey circuit.
GUBBINS, Brigadier Colin
The operational head of SOE.
GUÉTET, Dom (LEMOINE)
Marcel Descour’s counsellor/monk.
HAEZEBROUCK, Pierre (HARDY)
Commander of the defence of Vassieux. Killed 21 July 1944.
HOPPERS, Vernon G.
Commander of the US Justine Mission.
HOUSEMAN, John (RÉFLEXION)
Member of Eucalyptus Mission.
HUET, François (HERVIEUX)
Commanded the Maquis on the Vercors.
HUMBERT, Jacques
Retired General who walked to the Vercors to join the battle on 21 July 1944.
JACQUIER, Paulette (MARIE-JEANNE and LA FRETTE)
Leader of Maquis group in the Chambarand forest.
JOUNEAU, Georges (GEORGES)
Garage owner and head of the Motor Transport Depot on the Vercors.
KALCK,* (#ulink_a050de05-551e-5aee-8165-28e58d9f3fb4) Louis (ANDRÉ and JOB-JOB)
Commander of Compagnie André defending the eastern passes.
KNAB, Werner
Commander German Sipo/SD Lyon area.
KOENIG, Marie Joseph Pierre François (known as Pierre)
Appointed by de Gaulle as CO of FFI.
LASSALLE, Pierre (BENJAMIN and BOLIVIEN)
Descour’s radio operator at La Matrassière and La Britière.
LE RAY, Alain (BASTIDE and ROUVIER)
Vercors military commander until January 1944 and then FFI commander of Isère Department.
LONGE, Desmond (RÉFRACTION)
Leader of Eucalyptus Mission.
MARTIN, Léon Dr
One of the founders of Grenoble resistance in the Café de la Rotonde.
MAYAUD, Charlotte (CHARLOTTE)
Early Vercors Resistant and organizer in Villard de Lans. Also a courier and liaison agent.
MOCKLER-FERRYMAN, Eric
Director for SOE operations in western Europe.
MONTEFUSCO, Mario (TITIN and ARGENTIN)
Radio operator at La Britière.
MOULIN, Jean (REX, MAX and RÉGIS)
De Gaulle’s representative in southern France and the architect of the unified southern Resistance.
MYERS, Chester L.
Hoppers’ second-in-command on the Justine Mission.
NIEHOFF, Heinrich
German military commander southern France.
ORTIZ, Peter Julien (CHAMBELLAN and JEAN-PIERRE)
US Marine parachuted in with the Union Mission and subsequently the head of Union II.
PECQUET, André Édouard (BAVAROIS and PARAY)
Eucalyptus Mission radio operator.
PFLAUM, Karl Ludwig
Commander 157th Reserve Division.
PINHAS, France
Nurse at the second Battle of Saint-Nizier.
PRÉVOST, Jean (GODERVILLE)
Writer and friend of Dalloz. Commander of Compagnie Goderville in the north of the Vercors.
PROVENCE, Mireille
Milice spy.
PUPIN, Aimé (MATHIEU)
Early Vercors Resistance leader.
RAYNAUD, Pierre (ALAIN)
An agent of Cammaerts and commander of a Drôme Maquis unit.
REY, Fabien (MARSEILLE and BLAIREAU)
Expert in and author of Maquisard guide to the the flora and fauna of the Vercors.
REY, Sylviane
Nurse and friend of Francis Cammaerts.
RITTER, Stefan
Commander No. 8 Company Reserve Gebirgsjäger Battalion II/98.
ROMANS-PETIT, Henri (ROMANS)
Resistance leader in the Jura.
ROUDET, Marcel (RAOUL)
Corrupt Lyon policeman who led his own ‘Raoul Maquis’.
SALLIER, Ferdinand (CHRISTOPHE)
Maquis leader in the west of the Vercors.
SAMUEL, Dr Eugène (JACQUES and RAVALEC)
Early founder of the Resistance movement in Villard-de-Lans.
SCHÄFER, Friedrich
Commander Kampfgruppe Schäfer.
SCHWEHR, Franz
Commander Kampfgruppe Schwehr.
SEEGER, Alfred
Commander Kampfgruppe Seeger.
SOUSTELLE, Jacques
Confidant of de Gaulle and head of the French Directorate for Intelligence and Special Forces.
STÜLPNAGEL, Carl-Heinrich
German military commander for all France.
TANANT, Pierre (LAROCHE)
Huet’s Chief of Staff.
THACKTHWAITE, Henry (PROCUREUR)
British member of the Union Mission.
TOURNISSA, Jean (PAQUEBOT)
Landing-ground expert sent in to build an airstrip at Vassieux.
ULLMAN, Henri (PHILIPPE)
Commander of Compagnie Philippe.
ULLMANN, Dr Marcel
Doctor in Saint-Martin and Grotte de la Luire.
VILLEMAREST, Pierre FAILLANT de (FRANTZ)
Maquis intelligence expert and later commander of the Groupe Vallier.
VINCENT, Gaston (AZUR and PIERRE)
OSS agent in Saint-Agnan.
VINCENT-BEAUME, André (Capt. VINCENT and SAMBO)
Head of Huet’s 2nd Bureau (intelligence).
WINTER, Anne
Nurse at the Grotte de la Luire.
ZABEL
Commander Kampfgruppe Zabel.
ZELLER, Henri (FAISCEAU and JOSEPH)
Chief of Resistance in south-east France.
* (#ulink_e7cc62ff-0488-5d93-8835-e2dc1b60f4b2) Aliases in brackets.
* (#ulink_544bdedc-1f73-5ff2-9e03-49046be09849) There are several versions of this name, including Calke and Calk. I have used the one given in the journal of the 11th Cuirassiers and Robert Bennes’ memoirs.
LIST OF MAPS (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
Map 1: The Vercors (#ulink_c11f69fc-773b-5f1e-bd18-b74eb69b4dd6)
Map 2: Occupied Territories 1942 (#ulink_8c4d8511-9467-5ed1-bfc5-eccecb0b7fe8)
Map 3: Camps of the Vercors 1943 (#ulink_9e69737f-1acd-5c03-b82d-6ebe442db038)
Map 4: Drop Sites (#litres_trial_promo)
Map 5: German Operations 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
Map 6: Options for the Southern Invasion (#litres_trial_promo)
Map 7: The Battle of Saint-Nizier (#litres_trial_promo)
Map 8: Huet’s Dispositions and Early German Probes (#litres_trial_promo)
Map 9: Pflaum’s Plan (#litres_trial_promo)
Map 10: The Battle for Vassieux (#litres_trial_promo)
Map 11: Battle of the Passes (#litres_trial_promo)
Map 12: The Battle of Valchevrière (#litres_trial_promo)
Map 13: Flight and Refuge (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
Above the city of Grenoble, at Saint-Nizier-du-Moucherotte, the sun rose into a perfect sky at 04.48 on the morning of 13 June 1944. For the 700 young men who had spent the previous night under the summer stars, strung out along a 3-kilometre defensive line on the Charvet ridge, it bought a welcome warmth against the damp early-morning chill. Bees hummed among the flowers and grasses and everywhere little birds darted from clump to bush, seeking out insects. High above the early lark let down her string of liquid notes. Below them, the Grésivaudan valley, bounded by the Chartreuse massif on one side and the Bauges and Oisans ranges on the other, glowed with the colours of high summer. And in the distance, like a great white whale, the snow-covered hump-back of Mont Blanc sparkled in the sunlight. In normal times this would have been good day for lovers – and country walks – and family picnics. But this was not a normal time – and this would not be a normal day.
Modern-day soldiers almost always fight and die miles from home. But these young men – many little more than boys – looked down that morning to see their home city laid out as plain as a street map. They knew its every nook and cranny. There was the park where they had played football with friends. There the school they had attended. There the square in which they had hung around, watching the girls go by. There the café where they had met a lover. And there the rented flat where wives and children still slept this summer morning, as they lay out in the dew-soaked grass, waiting for the enemy to come.
Whatever politicians say, soldiers do not die for their country. They die, mostly, for the man next to them – the comrade they know will lay down his life for them. And for whom they, too, will lay down theirs in their turn – if required to do so. But most of these young Maquisards lying out this warm summer’s morning on the Charvet hill, in the same clothes – even the same white shirts – in which they had left home only days previously, were different. Young, naive, unpractised in the use of arms, inexperienced in the terrors of war, they had come to the plateau out of a genuine sense of patriotism mixed with romance and adventure. Their youthful enthusiasm remained undimmed by the dull, mind-numbing routines of the professional soldier. How were they to know that their proudly acquired Sten guns would be little more than pop-guns against the steel-clad might and majesty of the world’s finest army, now massing invisibly below them? How were they to know, plucked so suddenly out of comfortable city lives, what it would be like to watch a friend cough out his life’s blood on the grass next to them? These things were literally beyond their imaginings.
And so, in ways unknown to the common soldier, they lay there, waiting for their enemy – apprehensively of course – but in their innocence also proudly, bravely, determinedly, ready to carry out what they believed was a glorious duty on behalf of their long-oppressed country. ‘It’s the morning of Austerlitz!’ declared one, referring to Napoleon’s great victory over the Austrians in 1805.
Suddenly, there was a new noise punctuating the early-morning hum of the city, drifting up to them on a light summer breeze. It was the insistent thump of a German heavy machine gun somewhere in the woods and meadows below them. Little flowers of dirt started sprouting among them in the long grass where they lay. Looking to the foot of the hill, they could make out tiny dots of field grey spreading out as they started to move slowly up towards them.
‘They’re coming!’ someone shouted.
1
THE VERCORS BEFORE THE VERCORS (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
For those who live around the Vercors massif – from the ancient city of Grenoble lying close beneath its north-eastern point to the vineyards of Valence scattered around its south-western slopes – the forbidding cliffs of the plateau are the ramparts of another country. To them, this is not just a mountain. It is also a state of mind. Even when hidden behind a curtain of summer rain or with its summits covered by the swirling clouds of a winter tempest, the great plateau is still there – offering something different from the drudgery and oppressions of ordinary life down below. Best of all, on still, deep-winter days, when the cold drags the clouds down to the valleys, up there on the Vercors looking down on the sea of cloud, all is brilliant sunshine, deep-blue skies, virgin snow and a horizon crowded with the shimmering peaks of the Alps.
Today, this is a place of summer escape and winter exhilaration. But its older reputation was as a place of hard living and of refuge from retribution and repression.
The historical importance of the Vercors lies in its strategic position dominating the two major transport corridors of this part of France: the Route Napoleon which passes almost in the shadow of the plateau’s eastern wall and the valley of the River Rhône, which flows through Valence some 15 kilometres away from its south-western shoulder.
The Romans came this way fifty years before the birth of Christ. Pliny, writing in AD 50, referred to the people of the plateau as the Vertacomacori, a word whose first syllable may have been carried forward into the name ‘Vercors’ itself. Eight centuries later, the Saracens followed the Romans, implanting themselves in Grenoble for some years. According to local legend, they even sent a raiding party towards the Pas de la Balme on the eastern wall of the plateau, but were beaten back by local inhabitants rolling rocks down on the invaders. Less than a hundred years later, towards the end of the tenth century, the Vikings came here too, but from the opposite direction – south down the Rhône in their longships. And 400 years after that, the Burgundian armies followed them on their own campaign of conquest and pillage. Then in March 1815, Napoleon, after landing on the Mediterranean coast from Elba, marched his growing army north along the route which still bears his name under the eastern flank of the Vercors, towards Grenoble, Paris and his nemesis at Waterloo.
Napoleon excepted, what is most significant about these invaders is that, though there are signs enough of their passing in the countryside below, there are few on the Vercors itself. It is as though these foreigners were content to pass by in the valleys without wishing to pay much attention to the cold, poverty-stricken and inhospitable land towering above them. One consequence of this passage of armies and occupiers is, however, more permanent. The historian Jules Michelet, writing in 1861, commented: ‘There is a vigorous spirit of resistance which marks these provinces. This can be awkward from time to time; but it is our defence against foreigners.’
The plateau itself is shaped like a huge north-pointing arrowhead some 50 kilometres long and 20 wide. It covers, in all, 400,000 hectares, about the same size as the Isle of Wight. An Englishman who will play a small part in this history described it, in his prosaic Anglo-Saxon way, as a great aircraft-carrier steaming north from the middle of France towards the English Channel.
This extraordinary geological feature is the product of the the shrinking earth and the faraway press of the African continent, whose northward push against the European mainland generates the colossal pressures which wrinkle up the Alps and squeeze the Vercors limestone massif straight up in vertical cliffs, 1,000 metres above the surrounding plain.
Map 1 (#u84de6651-a52a-59dd-8f47-315abcb89bc2)
No concessions are found here to accommodate the needs of man. The Vercors offers nothing in the way of easy living. Extreme difficulty of access made the plateau one of the poorest areas, not just of France, but of all Europe, until new roads were blasted up the cliff faces in the nineteenth century. The forbidding bastion of the eastern wall of the plateau, stretching from Grenoble to the plateau’s southern extremity, is accessible only by goats, sheep and intrepid walkers. For vehicles, there are just eight points of access to the plateau, one on its southern flank, five spread out along its western wall and two on its north-eastern quarter. Of these, all bar one involve either deep gorges into which the sun hardly ever penetrates or roads which rise dizzily through a tracery of hairpin bends to run along narrow ledges and through dark tunnels blasted from vertical rock faces.
Only the road on the plateau’s north-eastern edge offers something different. Here the slope rises placidly from the back gardens of the Grenoble suburbs and is served by a moderately engineered road, supplemented, until 1951, by a small funicular tramway, at the top of which is the little town of Saint-Nizier. This sits on its own natural viewing platform, looking out over the city to the mountain-flanked valley of the Isère (known as the Grésivaudan valley) and the white mass of Mont Blanc in the distance.
The Vercors plateau itself is dominated by three rolling ridges which run along its length from north to south like ocean breakers. Their tops are above the treeline, rock-strewn and so sparsely covered with mountain grasses that on bright summer days the white from the limestone below seems to shimmer through the thin air and dazzle the eyes. In some high, very exposed areas, where the hot summer winds have whipped off all the soil, the limestone rock is laid bare and fissured into deep cracks, some large enough for a man – or several men – to stand up in. These are wild and terrible places, known to the locals as lapiaz. Their only gentleness lies in the strange lichens and alpine plants which make their homes in the cracks and survive by straining moisture from the dew-laden air of summer mornings.
Further down, there are cool conifers and one of the largest stands of hardwood in western Europe. Further down still, cradled in the valleys, are the little towns, villages and hamlets of the Vercors community – many of them, such as Saint-Martin, Saint-Julien, Saint-Agnan, La Chapelle, speaking of a past where an attachment to the right God was as important to survival as skill at animal husbandry and knowing the right time to plant the crops. Here, though the bitter snow-filled winters remain tough, there is good grazing and comfortable summer living.
One essential ingredient of life, however, is not easily available – water. This is a limestone plateau and every drop that falls as rain or seeps away from melting snow drops down through the limestone into hidden channels, underground rivers and a still-undiscovered network of chambers and caverns which honeycomb the whole Vercors plateau. Some say a drop of moisture captured in a snowflake which falls on the summit of the plateau’s highest peak, the 2,341-metre Grand Veymont, will take three years to pass in darkness through the hidden channels under the mountains before it sees the light of day again, tumbling down through the plateau’s gorges on its way to the Rhône and the warm waters of the Mediterranean far away to the south. Surface water across the whole plateau is rare and wells and springs even more so. All of them are widely known and meticulously marked on every Vercors map.
This is the unique topography and meteorology which has played such an important part in shaping both the Vercors, and the lives of those who have struggled to live and take refuge there, not least during the years of France’s agony in the Second World War.
But it is not just the topography that makes the Vercors unique. The plateau lies at the precise administrative, architectural, cultural and meteorological dividing line between northern, temperate, Atlantic France and that part of France – Provence – which looks south to the Mediterranean. The frontier between the departments of the Isère and of the Drôme divides the plateau into two halves: the northern Vercors is in the Isère and the southern Vercors is in the Drôme.
At least until the Second World War, these two Vercors were quite different. Indeed, as late as the nineteenth century, the rural folk of the plateau spoke two different and mutually incomprehensible languages, the langue d’oc and the langue d’oïl. The northern Vercors took its lead from sophisticated Grenoble. Here, at Villard-de-Lans, was established one of the first – and one of the most fashionable – Alpine resorts in France, frequented in the 1930s by film stars, the fashionable, the sportif and the nouveau glitterati of Paris. During pre-war summers, the area became one of the favourite Alpine playgrounds for those with a passion for healthy and sporty living; it teemed with hikers, climbers, bikers and even practitioners of Robert Baden-Powell’s new invention from England, le scouting. The southern Vercors on the other hand – the ‘true Vercors’ according to its inhabitants – remained virtually unchanged: still agricultural, still largely isolated, still taking its lead more from Provence and the south than the styles and sophistications of Paris and the north.
This division is visible even in the vegetation and architecture of the two halves. Travel just a few tens of metres south through the short tunnel at the Col de Menée at the south-eastern edge of the plateau and there is a different feel to almost everything. Even the intensity of the light seems to change. Pine trees, temperate plants and solid thick-walled houses, whose roofs are steeply inclined for snow, give way almost immediately to single-storey houses with red-tiled roofs crouching against the summer heat, tall cypresses as elegant as pheasant feathers, the murmuring of bees and the scent of resin in the air. Here the hillsides are covered with wild thyme, sage and the low ubiquitous scrub called maquis, from which the French Resistance movement took its name.
Many factors and many personalities shaped the events which took place on the Vercors during the Second World War. One of them was the extraordinary, secluded, rugged, almost mythical nature of the plateau itself.
2
FRANCE FROM THE FALL TO 1943: SETTING THE SCENE (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
It is only the French themselves who understand fully the depth of the wounds inflicted by the fall of France in 1940. They had invested more in their Army than any other European nation with the exception of Germany. With around 500,000 regular soldiers, backed by 5 million trained reservists and supported by a fleet of modern tanks which some believed better than the German Panzers, the French Army was regarded – and not just by the French – as the best in the world.
It took the Germans just six weeks to shatter this illusion and force a surrender whose humiliation was the more excruciating because Hitler insisted that it took place in the very railway carriage where Germany had been brought to her knees in 1918. It is not the purpose of this book to delve in detail into how France fell. But one important element of those six weeks in the summer of 1940 is often overlooked. Not all of France’s armies were defeated.
The French Army of the Alps – the Armée des Alpes – never lost a battle. They held the high Alpine passes against a numerically superior Italian assault. And they stopped the German Army too, at the Battle of Voreppe, named for the little town just outside Grenoble which guards the narrows between the Vercors and the Chartreuse massifs. Indeed the Battle of Voreppe ended only when the French artillery, wreaking havoc on German tanks from positions on the northern tip of the Vercors plateau, were ordered to return to barracks because the ceasefire was about to come into force. Thanks to this action, Grenoble and the Vercors remained in French hands when the guns fell silent. But this was small comfort to the victorious French Alpine troops who now found that they were part of a humiliated army. They regarded themselves as undefeated by the Germans but betrayed by the Armistice and ached to recover their lost honour.
The French rout and the German columns pushing deeper and deeper into France set in train a flood of internal refugees who fled south in search of safety. It was estimated that some 8 to 9 million civilians – about a quarter of the French population – threw themselves on to the roads, seeking to escape the occupation. They were later referred to as les exodiens. Among them were 2 million Parisians, French families driven out of Alsace-Lorraine and many Belgians, Dutch and Poles who had made their homes in France.
The ceasefire between German and French troops came into force at 09.00 on 24 June 1940 and was followed by the Armistice a day later. Under the terms of this peace, France was divided in two. The northern half, known as the Zone Occupée or ZO, was placed under General Otto von Stülpnagel, named by Hitler as the German Military Governor of France. The southern half, the Zone Non-Occupée or ZNO, comprising about two-fifths of the original territory of metropolitan France, was to be governed by Marshal Pétain, who set up his administration in the central French town of Vichy. The two were separated by a Demarcation Line, virtually an internal frontier, which ran from the border with Switzerland close to Geneva to a point on the Spanish border close to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.
Map 2 (#u84de6651-a52a-59dd-8f47-315abcb89bc2)
There was another France created by the nation’s defeat and humiliation, but very few knew about it at the time. It had left with General Charles de Gaulle in a British plane from Mérignac airport outside Bordeaux not long before the Armistice was signed. On 18 June 1940, just two days after he arrived in London, de Gaulle made the first of his famous broadcasts to the French people: ‘has the last word been said? … Is defeat final? No! Believe me, I who am speaking to you from experience … and who tell you that nothing is lost for France … For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone! … This war is a world war. Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ The sentences were stirring enough. The problem was, almost no one in France heard them. In the early 1940s there were only 6 million radios in France and, since a quarter of France’s population were in captivity, or fighting, or on the roads fleeing the invader, there were not many who had the time to sit at home with their ears glued to the radio, even if they had one.
With almost 70,000 casualties, 1.8 million of her young men in German prisoner-of-war camps and la gloire française ground into the dust alongside the ancient standards of her army, France’s first reaction to her new conqueror was stunned acquiescence. Early reports arriving in London from French and British agents all speak of the feeble spirit of resistance in the country. In these first days, many, if not most, of the French men and women who had heard of de Gaulle saw him as a rebel against the legitimate and constitutional government in Vichy. They trusted Pétain to embody the true spirit of France and prepare for the day when they could again reclaim their country. After all, was he not the hero of Verdun, the great battle of 1916? Some believed fervently that the old warrior’s Vichy government would become, not just the instrument for the rebuilding of national pride, but also the base for the fight back against the German occupier and that he, Pétain, the first hero of France, would become also the ‘premier résistant de la France’.
There were, of course, some who wanted France to follow Germany and become a fascist state. In due course they would be mobilized and turn their weapons on their fellow countrymen. But these were a minority. For the most part, after the turbulence and the humiliation, the majority just wanted to return to a quiet life, albeit one underpinned by a kind of muscular apathy. The writer Jean Bruller, who was himself a Resistance fighter and used ‘Vercors’ as his nom de plume, clandestinely published his novel Le Silence de la Mer in 1942. In this he has one of his characters say of France’s new German masters: ‘These men are going to disappear under the weight of our disdain and we will not even trouble ourselves to rejoice when they are dead.’
There were many reasons why, in due course and slowly, the men and women of occupied France broke free of this torpor and began to rise again. But two were pre-eminent: the burning desire to drive out the hated invader, and the almost equally strong need to expiate the shame of 1940 and ensure that the France of the future would be different from the one that had fallen.
The formation of the earliest Resistance groups came organically – and spontaneously – from French civil society. Some were little more than clubs of friends who came together to express their patriotism and opposition to the occupier. Others were political – with the Communists being especially active after Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. Almost all were strenuously republican in their beliefs. There were even Resistance organizations supporting the regime in Vichy, preparing for the day when they would help to recapture the Zone Occupée. Although the early Resistance groups concentrated mainly on propaganda through the distribution of underground newspapers, over time they evolved into clandestine action-based organizations capable of gathering intelligence, conducting sabotage raids and carrying out attacks on German units and installations.
In London, too, France’s fall changed the nature of the war that Britain now had to fight. Now she was utterly alone in Europe. Churchill knew that, with the British Army recovering after the ‘great deliverance’ of Dunkirk, the RAF not yet strong enough for meaningful offensives against German cities and the Royal Navy struggling to keep the Atlantic lifeline open, the only way he could carry the war to the enemy was by clandestine rather than conventional means.
On 22 July 1940, he created the Special Operations Executive (SOE), instructing it to ‘set Europe ablaze’. SOE, headed by Brigadier Colin Gubbins and headquartered in Baker Street near Marylebone station, was organized into ‘country sections’ which were responsible for intelligence, subversion and sabotage in each of Europe’s occupied nations. France, however, had two country sections: F (for France) Section and RF (for République Française) Section. The former, led by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, was predominantly British run and was staffed mostly by British officers and agents. The latter, which acted as a logistical organization for Free French agents sent into France, was made up almost exclusively of French citizens. Although members of the same overall body, SOE’s F and RF sections adopted totally different ways of doing business. The ‘British’ F Section operated through small autonomous cells, which were in most cases kept carefully separate from each other in order to limit the damage of penetration and betrayal. RF Section, on the other hand, tended to run much larger, centrally controlled agent networks.
But the organizational complexity and rivalry in London – which often seemed to mirror that on the ground in France – did not end there. De Gaulle, whose headquarters were at 4 Carlton Terrace overlooking the Mall, had his own clandestine organization too, headed by the thirty-one-year-old, French career soldier Colonel André Dewavrin. This acted as the central directing authority for all those clandestine organizations in France which accepted the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. However, as one respected French commentator put it after the war, ‘General de Gaulle and most of those who controlled military affairs in Free France in the early days were ill-prepared to understand the specificities of clandestine warfare … [there was a certain] refusal of career military officers to accept the methods of [what they regarded as] a “dirty war”. It was a long and difficult process to get [the French in] London to understand the necessities of the “revolutionary war”.’
For Churchill, who knew that a frontal assault on Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) was still years away, the strategic opportunities offered by the French Resistance, fractured and diffuse as it was, were much less appealing than those in the Balkan countries. The French Resistance may have been a low priority for Winston Churchill in these early years, but for General de Gaulle, who created the Forces Françaises Libres on 1 July 1940, it was the only means of establishing himself as the legitimate leader of occupied France. For him it was imperative to weld all this disparate activity into a unified force under his leadership, capable not only of effective opposition to the Germans, but also of becoming a base for political power in the future.
De Gaulle’s opportunity to achieve this came in October 1941 when the charismatic forty-one-year-old Jean Moulin escaped from France over the Pyrenees and arrived in Lisbon. Here Moulin, who, as the Préfet of the Department of Eure-et-Loire had been an early resister against the Germans, wrote a report for London: ‘It would be mad and criminal not to use, in the event of allied action on the mainland, those troops prepared for the greatest sacrifice who are today scattered and anarchic, but tomorrow could be able to constitute a coherent army … [troops] already in place, who know the terrain, have chosen their enemy and determined their objectives.’
Moulin met de Gaulle in London on 25 October 1941. The French General could be prickly and difficult, but on this occasion the two men instantly took to each other. On the night of 1/2 January 1942, Jean Moulin, now equipped with the multiple aliases of Max, Rex and Régis, parachuted back into France as de Gaulle’s personal representative. His task was to unify the disparate organizations of the Resistance under de Gaulle’s leadership. Thanks to Moulin’s formidable energy, organizational ability and political skill, he managed to unify the three key civilian Resistance movements of the southern zone into a single body whose paramilitary branch would become the Secret Army, or Armée Secrète, the military arm of the Gaullist organization in France.
Among those with whom Moulin made contact on this visit was the sixty-one-year-old French General, Charles Delestraint, who de Gaulle hoped would lead the Secret Army. On the night of 13/14 February 1943, a Lysander light aircraft of the RAF’s 161 Special Duties Squadron, which throughout the war ran a regular clandestine service getting agents into and out of France, flew from Tempsford airport north of London to pick up Moulin and Delestraint and fly them back to Britain.
Here, the old General, who had been de Gaulle’s senior officer during the fall of France, met his erstwhile junior commander and accepted from him the post of head of the Secret Army in France under de Gaulle’s leadership. His task was to fuse together all troops and paramilitary organizations, set up a General Staff and create six autonomous regional military organizations, each of which should, over time, be able ‘to play a role in the [eventual] liberation of the territory of France’. Delestraint’s first act was to write a letter under his new alias, ‘Vidal’, to ‘The officers and men of all Resistance paramilitary units’:
By order of General de Gaulle, I have taken command of the Underground Army from 11 November 1942.
To all I send greetings. In present circumstances, with the enemy entrenched everywhere in France, it is imperative to join up our military formations now in order to form the nucleus of the Underground Army, of which I hold the command. The moment is drawing near when we will be able to strike. The time is past for hesitation. I ask all to observe strict discipline in true military fashion. We shall fight together against the invader, under General de Gaulle and by the side of our Allies, until complete victory.
The Commanding General of the Secret Army
Vidal
On the night of 19/20 March, another Lysander flew Moulin and Delestraint back to France, where the flame of resistance was beginning to take hold. This change of mood was due, principally, to three factors.
The first was the increasing severity of German reprisals. In the beginning, hostages were taken at random, held against some required action by the French civil authorities and then released. But when Germans started to be assassinated, things took a much darker turn. On 20 October 1941 the German military commander of Nantes was shot dead. The Germans responded by taking fifty hostages from the local community and summarily executed them. As this practice became more and more widespread French outrage and anger deepened and the ranks of the Resistance swelled.
The second event which transformed the nature of the Resistance movement in France began at dawn on 8 November 1942, when Allied troops stormed ashore on the beaches of French North Africa. The strategic consequences of Operation Torch were very quickly understood by the Germans. Now the defeat of their forces under Field Marshal Rommel and the Allied occupation of the whole of the North African coast were only a matter of time. Germany’s hold on continental Europe could now be threatened not just from the Channel in the north, but also from the Mediterranean in the south. Three days after Torch, the Germans swept aside the barriers on the Demarcation Line and, amid squeals of protest from the Vichy government, sent their armoured columns surging south to complete their occupation of the whole of metropolitan France. This destroyed the Vichy government’s constitutional legality and laid bare the bankruptcy of their claim to be the protectors of what remained of French pride and sovereignty.
It also had another, even more powerful effect. The Vichy Armistice Army, or Armée de l’Armistice, created from the broken elements of France’s defeated armies, was immediately disbanded, causing some of its units to take to the maquis. Some dispersed individually and reassembled under their commanders in the forests, taking with them their structures, their ranks, their customs and even their regimental standards. From about January 1943 onwards, senior ex-Armistice Army officers, including two who will be important in our story, Henri Zeller and Marcel Descour, began to work more closely with Delestraint’s Secret Army. To start with, both forces, though co-operating closely with each other, maintained their separate autonomy. But in December 1943 they agreed to fuse together to form a single military structure, the FFI – the French Forces of the Interior, or Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur – under de Gaulle’s command.
The third and arguably greatest factor which turned many French men and women from relative apathy to armed resistance was Germany’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for resources and manpower. The Germans demanded 60 per cent of all France’s agricultural production, amounting to some 600,000 tonnes of food and equipment a month, causing severe rationing and acute food shortages, especially in the cities. Inevitably this in turn gave birth to an extensive, all-pervasive (and all-providing) black market. It was, however, Germany’s demand for labour which, more than anything else, provided the French Resistance with the recruits it needed to become a genuine popular movement.
It all began with a bargain which seemed, given the exigencies of war and France’s position as a subjugated nation, reasonable enough. With so many of her male population under arms, Germany was desperate for labour to run her industries and work her farms. Programmes to attract workers from France were implemented. These included a Sauckel/Laval scheme initiated in June 1942 (known in France as La Relève – the levy)under which the Germans would exchange prisoners of war for specialised volunteer workers on a ratio of 1 to 3. But by late summer 1942 La Relève had produced only some 40,000 new workers – nothing like enough for Germany’s needs; Sauckel demanded more.
To fulfil these new German demands, Pétain and Laval signed a law on 4 September 1942 requiring all able-bodied men aged between eighteen and fifty and all single women between twenty-one and thirty-five ‘to do any work that the Government deems necessary’. By these means the Sauckel/Laval deal was completed, albeit a month late, in November 1942. But this merely encouraged the Germans to demand even more. This time, in exchange for 250,000 French workers, an equal number of French PoWs would be given, not their freedom, but the status of ‘free workers’ in Germany. Laval agreed, but soon found that he could not keep his side of the bargain without adopting new measures of coercion. A law was passed on 16 February 1943 which required all males over twenty to be subject to the Compulsory Labour Organization (known as the STO after its French name – Service du Travail Obligatoire) and regulations governing the STO were issued the same day, calling up all those aged twenty to twenty-three for compulsory work in Germany. In March 1943, Sauckel again upped the stakes, demanding a further 400,000 workers, 220,000 of whom would go to Germany while the remainder would be handed over to Organisation Todt, the German-run labour force in France.
Of all the events in the early years of the German occupation which helped turn France against her occupiers, undermined the Vichy administration and boosted the cause of the Resistance, none did so more, or more quickly, than the establishment of the STO. The German Ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, later remarked: ‘If ever the Maquis were to erect monuments in France, the most important should be dedicated to “Our best recruitment agent, Gauleiter Sauckel”.’
There were public demonstrations against the STO across France, one being in the little market town of Romans under the western edge of the Vercors. Here, on 9 and 10 March 1943, the entire population occupied the railway station shouting, ‘Death to Laval! Death to Pétain! Long live de Gaulle!’ and stood in front of the train taking their young men away to Germany. Huge numbers of young men, now known as réfractaires, took to the maquis to avoid being sent to Germany. SOE agents reported to London on 12 March 1943 that the number of young men who had gone into hiding in the Savoie and Isère departments alone had reached 5,000 and was rising at an increasing rate every week.
These young men fled to the maquis for a complex set of reasons, not all of them to do with patriotism. For some it was simply a matter of avoiding being sent to Germany. For others it was seen as a form of civil disobedience. For many it was the romance of living the clandestine life in the mountains and the forests. Down there on the plain, men and women lived lives which were inevitably tainted by the daily exigencies of coexistence with the enemy. But up there in the high places and the forests the air was clean and freedom was pure and uncompromised.
But whatever their motives, all now lived as outlaws who had to rely on the already established Resistance movements for their food, shelter and protection. London recognized the opportunity and sent huge sums of money, mostly through Jean Moulin, to pay for food and shelter for the réfractaires. The French Resistance movements now found themselves with a growing of pool of young men whom they quickly set about turning into fully trained, armed and committed Maquisards.
It was probably in response to the new threat posed by this rise of the Resistance that, on 30 January 1943, Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval created – with help from the Germans – a new and much hated paramilitary force, the black-shirted Milice Française or French Militia, whose exclusive task was to fight the Resistance. Made up chiefly of Frenchmen who supported fascism, but including many from the criminal fraternity, the Milice by 1944 achieved a total strength in Vichy France, including part-time members, of perhaps 30,000. Although they worked very closely with both the Italians and the Germans, they were largely autonomous from any Vichy authority outside their own line of command, often operating outside the law and beyond its reach when it came to the torture, summary execution and assassination of their fellow French men and women.
And so it was that, by the early months of 1943, the forests and fastnesses of places like the Vercors had become home and refuge to a polyglot collection of the broken elements of defeated France: its new generations, its old administrators, its competing political parties, its heterodox communities and the scattered fragments of its once proud army. With the United States now in the war, with the Allied landings in North Africa and, just ten days later, the German defeat before the gates of Stalingrad, de Gaulle knew, as did almost every thinking French man and woman, that a turning point had been passed. It was now inevitable that Germany would lose. Only three questions remained. How long would it take? How could the Resistance be welded together into a force strong enough to play a part in the liberation of their country? And what would be the best military strategy to follow?
3
BEGINNINGS (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
The notion that the Vercors might become a citadel of liberty against France’s invaders began to take root in several places, among very different people and in very different ways, during the first half of 1941. According to Vercors legend it was first discussed one early-spring day in March 1941 when two old friends, both mountaineers, both writers and both members of France’s intellectual elite, were cutting down a dead walnut tree in a meadow above a small villa called La Grande Vigne, near the town of Côtes-de-Sassenage, a few kilometres north-west of Grenoble.
La Grande Vigne, which lies so close under the northern flank of the Vercors that the plateau’s slopes and woods seem to look in at every window, was – and remains still – the family home of the Dalloz family. In 1941, its occupants were the forty-one-year-old architect, writer, one-time government servant and ardent mountaineer Pierre Dalloz and his painter wife, Henriette Gröll. On this March day, the couple were entertaining two of their closest friends – and frequent visitors to La Grand Vigne – Jean Prévost and his doctor wife, Claude. Prévost, a year younger than Dalloz, was a startlingly handsome man with an arresting gaze and a character which combined love of action with a sturdy intellectual independence. A pacifist, an early and enthusiastic anti-fascist, Prévost had fiercely opposed the Munich settlement but had nevertheless heavily criticized the pre-war anti-German mood in France. He was best known as one of the foremost young writers in France, having written several well-received books, along with articles in the prestigious French magazine Paris-soir. Indeed it was writing which formed one of the major bonds between the two men – at the time of their tree-cutting exploit Dalloz was working on a translation of St Bernard’s Treatise on Consideration, while Prévost was preparing a study on Stendhal which would be published to widespread acclaim in Lyon on 9 November 1942, just two days before the German invasion of France’s ‘free’ southern zone.
According to Dalloz’s account, the two men were busy cutting down the old walnut tree – with Prévost offering his friend unsolicited advice on the best way to accomplish the task – when Dalloz stopped, leant on his axe and looked up at the cliffs of the Vercors rising above them into the blue March sky. ‘You could look at that up there as a kind of island on terra firma,’ he said, ‘a huge expanse of Alpine pasture protected on all sides by these vast Chinese walls of rock. The gates into it are few and carved out of the living rock. Once closed, paratroopers could be dropped clandestinely. The Vercors could then explode behind the enemy lines.’
There the conversation ended and the thought seemed to die. ‘I thought that the idea was probably a bit naive,’ Dalloz was later to explain. ‘This was more the kind of thing that the military would be considering, rather than me.’ It would take eighteen months, disillusion with the military leaders and a France more ready for resistance to bring it back to life.
A few kilometres away in Grenoble, General André Laffargue, a divisional commander in the Armistice Army, was also desperate to return to the struggle and spoke of the Vercors as ‘a vast closed Alpine fortress protected by a continuous solid wall of limestone rock’. He even drew up plans to protect the plateau against all comers with fixed defences made up of a ring of 75mm mountain guns sunk into concrete casements – a sort of Alpine Maginot Line, as though the recent failure of the first one had not been enough.
Some of Laffargue’s junior officers had a more realistic notion about what should be done to plan for the day when they would again take up their fight against the occupier and had begun to stockpile hidden weapons for future use. From late 1940 right through to the German invasion of Vichy France in November 1942, arms, ammunition and a wide range of matériel, including vehicles, fuel, optical equipment, engineering material, radios and medical stores, were spirited out of the city and into the surrounding countryside, and in particular on to the Vercors. All sorts of imaginative methods were used: lorries with false floors, carts loaded with hay, empty water and petrol bowsers, accumulator batteries emptied of acid and reserve petrol tanks on vehicles. They also made use of forged travel permissions so that the arms could be transported in official vehicles.
One of the chief smugglers who would in due course lead a local Resistance group in his own right, later described one of their hiding places: ‘An office of one of the Justices of the Peace in Grenoble became a veritable arsenal: heavy, medium and light machine guns, rifles, revolvers, munitions, explosives and aircraft incendiary bombs were hidden under the protection of the sword of Justice. The Court clerk, assisted by his men, buried the ammunition and concealed the arms in the walls. The judges of the police tribunals never guessed that under the defendants’ bench were hidden light machine guns, while sub-machine guns were piled up underneath the floorboard on which they sat holding court.’
By these means and many others, some thirty-five secret arms depots were established during the first months of 1941. At the time of the German invasion of Vichy, this number had increased to 135. These depots contained, it is estimated, 300 light and heavy machine guns, 3,000 revolvers together with a variety of other light arms, thirty 75mm mountain guns, four 81mm mortars, 4 tonnes of optical instruments such as binoculars, 5 tonnes of explosives, eight full petrol tankers and more than 200 vehicles of all types.
Another clandestine Armistice Army unit, meanwhile, forged false papers for military personnel imprisoned for breaking Vichy laws and those who had already gone underground.
On a fine August afternoon in 1941, five men sitting round a table in a working-class café behind Grenoble station took a decision which, though they did not know it, would link their fate indissolubly to the young military arms smugglers just up the road, even though their motives were entirely political and not military.
The Second World War had taken a surprising turn in June 1941 when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of Russia. Until this point, Hitler’s 1939 non-aggression pact with Stalin had meant that the war had been largely located in the west. Now the full force of his armies would strike east. Widely recognized as the key military turning point (and Hitler’s biggest mistake) of the early years of the war, Barbarossa had an effect on the populations of occupied western Europe that is often overlooked. Before Hitler’s invasion, the fact that Russia had stood aside from the struggle against fascism had constrained the attitude of the Communists in particular and the European left in general. Now, however, there was a common front against a common enemy. The French Communists and (though for very different reasons) their partners on the left, the French Socialist Party, shifted from an attitude of wait and see to one of activism – a process which greatly accelerated later in 1941 when, on 5 December, the Germans were beaten back from the gates of Moscow and, three days after that, following Pearl Harbor, the United States entered the war.
The five conspirators sitting in the Café de la Rotonde on the Rue du Polygone would have felt the ripples of these faraway events and would have known what they meant. Now there was hope; now there was a distant, dangerous possibility of liberation.
The Café de la Rotonde, set slightly back from the main thoroughfare, was a pink-stuccoed building on whose front façade three brown-shuttered windows functioned as a permanent prop for sheaves of bicycles. The area, just behind Grenoble freight station, was a working-class district, grimy with the soot of trains and permanently resonating with the clash of shunting engines, the hiss of steam and the day-round passage of lorries to and from the loading quays of the great station. Though graced by the name of café, La Rotonde was more like a bistro which depended for its custom on the railway workers at the station, the drivers of goods lorries and the workers at a nearby gas works, all of whom knew they could get a good cheap lunch here, washed down with the rough white wine of the nearby Grésivaudan valley.
At first sight, the five conspirators, all of whom held strong left-wing views, had nothing in common with the two intellectuals who had cut down a walnut tree at Sassenage four months earlier. They had even less in common with the young Army officers who, for months past, had been smuggling lorryloads of arms and ammunition past the front door of the café. But all three groups were in reality bound to a single purpose that would, in due course, bring them together in a common enterprise which would transcend their political differences: the distant but now growing possibility that some time – some time soon perhaps – their country might be free again.
Among those seated at the table that afternoon was a figure of medium height, round shoulders and powerful build whose face was underpinned by a sharply etched chin and enlivened by eyes which missed little that went on around him. Aimé Pupin, the patron of La Rotonde, was normally to be found behind its dark wooden counter, chatting to his customers and overseeing the service at the tables. Passionate about rugby – he had been a formidable hooker in his youth – Pupin had received, like so many of his class in pre-war France, only the bare minimum of education. But he had a force of personality, matched by firm opinions and a propensity for action, which made him a natural if at times obstinate and impetuous leader. He also had a marked sense of idealism for the brotherhood of man and the Socialist cause, and this was ardently shared by the four men sitting around him, all of whom were not only fellow members of the Socialist Party but also Masons.
Beside Pupin sat Eugène Chavant, forty-seven years old, stocky, pipe-smoking, taciturn, the haphazardly trimmed moustache on his upper lip complementing an unruly shock of hair greying at the temples. Chavant’s quiet demeanour hid an iron will and unshakeable convictions. As a young man he had followed his father into the shoe-making trade. During the First World War he had been quickly promoted to sergeant and platoon commander in the 11th Dragoons and received the Médaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre with four citations for bravery. When the First World War finished, he returned to Grenoble, became a leading member of the French Socialist Party and was elected on the first ballot with the entire Socialist list in the 1936 elections. For this he was summarily sacked from his post as foreman in a local shoe factory, forcing him to go into the café business in order to pursue his political convictions. He had later been elected Mayor of the Grenoble suburb of Saint-Martin-d’Hères and was now, like Pupin, the patron of a restaurant in a working-class district of the city.
Others round the table included a railway worker at the station, a garage owner and Léon Martin, who practised as a doctor and pharmacist in the city. At sixty-eight, Martin was the oldest of the five, a past Socialist Mayor of Grenoble city and a strong opponent of the Vichy government. He told his co-conspirators that he believed the time had come to set up a Resistance cell in the Grenoble area. The others enthusiastically agreed, and the meeting broke up – but not before the conspirators marked their passage into the shadows by distributing aliases. Chavant’s clandestine name would henceforth be Clément and that of Pupin, Mathieu. Slowly, over the following months, the little group drew more and more supporters to their meetings in the back room of Dr Martin’s pharmacy at 125 Cours Berriat, which lies under the rim of the Vercors at the western edge of the city.
Although the daily lives of those who lived on the Vercors itself were less affected by the fall of France and the establishment of the Vichy government than those in Grenoble, the plateau was by no means immune from its consequences.
On 28 September 1940, the prestigious Polish school in Paris, the Lycée Polonais Cyprian-Norwid, which had decamped from the capital shortly after the Germans arrived, formally re-established itself in Villard-de-Lans on the northern half of the plateau. A month later, on 28 October, it opened its doors to students – chiefly the children of Polish refugees from the north – in the Hôtel du Parc et du Château, a famous pre-war skiing establishment in the town.
On 23 May 1941, a trainload of French refugees, driven out of their homes in Alsace-Lorraine by incoming German families, arrived in the station at Romans, below the western edge of the Vercors. They were kept on the station for three days while the Vichy authorities found houses in the region, many of them in the Villard-de-Lans area. To add to these new arrivals, Jewish families soon started to arrive as well, fleeing the early round-ups in the northern zone, later replicated by the Vichy government in the south as well. Even by the standards of a town used to the annual influx of winter-sports visitors, life in Villard was becoming unusually cosmopolitan.
Some time during the late summer or early autumn of 1941, a quite separate group of conspirators, also Socialists and Masons, started meeting in secret in Villard-de Lans. The moving spirit of this group, who were initially unaware of their Grenoble co-conspirators, was another doctor/pharmacist called Eugène Samuel. A Rumanian by origin, Dr Samuel, who had come to Villard to join his wife after the fall of France in 1940, held his meetings in the back room of his pharmacy under the cover of a Hunting Committee. The Villard group was as varied as its Grenoble equivalent, consisting, apart from Samuel himself, of a hotelier, the local tax inspector, the director of the Villard branch of the Banque Populaire and the three brothers, Émile, Paul and Victor Huillier, who ran the local transport company. Not long after their formation, the Villard group began searching for other organized Resistants in the area. Through the good offices of one of their number they were put in touch with Léon Martin in Grenoble.
On Easter Monday (6 April) 1942, ‘the day the history of [the Resistance] in the Vercors started’, according to Léon Martin, the two groups met together in Villard and agreed to form a single organization to promote the Socialist cause and foment resistance in the area. The journey had begun that would take this handful of idealistic plotters from furtive meetings in the back rooms of local pharmacies to a fully fledged, 4,000-strong partisan army ready to take on the full might of the German Wehrmacht.
Marcel Malbos, one of the teachers at the Polish school in Villard, summed up the mood of these early resisters: ‘When the life of a whole people is mortally threatened, when the tyrant sets out to destroy a whole civilization along with both its culture and its people, when the shipwreck is upon you – then, just when all seems lost, suddenly a conjunction of events occurs, as is so often found in history, which offers the possibility of hope. [In our case] it was the creation on our mountain plateau of a patch of dry land above the flood – above the tumult – where a few men came together to create a kind of rebirth. And soon this tiny plot above the waves would become a rock, a refuge, a home and a fortress …’
4
THE ARMY GOES UNDERGROUND (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
All day and all night, General Laffargue stayed in his grand office with its heavy Empire desk in the Hôtel de la Division on one side of the Place Verdun in Grenoble. The date was 10 November 1942, two days after the Allied landings in French North Africa, and the General was expecting a telephone call from his superior which would set in train the plan already drawn up by Vichy military headquarters for mobilization of the Armistice Army against a German invasion in the south. All through the long day and night, into 11 November (the anniversary of the German surrender in 1918), the General waited. But the call never came.
The truth was that the government of Vichy had been thrown into complete confusion, not to say panic, by the Allied invasion of North Africa. The Vichy leaders knew what would come next, but should they oppose, or acquiesce? Anticipation and indecision came to an end at dawn on 11 November 1942, when Hitler’s personal emissary arrived in Vichy and delivered a letter from the Führer to Marshal Pétain informing him that Axis troops were taking control of Vichy France. In fact, the Germans had already launched Operation Attila. Some hours previously Italian units had stormed across the French/Italian frontier with orders to occupy Grenoble. Meanwhile German columns under Generalleutnant Heinrich Niehoff, the newly appointed German Army commander for southern France, pressed at full speed towards Lyon where they swung south heading for the Mediterranean coast.
Early on the morning of that same day, 11 November 1942, a young cavalry officer, Lieutenant Narcisse Geyer, received orders to man the Pont de la Boucle in Lyon and maintain public order when the Germans arrived.
The thirty-year-old Geyer, known as ‘Narc’ to his friends, was in many ways a man born out of his time. Small in stature, dapper in dress, never other than a soldier, never out of uniform, ever impetuous of spirit, courageous to the point of folly and always in search of la gloire, he would have been far more at home among Dumas’ Three Musketeers than in the dull, gloryless existence of a junior officer in a defeated army. He was the scion of a military family: his father’s last words to the priest who comforted him as he lay dying of wounds in October 1918 had been ‘It is a terrible shame that my son is too young. He could have replaced me.’ Geyer, true to the family tradition, had fought with distinction under the then Colonel Charles de Gaulle before the fall of France, earning himself a Croix de Guerre for his bravery.
But it was not only the man who represented what was seen at the time as the forever vanished days of France’s military glory. The unit he commanded in Lyon that day was itself one of the most illustrious of France’s cavalry regiments. The 11th Cuirassiers (motto ‘Toujours au chemin de l’honneur’ – ‘Forever the path of honour’) was founded by Louis XIV in 1668, still carried the French royal insignia of the fleur de lys on its regimental standard and had fought with distinction in all the great battles of the Napoleonic Wars.
To ask such a man and such a regiment to guard a bridge in order to facilitate the entry of a hated occupier was too much for Geyer to bear. Wilful as ever and largely on a whim, he ignored his orders and, leading a troop of fifty-six of his troopers, mounted on horses and accompanied by eight machine guns and four mortars, headed north out of the city towards the forests of the Savoie. A few kilometres out of Lyon, Geyer appears to have had second thoughts – or at least to have concluded that going underground with his troops required more preparation than a spur-of-the-moment canter through the streets of Lyon. He turned his troops round and, rather ignominiously one imagines, led them back to barracks.
A few days after the occupation of Grenoble by the Italians, General Laffargue called his senior commanders together in the Mairie of Vizille, a small town south of Grenoble, to discuss what should be done. The meeting broke up in indecision. Aimé Pupin, one of the Café de la Rotonde plotters, rushed to Vizille and did his best to persuade Laffargue’s men not to hand over their weapons to the Germans. But the officer in charge refused even to see Pupin and ordered his regiment to disarm, leaving Pupin to comment: ‘We Resistants were left with just empty hands.’ At Christmas 1942, Pupin listed the arms at his disposal as a revolver and a rubber hammer.
On 27 November the Germans disarmed the remaining French units, disconnected their telephones and emptied the French barracks in Lyon and Vienne.
Narcisse Geyer’s second opportunity for a more considered escape came that day when the Germans burst into the Cuirassiers’ barracks in the Lyon suburb of Part-Dieu and began to drive the regiment from their quarters. Geyer grabbed his unit’s regimental standards and took them to the barracks guardroom, from where they were passed over the wall to a party waiting outside. Geyer’s initial intention had been to leave Lyon for the forests by bicycle. But how could a cavalryman leave without his horse? So that night he led a small group back to the barracks where, having muffled his horse Boucaro’s hooves to deaden the noise, he walked his mount to a nearby lorry and drove out of the city and into life as a Maquisard.
Geyer, his horse and two or three of his Cuirassiers took refuge in a fortified farm with thick walls and a massive iron-studded gate, attended by stables and substantial outbuildings in the Forêt de Thivolet, 8 kilometres west of the Vercors. It was from this farm that Geyer took the nom de guerre Thivolet by which he would from now on be known. Over the next months, Geyer, who had a disparaging view of non-military Maquisard units, referring to them as ‘as civilians playing at soldiers’, returned several times to see his old troopers, eventually persuading some fifty of them to join him. The 11th Cuirassiers was reborn as a clandestine unit of the French Resistance under a courageous but headstrong young officer, complete with its standards, its insignia, its uniforms, its ranks and its proud customs, such as the habit of saying the regimental grace before every dinner: ‘Gloire et honneur à ce cochon de popotier’ – ‘Glory and honour to the pig of a cook (who made this)’.
On 28 November, another much loved commander of one of France’s best Alpine units gathered his men in the square of the little town of Brié-et-Angonnes, 5 kilometres south-east of Grenoble, and asked them to sing the regimental song for one last time. Then he told them, with tears in his eyes, that he had just received the order for the battalion to be disbanded. But, he reassured them, ‘one day soon the bell will toll again to call us to action … no power on earth can break the bonds which bind us together as a fighting unit’.
Another French officer central to this story was among the many who chose the clandestine life during these turbulent days of November 1942. The forty-three-year-old Marcel Descour, one of the earliest organizers of secret resistance within the old Armistice Army, was, like Geyer, a decorated and courageous cavalry officer. Tall, and spare of build, Descour had a thin angular face adorned with a small military moustache and topped with carefully coiffed, lightly oiled, swept-back black hair. With an air of command that indicated that he expected instant obedience, Descour, conventionally military in his ideas, decidedly right wing in his political views and strongly Catholic in his beliefs, was always accompanied by his ‘religious counsellor’ and éminence grise, a Benedictine monk called Dom Guétet. Guétet’s omnipresence, reinforced by a cadaverous frame and sombre monk’s habit, made him look, according to one observer, ‘A bit like one of those holy soldier monks of the Middle Ages who accompanied their feudal masters on the Crusades’. Descour’s view of himself may be guessed at by his choice of alias, Bayard – after the fifteenth-century knight Pierre Terrail, the Chevalier de Bayard, famous as ‘The knight without fear and without reproach’.
Pierre Dalloz, in his house at La Grande Vigne in Côtes-de-Sassenage, watched all the farce and tragedy of the days after 11 November with despair. He confided his fears and his concept of the Vercors as a guerrilla base behind enemy lines to a young friend, Jean Lefort, who was not only an enthusiastic caver, with a deep knowledge of the Vercors, but was also a decorated officer in a French Alpine regiment. Lefort was as enthusiastic about the idea as Dalloz, and encouraged the older man to put the concept down on paper.
That mid-December night in 1942, Dalloz made the first three-page draft of his plan. ‘The project had ripened in me over the time [since he had first discussed it with Jean Prévost] and my thoughts flew easily off my pen on to the paper. After I had finished, I opened the door and breathed in the cool night air. The highest branches of the almond tree in the garden swayed in the wind, as though trying to sweep the stars from the sky, and the clamour of the local stream filled the silent darkness. The Vercors was there, very close – almost alongside me. I thought for a long moment. Secrecy suddenly seemed my co-conspirator; the moment was heavy with responsibility, resolution and hope.’
5
CAMPS AND PLANS (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
The bitter winter of 1942/3, which destroyed Hitler’s armies before the gates of Stalingrad, also held the Vercors in an icy siege. The cold that Christmas cut like a knife. The plateau lay under a deep layer of snow which weighed down branches in silent pine forests, piled up thick white quilts on timbered roofs and gave an extra tinge of blue to the woodsmoke rising from farmhouse chimneys.
It was a bad time to be away from home. Yet this was the choice that many young men in France faced that December: to leave home for the forests or join the work transports to Germany. By December 1942, the number of fleeing réfractaires was causing severe administrative problems for Resistance movements such as the Martin/Samuel organization in Grenoble and Villard-de-Lans. In early December, a group of young railwaymen from Grenoble station approached one of Eugène Chavant’s friends, Jean Veyrat, who had by now joined the Café de la Rotonde plotters in Grenoble. The young men told Veyrat that they wished to go underground to avoid having to leave for Germany. But where could they go?
In the second week of December, Eugène Samuel went to the little town of Pont-en-Royans, whose ancient houses cling impossibly to the vertical sides of the Gorges de la Bourne, guarding the narrow bridge which spans the river and the western entry to the plateau. Here he knocked on the door of one of his brothers-in-law, the café owner and town Mayor Louis Brun, and asked if he could help. Brun said he knew just the place.
On 17 December 1942, Brun, accompanied by Simon, Samuel’s younger brother, struggled through deep snow to look at an isolated farmhouse with substantial outbuildings called La Ferme d’Ambel, which lay in a desolate and deserted valley in the south-western corner of the plateau. It was ideal. The farm, fed by a bountiful and permanently running spring, is tucked under a high ridge covered in woods, which sweep down almost to its back door. The main access for vehicles is by a rough track served by stone bridges, leading down through beechwoods which shield the area from the nearby mountain road. The house, together with the loft space above and its outbuildings, was capable of accommodating, the two men estimated, around fifty or so réfractaires.
To add to its advantages the Ferme d’Ambel lay at the heart of a large timber concession centred on the nearby Ambel forest, which provided good cover for human activity in the area – indeed the réfractaires could be employed as a useful local labour force. These timber concessions played an important part in the life (and especially black-market life) of wartime France. Timber produced charcoal and charcoal produced the gas which, in the absence of readily available petrol, was the main driving power of the gazogène lorries and cars which could be seen everywhere puffing and wheezing around the streets of Grenoble and struggling their way in a cloud of smoke up the steep roads of the plateau. It was for this reason that timber concessions were often closely linked with the haulage industry – and so it was with the concession at the Ambel forest, two of whose most active partners were members of the transport firm run by the three Huillier brothers who had helped to found the Villard-de-Lans group of early resisters.
On 6 January 1943, a dozen or so young men, made up chiefly of railway workers and Polish refugees from Villard, moved into the Ambel farm. That month, as the pressure of conscription grew, a clandestine system was established to deal with the increasing flood of young men seeking refuge from the transports to Germany. Would-be réfractaires would be asked to go to a hardware shop, run by two sympathizers just a couple of hundred metres from the Place Verdun in Grenoble. The shop was served by two entrances, one on the main street and a second leading on to a small street at the rear. Here, in a back room, they were interviewed by Eugène Chavant and, if found acceptable, were instructed to go home, pack a few necessaries in a rucksack and catch the little funicular railway run by the Huillier brothers to Villard-de-Lans. There they would transfer to a Huillier bus to Pont-en-Royans where they would go to Louis Brun’s restaurant. From here they were guided across the mountains at night to Ambel. On arrival, they would be met by the site director of the Ambel forestry concession, Louis Bourdeaux, who had been appointed by the Villard group as the Ambel’s camp commander.
Measures were also put in train to make Ambel as secure as possible. The lights in the Ferme d’Ambel, which depended on a single electric cable supplied from the hydroelectric plant at Pont-en-Royans, were left on all day and night. This enabled a Resistance sympathizer at the plant to warn of approaching danger by turning the supply (and therefore Ambel lights) on and off three times in quick succession. Ambel was now a properly structured Maquis camp. Some claim that it was the first to be established in all France.
Meanwhile, at Côtes-de-Sassenage, Pierre Dalloz was thinking of ways to pursue his own ideas about the use of the Vercors to fight back against France’s occupiers. Encouraged by Jean Lefort’s welcome for his plan (but still completely unaware of the existence of his co-conspirators in Grenoble and Villard-de-Lans), he decided to take matters further. He was advised by a left-wing friend at Grenoble University that the man to see was Yves Farge, the foreign affairs editor of the regional newspaper Progrès de Lyon, who was known to have high-level Resistance connections.
In late January 1943, Dalloz, with his plan carefully tucked into an inside pocket of his jacket, took the train to Lyon, calling a little after midday at the offices of Progrès where he asked for the foreign affairs editor. The two men went to a nearby restaurant, where over lunch Dalloz explained his idea. He left a copy of his paper with Farge, who expressed enthusiasm for the plan and promised to ensure that it would be seen by the ‘appropriate people’. Farge must have briefed Jean Moulin very shortly after the lunch, for on 29 January Moulin sent a courier to de Gaulle in London with full details of the Dalloz plan and a personal recommendation that it should be supported.
On 31 January, Farge paid Dalloz a return visit in Grenoble to tell him that Moulin had seen the plan, approved it and agreed that 25,000 francs should now be assigned to Dalloz to develop the idea. Dalloz hurriedly typed a second, more comprehensive paper on his ideas. A few days later, he received a note which instructed him to join Farge and to ‘Be in the waiting room at Perrache station in Lyon at 12h15 on 10 February where “Alain” will meet you.’ The two men found their contact ‘Alain’ in deep contemplation of the window display of the station bookshop. ‘The meeting place has been changed,’ he instructed. ‘Someone will be waiting for you at Bourg-en-Bresse station. There is a train at 16h20. When you arrive, stand in front of the station entrance and carry a copy of the newspaper Signal in a prominent place. General “Vidal” will approach you. He will be dressed in a grey overcoat with a white silk handkerchief displayed in the top pocket.’
The two men did not have to stand long outside the station entrance before they saw, in the light of a street lamp, a rather small man with a brisk military step displaying a most luxurious silk white handkerchief, which fluttered in the wind from his top pocket. After introductions, the old soldier led them away from the station, turning left into the main street of Bourg-en-Bresse and, 200 metres further on, passing a cake shop whose éclairs Dalloz remembered with great affection from his youth. The General stopped in front of the next-door building, a three-storey turn-of-the-century terraced town house. Here he took a step back to get a better look, as though checking he was in the right place, and then fumbled with his key for a moment in the lock of the heavy oak front door before it opened. Inside, the General lit a match to find the switch and turned the lights on. They were in a large room with closed shutters which turned out to be the offices of an insurance company. A moment later they were joined by a fourth, older man with a magnificent white moustache who introduced himself as General ‘Richard’.
In fact, the two civilians were in the presence of the two most important military officers in the hierarchy of the Secret Army in France: the man de Gaulle had charged with heading up the Resistance’s military wing, Charles Delestraint and his deputy General Desmazes. Dalloz ran through his three-page report, a copy of which he gave to Delestraint, together with an annotated map of the Vercors, a guidebook of the plateau and several supporting photographs. After asking Dalloz some searching questions, Delestraint pronounced his verdict: ‘From now on the Vercors will be part of the national military plan for liberation. From today it will be known as the Plan Montagnards.’
Two days later, on the moonlit night of 12/13 February 1943, two Lysander light aircraft from the RAF’s 161 Squadron landed in a field near Ruffey-sur-Seille in the Jura. Here they picked up Jean Moulin and Charles Delestraint, who carried a briefcase containing Dalloz’s papers, maps and photos for Plan Montagnards, and flew them back to Britain. During his stay in London, Delestraint had several meetings with de Gaulle at which he discussed his plans for the Secret Army, including in the Vercors. Afterwards, according to de Gaulle, Delestraint ‘was able to work usefully with the Allied leaders. Thereby, the operations of the Secret Army during the landing in France would be linked as closely as possible to the plans of the Allied Command.’
On 25 February 1943, just under a fortnight after Delestraint had landed in Britain, Dalloz was listening to the ‘personal’ messages for France broadcast by the BBC in its nightly programme Les Français parlent aux Français when he heard the announcer say: ‘Les montagnards doivent continuer à gravir les cimes.’* (#ulink_88a580ec-4981-5d2b-8d21-48405d027004) It was the code message that Dalloz had been given by Delestraint to indicate that his proposal had been agreed by London. Plan Montagnards was to proceed as discussed.
It has always been presumed that Plan Montagnards was a purely French affair, known only to the Free French authorities in London and specifically not shared with the British, either at this stage or later. But we now know that Dalloz’s plan was in fact discussed with the British officer acting as French Regional Controller, who was directly responsible to the head of SOE, Brigadier Gubbins. A minute addressed to the Controller dated 10 April 1943 concluded that Montagnards could be ‘of appreciable value in support of an operation directed against the Mediterranean coast of France’. Noting that Dalloz’s plan ‘provides for co-operation with Allied airborne troops’, the minute makes it explicitly clear that ‘It seems extremely unlikely that such co-operation could be provided, except possibly from Africa, and it is certain that we could not promise it. We therefore feel that even if the organisation is to be encouraged they should be told … that they must expect to work on their own.’
Back in the Vercors, Dalloz immediately set about assembling a small team to help him carry out a full-scale study of the plateau. This included the head of the Department for Water and Forests on the Vercors, whom Dalloz asked to make a record of the plateau’s topography including its many caves and underground caverns, and an ex-commander of the Mountain Warfare School at Chamonix, whom he tasked with drawing up an inventory of all the huts, refuges, food resources, secret caches of arms and explosives and available vehicles on the plateau.
Dalloz, looking for a third member of his team, also sought out a young ex-Army officer whom he had not met, but had heard of as a skilled and courageous mountaineer. Alain Le Ray, who at thirty-two was Dalloz’s junior by almost ten years, was also an ex-member of a now disbanded Alpine regiment and had a number of noted Alpine climbing firsts to his credit. First captured by the Germans in 1940, he escaped, only to be recaptured and sent to the supposedly escape-proof PoW camp of Colditz Castle. But Colditz held him for only three weeks before he escaped again, this time making successful ‘home run’ back to France.
Le Ray, tall, athletic and striking to look at, was a most unusual Army officer for his time. Scrupulous about maintaining his political neutrality, meticulous in his analysis, cool in his judgements, he had, unlike most of his Army counterparts, a natural feel for irregular warfare, including an understanding of the need to make compromises in order to combine both the military and civilian elements of the French Resistance. Dalloz asked Le Ray to conduct a full-scale military study of the Vercors. Assisted by three fellow ex-officers, one of whom, Roland Costa de Beauregard, would later command a guerrilla unit on the plateau, Le Ray completed his study (see Annex B) while awaiting Delestraint’s return from London.
While Dalloz’s team were conducting their various surveys of the plateau, Dalloz and Farge were busy touring the shops in Grenoble and buying up all the available guidebooks and Michelin maps of the area. On the few days the two men were not scouring map shops they were criss-crossing the plateau in a taxi, looking for parachute and landing sites. On one such visit in early March, with the snow melting, Farge and Dalloz clambered over a forest-covered ridge to inspect one of the enclosed high mountain pastures which are a feature of the Vercors. The place was called Herbouilly and they immediately recognized it as an excellent parachute landing ground. There was only one problem. Right in the middle of the valley was a substantial, but unoccupied, farmhouse which was the property of someone suspected of being sympathetic to the Germans. Farge solved the problem by bringing in a special group of Resistants from Lyon one night to burn the place to the ground. By mid-March the two men felt they were ready for Delestraint’s return from London and the next stage of Plan Montagnards.
Elsewhere on the plateau, however, things which had started so well for Eugène Samuel and his team working with the réfractaires suffered a serious setback.
* (#ulink_84903c7e-b542-5c5d-b540-50effae86f8a) ‘The mountain men should continue to climb to the peaks.’
6
EXODUS AND FOLLY (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
‘So you do not wish to go and work in Germany?’ Eugène Chavant asked abruptly, pulling his pipe out of his mouth for a moment.
‘No, M’sieu.’ The young man, no more than twenty or so, nervously twisted his beret between his fingers.
‘Who told you to contact me about this?’
‘My boss at the shoe factory, M. Blanc, told me you would be a good person to talk to, M’sieu.’
‘So you want to join the Maquis?’
‘Yes, M’sieu.’
‘Are you aware that life in the Maquis is very hard?’
‘Yes, M’sieu.’
‘Do you understand the risks involved – great risks?’
‘Yes, M’sieu.’
‘And you know how to keep your tongue, do you?’
‘Absolutely, M’sieu.’
‘OK. Go to the Fontaine halt on the tramway which takes you up to Villard at five o’clock tomorrow evening. Ask for one of the Huillier brothers and tell him discreetly that you have come to see “Casimir” – that’s the password. He will tell you what to do next. Follow his instructions closely and without any questions. Take a rucksack with what you need. But be careful. Don’t take too much. You must look like a casual traveller.’
The young man nodded and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Eugène Chavant took out a small piece of paper and wrote a message for his friend Jean Veyrat: ‘There will be one colis [package] to take up to Villard tomorrow evening.’
The following evening a Huillier bus set the young man down in the main square of the town of Méaudre on the northern half of the Vercors plateau. Here, following his instructions, he went to a café in one of the town’s back streets where he found he was among a number of young men who likewise seemed to be waiting for something – or someone. A short time later an older man arrived. He was wearing hiking clothes and boots and carried a small khaki rucksack.
‘Follow me,’ he said, and led the way out of the café and into the darkness.
The little group walked north along back roads for forty minutes or so and then took a short break before starting to climb steeply up the mountain. Half an hour later they entered a forest and five minutes after that their guide stopped in the darkness and gave three low whistles. Out of the night came three answering whistles. A guide emerged from the trees and led the little group of newcomers to a shepherd’s hut in a clearing in the forest. Though it is doubtful that any of them realized it, they had all taken an irreversible step out of normality, into the Maquis and a life of secrecy and constant danger. One way or another, their lives would never be the same again.
As German demands for manpower increased, the trickle of réfractaires turned into a flood. The numbers at the Ambel farm quickly rose to eighty-five. There was no more space. In Eugène Samuel’s words, ‘The young men coming up the mountain became more and more numerous. Now it was not just the specialists who were being called away, but whole annual intakes of young men whom Laval wanted to send to help Hitler’s war effort. There was a mood of near panic among the young men, and the resources of the Gaullist resistance organizations were very soon swamped. We needed new camps; we needed more financial resources; we needed food; we needed clothes and above all we needed boots. We needed to organize some kind of security system to search out the spies who we knew the Milice were infiltrating with the réfractaires. We needed arms.’
New camps were soon found. And not just in the Vercors. Elsewhere in the region, other early Resistance groups were also establishing camps for fleeing réfractaires in the remote areas of the nearby Chartreuse Massif and the Belledonne and Oisans mountain ranges which bordered the Grésivaudan valley. Between February and May 1943, eight new réfractaire camps – housing some 400 men in all and numbered consecutively from Ambel (C1) – were established across the Vercors plateau under the direction of Aimé Pupin. To this total must be added two military camps, one set up in May by an ex-Military School in Valence, another established in November under the control of Marcel Descour.
Map 3 (#u84de6651-a52a-59dd-8f47-315abcb89bc2)
Those who joined the camps between March 1943 and May 1944 (that is before the Allied landings in Normandy) were of differing ages and came from a wide area. In a sample of forty-four réfractaires in the initial influx between March and May 1943, almost half were over thirty years old, many of them married. As might be expected, the majority (60 per cent) were from the immediate locality (the region of Rhône-Alpes), but among the rest almost 10 per cent were Parisians, a further 10 per cent were born out of France and nearly 15 per cent came from the eastern regions of France. There was similar diversity when it came to previous employment. In C3, above Autrans, nearly half the camp members had been ordinary workers, almost a third technicians of one sort or another, some 12 per cent were students and nearly 10 per cent had been regular soldiers. Politically, too, there was a broad variety of opinions and views. The fact that the great majority of the Vercors’ civilian camps were loyal to de Gaulle meant that the organized presence of the Communists and the French far right was almost non-existent on the plateau. Individually, however, the camps included adherents to almost every political belief (except of course fascism). Political discussions round evening campfires were frequent, varied and at times very lively.
By autumn 1943, every community of any size on the plateau had a secret camp of one sort or another near by – and every inhabitant on the plateau would have been aware of the unusual nature of the new young visitors in their midst. For Samuel, Pupin, Chavant and their colleagues, the administrative burden of all this was immense. Pupin later said: ‘We didn’t have a moment of respite. Our eight camps occupied our time fully.’ The biggest problem by far, however, was finding the money to pay for all this. Collections were made among family, well-wishers and workplaces – two Jewish men contributed between them 20,000 francs a week which they had collected from contacts. But it was never enough.
London started providing huge subventions to support the réfractaire movement. During Jean Moulin’s visit to London in February 1943, de Gaulle charged him with ‘centralizing the overall needs of the réfractaires and assuring the distribution of funds through a special organization, in liaison with trades unions and resistance movements’. On 18 February, Farge delivered a second massive subvention amounting to 3.2 million francs to be used for Dalloz’s Plan Montagnards alone. And on 26 February Moulin’s deputy sent a coded message to London containing his budget proposals for March 1943. This amounted to a request for no less than 13.4 million francs for all the elements of the Resistance controlled by de Gaulle, of which some 1.75 million francs per month was designated for the Vercors. This was in addition to the private donations pouring into Aimé Pupin’s coffers by way of a false account in the name of a local beekeeper, ‘François Tirard’, at the Banque Populaire branch in Villard. This level of support made the Vercors by far the biggest single Resistance project being funded by London at this point in the war.
Despite these significant sums, money remained an ever-present problem for those administering the Vercors camps through 1943 and into the following year. A British officer sent on a mission to assess the strength and nature of the Maquis in south-eastern France visited the Vercors later in 1943 and reported that those in the camps ‘have to spend much of their time getting food etc. They have to do everything on their own and are often short of money. In one case they stole tobacco and sold it back onto the Black Market to get money.’
Not surprisingly this kind of behaviour, though by no means common, caused tensions between the réfractaires and local inhabitants. With food so short, the proximity of groups of hungry young men to passing flocks of sheep proved to be an especially explosive flash-point. On 14 June 1943, the réfractaires of Camp C4, fleeing to avoid a raid on their camp by Italian Alpine troops, arrived on the wide mountain pasture of Darbonouse where they were met by a flock of sheep numbering some 1,500. Their commander told them: ‘If there is any thieving I will take the strongest measures against the perpetrators. Remember that it is in our interests to make the shepherds our friends. Remember too that it is through our behaviour that the Resistance is judged.’
On the other hand, not far away at the Pré Rateau mountain hut above Saint-Agnan, another band of young réfractaires who had absconded from their original camp enjoyed a merry summer of pilfering and theft, to the particular detriment of the flocks of sheep in the area.
Tensions between local farmers were considerably eased when spring turned into summer and some camp commanders offered their young men as free labour to cut and turn grass and bring in the harvest. It was very common during the summer days of 1943 to see small armies of fit and bronzed young men among the peasant families in the fields and pastures of the Vercors. The easy habits of city living were being replaced by the calloused hands and sinewed bodies necessary for survival as a Maquisard.
This was not so everywhere. There was considerable variation between camps according to how and by whom they were run. By the middle of 1943, many camps had ex-military commanders and were run on military lines. Here, by and large, there was good order, effective security, discipline and good relations with the locals. In other camps, however, things had ‘the appearance of a holiday camp [with] young men taking their siestas in the shade of the firs after lunch or lying out in the sun improving their tans’.
One feature dominated the daily routine of all the camps, whether well run or not – the routine of the corvées, or camp chores. There were corvées for almost everything from peeling potatoes to gathering water (which in some camps had to be carried long distances from the nearest spring), bringing in the food, collecting the mail, chopping and carrying the wood (especially in winter), cooking, washing up and much else besides. Some camps – the lucky ones – were able to use mules for the heavy carrying, but many relied for their victuals, warmth and water on the strong legs and sturdy backs of their young occupants alone.
Soon it was realized that work in the fields was not going to be enough to keep the minds of intelligent young men occupied – or prepare them for what everyone knew would come in due course. One of the organizations established by the Vichy government – and then dissolved shortly after the German invasion of the south – was a school to train ‘cadres’ or young professionals to run Vichy government structures. The École d’Uriage, many of whose students came from the Army, was located some 15 kilometres outside Grenoble. Following the lead of its commander, the École soon became a hotbed of Resistant sentiment. When the École d’Uriage was dissolved in December 1943, most of the students and staff swiftly reassembled in the old château of Murinais, just under the western rim of the Vercors. It was from here, at the suggestion of Alain Le Ray, who had by now become the effective military commander of all the camps, that flying squads, usually of three or four students and staff, were sent out to the camps to provide training for the réfractaires. Typically a Uriage flying squad would spend several days in a camp, following a set training programme which provided military training, cultural awareness and political education. The curriculum included instruction in basic military skills, training exercises, weapon handling, physical exercise, map reading and orientation, security, camp discipline, hygiene and political studies covering the tenets of the Gaullist Resistance movement and a briefing on the aims of the Allies and the current status of the war. One camp even received instruction in Morse code. In the evenings there were boisterous games and the singing of patriotic songs around the campfire. Study circles were established which continued to meet after the flying squad had moved on. In many cases camp members were required to sign the Charter of the Maquis, which laid out the duties and conduct expected of a Maquisard. The Uriage teams even produced a small booklet on how to be a Resistance fighter with a front cover claiming it was an instruction manual for the French Army.
There was also some less conventional training given by one of the Vercors’ most unusual and remarkable characters. Fabien Rey was famous on the plateau before the war as a poacher, a frequenter of the shadowy spaces beyond the law, an initiate into the mysteries of the Vercors’ forests and hidden caves and an intimate of the secret lives of all its creatures. During the summer and autumn months of 1943, when not striding from camp to camp to share his knowledge with the young men from the cities, his latest crop of trapped foxes swinging from his belt, he could always be found sitting in his cabin invigilating a bubbling stew of strange delicacies such as the intestines of wild boars and the feathered heads of eagles, which he would press on any unwary visitor who passed. He also wrote a small cyclostyled handbook on how to live off the land on the plateau. It too was widely distributed and eagerly read.
In February 1943, Yves Farge, who had by now become the chief intermediary between Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s emissary, and the Vercors Resistants, made the connection between Pierre Dalloz and Aimé Pupin’s organization. From now on, the two organizations, which were soon joined by their military co-conspirators, were fused into a single Combat Committee which directed all Resistance activity on the plateau.
On 1 March 1943, at a meeting in the Café de la Rotonde, Yves Farge handed Aimé Pupin the first tranche of the money London had sent by parachute to pay for the camps. Farge stayed the following night with Pupin and then, on the morning of 3 March, the two men set off on a day’s reconnaissance of the southern half of the plateau in a taxi driven by a sympathizer. They went first to La Grande Vigne to collect Pierre Dalloz and then continued their journey up the mountain to Villard-de-Lans, where they collected Léon Martin. From there the little group pressed on to Vassieux: ‘What I saw in front of me was the wide even plain around Vassieux … The aerial approaches to the plain from both north and south were unencumbered by hills, especially to the south. Somehow I had known that we would find an airstrip and here it was – and even better than I could have dreamed of … all around were wide areas which appeared specially designed to receive battalions parachuted from the sky.’
The little group stopped for a drink in a small bistro in Vassieux, pretending that they were looking to buy a piece of land on which to construct a saw-mill. But according to Dalloz, no one in Vassieux was deceived and the whole town, from that day onwards, believed that General de Gaulle himself was about to descend from the sky at any moment. The impression that secrets were impossible on the Vercors was further reinforced at lunch when, despite their attempts to appear discreet, the waiter at the Hôtel Bellier in La Chapelle announced their entry into the hotel dining room with the words ‘Ah! Here are the gentlemen of the Resistance.’
That afternoon, the party returned to Villard where they dropped off Léon Martin before taking a quick detour to look at Méaudre and Autrans in the next-door valley. Crossing back over the Col de la Croix Perrin, they were surprised to see Léon Martin standing in the middle of the road flagging them down urgently. It was bad news. The Italians had raided the Café de la Rotonde and arrested Pupin’s wife and fourteen other core members of the Grenoble organization.
Pupin immediately went to ground in Villard but not before taking two precautions. He dispatched Fabien Rey to Ambel to tell the réfractaires to decamp until the coast was clear. And he sent a friend down to Grenoble to try to prevent his records from falling into the hands of the Italians (whose soldiers had often frequented La Rotonde). He needn’t have bothered. The quick-witted Mme Pupin had burnt the records before they could be found. In the absence of any evidence, the Italians had to release all the detainees a few days later.
Aimé Pupin and his co-conspirators should have realized that they had been given two warnings that day. First that their activities were no longer secret. And second that keeping centralized records was dangerous folly. Sadly neither warning was heeded.
7
EXPECTATION, NOMADISATION AND DECAPITATION (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
Flight Lieutenant John Bridger, DFC, throttled down and watched the needle on his Lysander’s air-speed indicator drop back. Almost immediately the little aircraft’s nose dipped towards the three dots of light laid out ahead like an elongated ‘L’, the long stroke pointing towards him and the short one at the far end pointing to the right.
Bridger was one of the most experienced pilots in RAF’s 161 Lysander Squadron. On a previous occasion he had burst a tyre while landing Resistance agents at a clandestine strip deep in France. Worried that, with one tyre out, his Lysander (they were known affectionately as ‘Lizzies’) would be unbalanced for take-off, he pulled out his Colt automatic, shot five holes in the remaining good tyre, loaded up his return passengers for the UK and took off on his wheel rims.
Maybe it was because of his experience that he had been chosen for Operation Sirène II. Tonight, 19 March 1943, he was carrying passengers of special importance – Charles de Gaulle’s personal representative in France, Jean Moulin, the Secret Army’s commander General Charles Delestraint and one other Resistance agent. In truth, with three passengers on board, the little plane was overloaded for it was designed to take only two. But 161 Squadron pilots were used to pushing the limits.
Bridger’s destination this night was a flat field close to a canal a kilometre east of the village of Melay, which lies in the Saône-et-Loire valley 310 kilometres south-east of Paris and 700 from 161 Squadron’s base at Tangmere on the English south coast. This meant a round trip in his unarmed Lysander of some 1,500 kilometres, most of which would be flying alone over enemy-occupied territory. With a cruising speed of 275 kilometres per hour and allowing for headwinds and turn-around time on the ground, Bridger would be flying single handed for the best part of seven unbroken hours.
Like all of the RAF’s clandestine landings and parachute drops into France, tonight’s operation was taking place in the ‘moon period’ – roughly speaking the ten nights either side of the full moon (sometimes known by the codeword Charlotte). The remaining ten nights of the month were known as the ‘no moon period’ when conditions were too dark for accurate parachuting or safe landings. The March 1943 full moon occurred two days after Bridger’s flight, which meant that the moon’s luminosity this night was 91 per cent of that of the full moon, enabling Bridger to see many of the main topographical features such as woods and towns of the area he would be flying over. Most visible of all would have been the great rivers of France, which were 161 Squadron’s favourite navigational aids.
According to his logbook Bridger took off from 161 Squadron’s base at RAF Tangmere at 22.44 hours, two and a half hours after sunset that day. His post-operational report of his route is laconic and sparse on detail: ‘went via St Aubin-sur-Mer, Bourges, Moulins and direct to target. Apart from meeting a medium sized [enemy] aircraft 4 miles north of Moulin … the journey was uneventful.’
At Moulins, Bridger would have turned due east to pick up the River Loire, now turned by the gibbous moon into a great ribbon of silver, its little lakes and tributaries appearing as sprinkles of tinsel scattered across the darkened countryside. Here he swung south on the last leg of his journey – a lonely dot hidden in the vast expanse of the night sky. It is not difficult to imagine Jean Moulin and Charles Delestraint looking down on the moon-soaked fields and villages of occupied France and wondering about the task ahead and what it would take to free their country from the merciless grip of its occupiers.
The reception team waiting for Bridger at Melay that night was commanded by forty-year-old Pierre Delay, an experienced operator who had already received the Croix de Guerre from de Gaulle for his conduct of a previous SOE landing. He had been alerted that there was to be a landing on this site by a special code phrase broadcast during the six-minute ‘Messages personnels’ section of the BBC’s Les Français parlent aux Français. Delay had chosen Melay for tonight’s operation because he had a cousin who had a safe house 2 kilometres north of the landing site where the new arrivals could be put up, and a sympathetic local garage owner, whose Citroën was always available on these occasions.
According to Bridger’s operational report he ‘Reached target at 0140, signals given clearly & flare path good’. Delay’s men, who had waited in the deepening cold for two hours before Bridger arrived, now watched as the plane – it seemed big to them now – glided in almost noiselessly to touch down on the dewy grass. Moulin and Delestraint were bundled into the waiting Citroën and spent the night in the safe house, leaving the following day for Macon. They had arrived back in France to take command of a Resistance movement which was in a high state of expectation that the Allied landings would take place some time during the summer of 1943.
An SOE paper marked ‘MOST SECRET’ and dated 13 March 1943, just a week before the return of Moulin and Delestraint, discussed the possible uses of the Resistance in the event of an Allied landing, but warned that ‘the state of feeling in France has, after a gradual rise in temperature, suddenly reached fever pitch … there is a real danger that, if this … is allowed to pass unregarded, the French population … will subside into apathy and despair’. On 18 March, the night before Moulin and Delestraint landed, Maurice Schumann – who was for many the voice of Free France broadcasting on the BBC – was so inspired by news of the flood of réfractaires to the Haute-Savoie that he invoked the famous French Revolutionary force, the Légion des Montagnes, in one of his famous broadcasts, implying a Savoyard uprising. He was immediately rebuked by his London superiors for being premature – but he had accurately caught the feverish mood of excitement and expectation.
On 23 March, just three days after he arrived, Jean Moulin sent a coded telegram to London saying that the mood was so ‘keyed up’ that he had been ‘obliged to calm down the [Resistance] leaders who believe that Allied action was imminent’. One local Resistance leader, however, was sure that the state of over-excitement was generated not in France, but in London: ‘not a single one of us at the time was expecting an imminent landing. The truth was that the “over-excitement” of the [local] leaders reflected our intense preoccupation with the drama that was unfolding as a result of having Maquis organizations [in the field] without any support and our irritation over the attitude of de Gaulle and [the French] clandestine services.’
De Gaulle’s personal instructions to Delestraint before his departure, a copy of which can still be found in the French military archives in the Château de Vincennes in Paris, also give the impression that D-Day is fast approaching. Under the heading of ‘immediate actions’ to be taken ‘In the present period, before the Allied landings’, he instructed Delestraint to ‘prepare the Secret Army for the role it is to play in the liberation of territory’, including the ‘delicate measures necessary to permit a general rising of volunteers after D-Day [referred to by the French as ‘Jour J’] in the zones where this can be sustained because of the difficulty the Germans have in dominating the area’ – a clear reference, it would seem, to Plan Montagnards and the Vercors.
Whatever the true cause of all this premature excitement, the Vercors was not immune from its effects. Aimé Pupin commented that in the camps on the plateau the Allied landings were expected daily and ‘They were all burning for action …’ Unfortunately it was not just the Resistance who were ‘burning for action’ in anticipation of an Allied landing soon. France’s German and Italian occupiers were too.
By this stage of the war the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and were able to provide SOE with the complete text of a cable sent by Japan’s Ambassador to France giving his analysis of the state of the Resistance, following a visit to Vichy in the middle of 1943. This document revealed that the Gestapo had penetrated the entire Resistance movement and were also anticipating ‘a hypothetical D Day which they feared might be imminent’. The Ambassador predicted that the Gestapo would soon unleash a ‘heavy drive’ against Resistance structures with the aim of emasculating them before any landing could take place. At the end of April agents in France were also reporting to London that the Germans were making detailed plans to combat an Allied invasion in the summer.
By the time of the Japanese Ambassador’s visit to Vichy the ‘heavy drive’ had, in fact, already started. Following the arrest of Aimé Pupin’s wife in the Café de la Rotonde on 3 March, the Italians raided the Ferme d’Ambel. But, warned by Fabien Rey, the young occupants fled before the enemy party got there. Then on 18 March Italian mountain troops tried to surprise the C4 réfractaire camp on La Grande Cournouse, the great forest-covered buttress of rock which overlooks the Gorges de la Bourne. Once again the Maquis were warned in time and managed to slip away in good order. By now similar operations were taking place against réfractaire camps across the whole of the region and even in Grenoble.
On 19 April the Italians tried again on the plateau, this time raiding C7 camp on the Plateau de Saint-Ange. ‘The Italians arrived so quickly that our sentries didn’t have time to warn us and everyone tried to find the best hiding place they could, some taking refuge in holes, others scrambling towards the nearest pine tree … No fewer than a dozen of us ended up sitting perched, rucksacks on our backs, in the branches of one especially large fir. “Now this really is what I call a Christmas tree,” one wit remarked. The camp dog, thinking it was all some kind of game, tore after us yelping as we ran for our hiding place and then insisted on sitting down at the base of the tree staring intently at our merry pantomime, while we tried in vain to persuade it to go away. The Italians, the black feathers on their Alpine hats waving in the wind, ran past us not ten metres away.’
Alain Le Ray, who spent much of his time travelling from one camp to the other checking on wellbeing, security and training, saw the danger early and issued instructions: ‘At the smallest sign of trouble, get out, cover your tracks and keep moving for as long as possible.’
By the beginning of May, the Maquisards of C4 camp arrived back at their original site on La Grande Cournouse after a long series of peregrinations, only to be woken in the early morning of 18 May by their sentry shouting ‘Les Ritals! Les Ritals!’ (slang for Italians). In a later coded message to London Aimé Pupin reported that a force of Italian Alpini ‘three thousand’ strong, guided by the Milice, had scaled the sheer slopes from the Gorges on to the plateau overnight. But again the attack appears to have been bungled for, of the eighty in the camp, at the time, the Alpini managed to catch only four, whom they surprised returning from collecting food. De Gaulle himself sent a message to the young Maquisards congratulating them on ‘thwarting the attack’.
And so began what the Vercors fugitives called the ‘summer of nomadisation’ with the réfractaires and their leaders playing a game of cat and mouse with the Italian Army which the Maquisards almost invariably won. But it meant constant changes of camp, hurried last-minute exits and lengthy marches across the mountains often at dead of night. Uncomfortable as it was, the hardships of this period served to toughen soft city bodies and create a real sense of teamwork, comradeship and trust in their leaders.
On one occasion a troop of fleeing Maquisards (after two weeks of nomadisation) passed through the little settlement at Col de Rousset where the redoubtable Jeanne Bordat, known as Mémé Bordat, kept a bar/café/rest house for the refreshment of travellers crossing the Col. Hot on the fugitives’ tail came a troop of Alpini led by an Italian officer who demanded to know where the Maquis were. Mémé Bordat denied any knowledge of the Maquis – indeed, she wanted to know what exactly were these mythical creatures, ‘the Maquis’, for she had never seen them. The Italian officer replied that they were the young men who lived in the mountains. Again Mémé Bordat professed ignorance. Again the Italian returned to the charge, demanding in more insistent terms to know where the fugitives were. Finally, according to Vercors legend, the good Mme Bordat lifted her skirt, pulled down her knickers and, pointing to her bottom, told the officer that if he really wished to know where the young men were, no doubt he could find them up there. The officer left, red faced, taking his Alpini with him.
The importance of this story lies not so much in its veracity as in the indication it provides that, although the disruption caused by nomadisation was uncomfortable, the French Resistance in the Vercors did not regard the Italian Army as a serious threat. As one Maquis leader put it ‘The “Piantis”* (#ulink_4ce27f9f-2fb1-518d-85d7-85408d821b25) were less troublesome and much easier to fool than their allies and friends [the Germans].’ Francis Cammaerts, a British SOE agent in south-eastern France, had the same view: ‘the morale of the Italian Army was so low that [they] … presented no difficulty to the French resistance movements, as nearly all their work was left to the French police’.
Meanwhile, progress continued to be made on the Montagnards plan. In April, Jean Moulin sent a further 1.6 million francs to Dalloz for Montagnards and asked London for a further 40 million to fund his work across France.
On 6 April 1943, just ten days after his return from London and right in the middle of the early Italian raids on the plateau, Delestraint, on Jean Moulin’s instructions, attended a meeting of the Montagnards leaders in the main reception room of Pierre Dalloz’s house at La Grande Vigne, looking out over Grenoble and the Alps on the other side of the Grésivaudan valley. It was a beautiful day, with early-spring light streaming through the windows and the brilliance of the snow on the distant mountains, reflecting in the gilt mirrors on the Villa’s walls. Here, protected by sentries posted at all the main points around the house and on the neighbouring roads, Delestraint was briefed in detail by Dalloz and his co-conspirators on the state of Montagnards. This included presentations on the camps, the Maquisards, the logistics, lorries and cars, mountain refuges, parachute sites and landing zones, resources and food.
Dalloz wrote: ‘We told him that we had no doubt that the Allies would land on the beaches of Provence and that the Germans would try to reinforce their positions before the attack by moving their forces along the north–south line of the valley of the Rhône and the Route des Alpes. But they would be very concerned about their line of retreat. At this moment the Vercors would rise and block the access roads to the plateau at the ten points marked in red on the map. The Allies could then launch paratroop units with their full armament on to the plains of the Vercors at Vassieux, Autrans and Lans … This would be the signal for the whole region to rise. Lyon would fall.’
That night the whole company had a convivial dinner at the Restaurant des Côtes at Sassenage and the following day accompanied Delestraint on a tour of inspection of the plateau. They went first to Saint-Nizier, the gateway to the northern half of the plateau. Delestraint immediately identified this as the weak point in the Vercors’ natural defences and warned prophetically, ‘Without mountain artillery, or at least mortars, you cannot expect to hold the plain of Villard-de-Lans for very long. In these circumstances it might be best to defend instead the southern, more mountainous part of the Vercors.’
Over lunch in a restaurant at La Balme-de-Rencurel in the Bourne gorges, the old General turned to Aimé Pupin and asked, ‘Why did you choose the Vercors?’
‘Pure romanticism, mon Général,’ Pupin replied. ‘I was always fascinated by the fact that Mandrin [an eighteenth-century brigand with a Robin Hood reputation] was able to escape the police when he took refuge here.’
It had been a good day and Delestraint, who expressed himself well satisfied, thanked everyone for their work and promised that ‘The Vercors will play an important role when eventually the Allies land in France.’
Throughout April and early May, despite Italian Army raids on the camps, the Montagnards preparations continued, including a plan to install a high-powered transmitter in Villard-de-Lans which could be used by General de Gaulle to broadcast to the whole of France when he set up his government on the plateau after the Allied landings. Chavant, Pupin and others even began to search for appropriate houses to be used as de Gaulle’s personal accommodation when he arrived.
This high mood of hope and optimism was reflected in London. On 4 May, de Gaulle addressed a reception for young people at the Grosvenor House Hotel. He said ‘France can return again to her force of arms and her hopes, waiting for the day when, her liberation accomplished and her victories achieved, she can escape from her pains and ruins to claim her greatness and her place among the ranks of the great nations again.’
Despite such intoxicating dreams, there were more prosaic problems which needed urgent solutions – the Maquisards in the camps lacked boots. A raid was duly mounted to appropriate a large number of boots and shoes from a nearby government depot, which were distributed for the comfort of blistered feet across the plateau. This success was followed by several other raids on the valley to obtain what the plateau lacked, attracting the attention of the Italian secret police, OVRA. Whatever the ineffectiveness of the Italian Army, the same could not be said of this organization which worked closely with the Gestapo. On 24 April OVRA agents arrested and tortured Dr Leon Martin, then imprisoned him in the Fort d’Esseillon in Modane close to the Italian border. ‘I sent Benoit to see if it might be possible to spring him,’ Aimé Pupin explained. ‘But he came back saying it was hopeless.’
OVRA’s next chance came not through their own work but through a mixture of complacency, braggadocio and stupidity on the part of the Maquisards. It began one day in mid-May when a garage owner with known Resistance sympathies was asked to hide two full ex-Army petrol bowsers in his garage until they could be collected. He was given a password and firm instructions that he should on no account allow the vehicles to be stolen or captured by the Italians. This was easier said than done since Italian soldiers were billeted in a house not fifty metres from his garage. He made the vehicles safe by chocking them up on bricks, removing their wheels and distributor heads, and repainting them in the livery of the Water and Forestry Department.
For a week or so, nothing happened. But then, when the owner arrived at his garage as usual on 27 May, he found the doors had been forced overnight. The vehicles were still there, though there had clearly been an attempt to replace their wheels. But the bowsers were empty. Two days later the garagist was arrested and questioned by OVRA and accused of providing petrol to the Maquis. Only then did it emerge that the break-in at his garage had been carried out by a team of eleven armed Maquisards from Villard-de-Lans who had attempted to ‘liberate’ the vehicles and take them on to the plateau, where the petrol was desperately needed to keep the Huillier buses running. On the way down from the plateau, the ‘commandos’ had stopped at a bar in Grenoble well known for its Resistance sympathies. Here they met a fellow Resistant leader who, hearing of the exploit, told them that it was extremely foolish, since he could easily get false papers to allow the vehicles to be driven up to the plateau without any risk. But the leader of the Villard commandos insisted on pressing ahead with his plans. Of course, since no warning had been given to the owner, the commando team had no option but to break into his garage, where they duly discovered that the vehicles were immovable. Realizing there was nothing further they could do, they set off to return to the plateau. But, breaking all the normal security rules, they chose to travel back by the same route by which they had come down. At the Pont de Claix just outside Grenoble they ran into an OVRA checkpoint in the early hours of the morning. A search of the back of the lorry revealed that it was full of quietly sleeping ‘commandos’, their arms stacked neatly by their sides. All ten were arrested, interrogated and in due course deported to Italy.
The next day, 28 May, the OVRA and the Milice swooped. A black OVRA car supported by a lorry full of Alpini arrived in Villard in mid-morning and arrested Victor Huillier, four other key Resistance organizers and finally, after a lengthy search, Aimé Pupin himself, hiding in a loft. At the same time, a Milice search of the village turned up a cache of some 6 tonnes of dynamite hidden near by. Almost the entire leadership of the Vercors Resistance had been decapitated in a single morning. Other arrests of those further down the chain swiftly followed. Thanks to fast footwork, Farge, Le Ray, Chavant and Dalloz among the main leaders managed to escape (Dalloz’s wife Henriette Gröll fled her home in La Grande Vigne in the middle of a reception for forty guests moments before Italian troops roared in to take possession of the house). However, thanks to Pupin’s habit of keeping neat centralized records, all were now hunted fugitives.
On 28 May London sent instructions to Delestraint to refrain from all military action. That afternoon Farge had a clandestine meeting with Dalloz in a grove of acacia trees on the Quai de France, alongside the Isère in Grenoble. ‘My friend,’ said Farge, ‘you and I have the money in our pockets and the clothes we stand up in. We have nothing else now. No job, no home, no family, no name. From now on we live the clandestine life, or we don’t live.’ Chavant hurriedly left Grenoble to find refuge in a village west of Grenoble, Farge fled for Paris, Dalloz for Aix-les-Bains and Le Ray for the plateau.
On 2 June, Dalloz received instructions to meet Delestraint in a restaurant in Lyon, where the old General instructed him that Alain Le Ray and Jean Prévost were to take over the Vercors Resistance structures and Dalloz himself was to go to Paris where he should meet the General again on the terrace of the Chez Francis restaurant by the Alma-Marceau exit of the Métro at 18.00 on 6 June 1943. When the two conspirators met in Paris they found the restaurant too crowded for safe discussion, so they walked together to the house where Dalloz had found temporary refuge in Paris. Here Delestraint told Dalloz that, if anything happened to him, Dalloz should go to London where he would help to prepare the way for Plan Montagnards.
Dalloz may have been lucky. Three days after his meeting at Chez Francis, Delestraint was arrested emerging from another Métro station, La Muette, on his way to a meeting with another Resistance leader. He was handed over to the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo, and interrogated for more than fifty no doubt terrible hours, before being sent, as a Nacht und Nebel* (#ulink_90a3746a-e179-5f9f-893c-58baea06727f) prisoner, to Natzweiller-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace. He was shot in Dachau three weeks before the German surrender in 1945.
On 18 June, a message from Jean Moulin written before Delestraint’s arrest arrived in London. Moulin’s report warned: ‘the safety of the Vercors has been compromised. Many arrests have taken place owing to indiscretions committed by some of them [the leaders of the Vercors]. The Commander of the Groups [Le Ray] and his Chief of Staff [Prévost] have had to go into hiding and the Vercors must therefore be left for the moment and reconstituted later … No one is to take to the maquis until further orders. All direct wireless communications between the Vercors and London is to cease.’ Moulin’s decision to ‘put the Vercors to sleep’ was a wise one, for by now a wave of Gestapo arrests was sweeping the whole of France, north and south.
Despite these events, a meeting of the Directing Committee for the whole of the southern zone, chaired by Moulin himself, was held as planned on 21 June in the outskirts of Lyon. The location was betrayed and in a Gestapo swoop Moulin, together with seven other key Resistance leaders, was seized. Moulin was handed over to Klaus Barbie and tortured to death.
The leadership and structure of the Resistance in southern France now lay in ruins. It was not just the Vercors that had been decapitated. Similar operations had taken place in Isère, the Haute-Savoie and the Alpes-Maritimes. A British Cabinet paper of the day estimated that ‘fifteen principals and several hundred subordinates of the Fighting French organisation were arrested’ in the Gestapo swoops. An SOE paper quoting a secret French source put the figure much higher: ‘some three thousand members of resistance groups were rounded up and put in prison by the Germans, the majority being in Fresnes [the notorious Gestapo prison in Paris]’.
One element, however, made the Vercors different from all others affected. While the Resistance structures on the plateau could be rebuilt, the crucial connection between Plan Montagnards and those at the very top of the Free French leadership, which had given the Vercors a prime position in French plans for the liberation of southern France, had been irretrievably broken.
* (#ulink_7bbdf12a-889c-58db-add0-ec3d63009698) Another nickname for the Italian troops – perhaps a corruption of ‘les Chiantis’.
* (#ulink_a29c2b42-4834-51d5-9936-9d7c94db72d2) Literally ‘Night and fog’. It meant he was allowed no contact with the outside world whatsoever. The purpose was to make people completely disappear so that no one knew their whereabouts or their fate.
8
RETREAT, RETRENCHMENT AND RECONSTRUCTION (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
For Alain Le Ray and Jean Prévost, standing now almost alone amid the wreckage of the Vercors Resistance, the first and most pressing problem was money and how to rebuild their organization. Le Ray managed to make contact with one of the few members of the Moulin organization in Lyon who had survived the summer purges and who was able to provide enough money to cover the plateau’s immediate needs. His next task was to try to make contact with those who had survived the May arrests. Pierre Dalloz, with Delestraint’s last words instructing him to go to London ringing in his ears, had already set out on what would be a long and hazardous odyssey out of France.
Eugène Chavant, however, seemed to have vanished. In fact Chavant, who had first taken refuge in the countryside outside Grenoble, soon decided he was safer with trusted friends in the city, one of whom ran the Perrin sports shop in the Place des Postes. One day, quite by chance it seems, Chavant spotted a young, impressive-looking man buying fishing tackle and asked who he was. He was told that the man was an Army officer connected with the Resistance. A meeting was arranged at which a personal bond was immediately established between the two. The forty-nine-year-old Chavant, whose socialist background made him instinctively suspicious of the military and their right-wing ways, found in Le Ray, thirty-two at the time, an energetic and politically sensitive partner. For his part, Le Ray, who had an understanding of the importance of close politico-military cooperation which was unusual for French officers of the day, saw the older man as a wise counsellor and effective political operator. A close working relationship was quickly established.
At the end of June a meeting of key leaders in the Vercors region was held at the Château de Murinais under the western edge of the plateau. Its purpose was to re-establish a functional organization in place of the one which had been destroyed by the May arrests. A second Combat Committee made up of five men and two women was created under the overall control of Eugène Chavant (now increasingly referred to as le Patron). The two military representatives on the Committee were Alain Le Ray and one of his lieutenants, Roland Costa de Beauregard.
Though there would be changes to the personnel at the top, this second Vercors Combat Committee, known throughout the Resistance simply as the ‘Organisation Vercors’, would form the basic structure responsible for the direction of all Resistance operations on the Vercors right through to the end of the war. It did not, however, have either the attention of the Free French leadership in London or the direct communication with them that its predecessor had enjoyed.
To start with, Chavant himself stayed in Grenoble, making regular visits to the plateau on the tram to Saint-Nizier and Villard. But in September he moved to take up permanent residence at Saint-Martin on the Vercors itself. By the end of the year effective civilian control of almost all Resistance activities on the Vercors had been established, with Chavant presiding over two administrative sub-units, one covering the northern and the other the southern half of the plateau. Given that this was all done under the noses of a seemingly alert enemy, Chavant’s organization was astonishingly comprehensive. It incorporated the postal and telecoms services in the area, the co-ordination of friendly Gendarme units where these existed, the setting up of a system of ‘sentinels’ linked by phone and courier, the direction of the plateau’s hydroelectric generating plants and a system of motorcycle couriers based at the western edge of the plateau at Saint-Nazaire-en-Royans, who were ready round the clock to carry messages and alert the plateau of impending danger.
Alain Le Ray, replicating Chavant’s civilian structure, split his military ‘command’ in two as well, appointing Costa de Beauregard as commander of the north and another of his officers the south. Over the summer months and into the early autumn, Le Ray concentrated on reorganizing, training and, as far as he could, arming the Vercors camps, always ensuring that everything he did was coordinated with Chavant and his civilian partners. Far from lazing around in ‘holiday camps’, most of the Vercors réfractaires – when they weren’t out in the fields helping to get in the harvest – spent this summer on forced marches, on learning to live off the land and on repeated military manoeuvres under the direction of professional military officers who had by now been appointed to command each of the camps on the plateau.
Le Ray himself embarked on a tireless round of the camps, checking on their security, seeing to their needs and instructing them about their role and importance. A flavour of these events is given in an account of Le Ray’s visit to the Vercors’ first camp, the Ferme d’Ambel. After a dinner sitting, quiet and unannounced, among the réfractaires around the rough wooden tables of Ambel’s refectory, Le Ray called for silence and spoke: ‘From today you will be a part of a new French force which General de Gaulle has created, with the support of our powerful Allies, to recover our independence and rediscover the true strength of our country. This is the great task which is before you, the glory which is yours to achieve. You have responded to this appeal even before it was made. You have taken your posts, even before they were assigned to you … The role you have already accepted to play is one of the most important in the battle for our freedom. This is what your leaders confirm today, placing their trust in your courage. Now you must wait for their orders – they will not be long in coming. In a few months – in a few weeks, perhaps – the signal will be given. You must be ready. I am here today to give you my assurance that the service you will give – the sacrifice you will perhaps have to make – will be fully recognized and will contribute decisively to the victory your courage will have delivered.’
After the war Le Ray outlined what he was trying to achieve during his push for better organization and coordination in the late spring and early summer of 1943:
We had to change our whole approach according to five principal aims:
1. The elimination of all the damaging distinctions between the military and the civilians. We were now united together under a single category: Resistance fighters.
2. A structure of command which was as simple and direct as possible.
3. The elimination of all embedded prejudices, especially where the lifestyles of the Maquis groups could have the effect of damaging relations with the local villages.
4. A dual role for those who remained in their own communities waiting for the call to action:* (#ulink_9b33f241-cec2-52d8-892c-5e1cc8ce52d4) providing intelligence, early warning, food and supplies to the Maquis, putting together teams, quickly and on demand, for specific assignments.
5. The strengthening of the professional and leadership elements in each of the Maquis groups.
It was in pursuit of the fourth of these, ‘A dual role for those who remained in their own communities’, that a decision was taken which was to have a profound effect on all those who lived around the Vercors during the struggle ahead. Conscious that there would be a general mobilization of forces when the Allies landed, Le Ray proposed that a reserve force made up of four secret Maquisard companies should be raised from the young men of the communities lying outside the mountainous perimeter of the Vercors. Each of these would be led by a professional military officer who would provide them with training at the weekends. No doubt one of Le Ray’s motives in proposing this reserve force was to help deepen the connection between the military and the local civil society. But it had strong military advantages too for it provided, not just reinforcement which could be called to the plateau when required, but also a kind of informal militarized cordon around its outside edge which would act both as a warning system and as a line of defence in case of attack.
One of these companies was founded by a Socialist professor of mathematics at the Romans Technical College, André Vincent-Beaume, and was constituted from young volunteers from the towns of Romans, Bourg-de-Péage and Saint-Donat-sur-l’Herbasse off the western edge of the plateau. A secret programme of recruitment to what was eventually to become Abel Company began in the three towns in June 1943, with recruits being drawn from factories, warehouses, offices, local clubs (especially the rugby club) and even the patient lists of a doctor and a dentist in the area. Provisioning and money for the clandestine unit was provided from local sources, chiefly by collections in factories, churches and clubs. A hundred pairs of boots were donated by a local factory owner (this area is famous in France as the centre of the shoe industry) and funds were banked in the Romans branch of the Banque Populaire.
Serious training, conducted mostly by military professionals and consisting of long forced marches, military manoeuvres and occasional firing of weapons, began in July. At weekends the young men of Abel Company would quietly melt away from their communities and reassemble in forest clearings or at mountain refuges on the high pastures of the plateau, returning on Sunday evening ready for work next day. In August, Abel Company, now numbering some 235 Maquisards and divided into four sections, was formally given its proposed area of operation when full mobilization on ‘Jour J’ occurred – they were to help defend the whole of the south-west quadrant of the plateau.
The D-Day mobilization process itself was carefully planned. Special signs were prepared which would be nailed to trees and barn doors indicating where to find assembly points, there was a mass purchase of Michelin maps of the area, camping gear was requisitioned from local sporting and hardware shops and each Maquisard was required to have a rucksack ready packed for quick departure containing a candle, spare shoes, a blanket, a waterproof sheet, a set of mess-tins, eating utensils and a water bottle.
On the other side of the Vercors massif, in the little market town of Mens in the Trièves region, under the plateau’s south-eastern corner, the same thing was happening.
‘You free this evening after 8 p.m.?’ asked Jacques, who owned a saw-mill at the entry to Mens. It was six o’clock in the evening and almost dark when he had knocked on the door of the Darier house. The evening light caught the last streaks of unmelted snow on the slopes of the Bonnet de Calvin, high above the little town.
‘Sure. I can easily be free,’ Albert Darier replied.
‘Good.’ Jacques continued, ‘I know you believe in the Resistance. But we have nothing organized here. One of the key men in the Secret Army is coming tonight to see if we can set up a unit in the Trièves. If you would like, why not come along and meet him – and bring anyone else you think might be interested.’
When Albert Darier, who turned twenty-one that year, and six of his closest companions arrived at 20.00 precisely in the first-floor private room set aside in the Café de Paris, he found a brightly lit space with several chairs set around a table on which stood a small vase of spring flowers. His friend Jacques and a young stranger, who was introduced as ‘Emmanuel, one of the local chiefs of the Secret Army’, were already there. Otherwise the room was empty.
At first the stranger seemed a little disappointed that there were so few of them. But Albert Darier explained that he had known of the meeting only a couple of hours previously and had not had time for discreet contact with more of his friends. Reassured, the stranger spoke of the need to resist the enemy in organized groups and to play a part in the liberation and future of France. He continued, ‘I warn you. It will be hard. Some of us will not return … There will be few to help us. We will not be protected by the laws of war, because we will be “terrorists”. And we will be fighting more than just men. We will be fighting the beast of the Nazi regime … This beast will defend itself with blood and terrible savagery. And it will become even more terrible as its final agonies draw near.’ The six young men sitting round the table hung on every consonant and syllable the mysterious stranger spoke. ‘We will have not just to defend, but also to attack. We will certainly have to kill … But to fight we shall need arms. And at present I have none … I don’t know when exactly the arms will come. But I do know they will come. They have been promised. Maybe not tomorrow, but in due course.’
By now it was late and the Café de Paris had already closed. One by one the new recruits slipped down the back stairs and out into the darkness to their homes, their warm beds and the comfort of their families. The Mens platoon of the Compagnie de Trièves had been formed. In due course they would be given the crucial task of defending the high passes on the south-east corner of the Vercors’ eastern ramparts. Slowly but surely Alain Le Ray was creating a ragged but surprisingly capable guerrilla force – except of course for arms, of which they had none, apart from an occasional old hunting rifle and what little was left of the arms smuggled out of Grenoble that the Italians hadn’t found.
On 10 and 11 August 1943 the leadership of the Organisation Vercors arranged a mass convocation of all the Vercors Maquis and those from the neighbouring areas, on the high pasture of Darbonouse, overlooked by the Grand Veymont which towers above the eastern plateau. Maquis groups and their leaders from across the plateau and beyond made their way up the mountain to a meeting point in a small natural amphitheatre in front of a shepherd’s hut, located in a hidden dip in the middle of the Darbonouse pasture. Sentries were posted at strategic points around the area and each group were required to provide their names and give the password – ‘Great Day’. The Maquis chiefs were accommodated in the shepherd’s hut. Tents stolen from the valley were erected for the rest. Formal proceedings were opened on 10 August with a singing of the ‘Marseillaise’ and the raising of the national flag. Le Ray’s original plan seems to have been to have two days of open-air discussions and then take the Organisation’s leaders on a tour of inspection of key sites on the plateau. But the clouds swept in and it started to rain, so this was abandoned.
There is no reliable record of how many attended this gathering, which some have compared, rather grandly, with the great feast at the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790, a key event in Revolutionary France. We do know, however, that all the main Vercors leaders were there, including Le Ray, Chavant, Samuel and Prévost, as well as many of the heads of the newly formed Maquisard companies and others among the second echelon of Vercors leaders, including a doctor from Romans, Dr Fernand Ganimède, who will feature later in our story.
Le Ray opened proceedings with a statement of intent: ‘We have to eliminate all passive attitudes among our people. Our Maquis companies must be divided into highly mobile groups of thirty with the majority coming from those who have been in the camps already established. The danger lies in us becoming too settled in one place – too fixed. Mobility, speed and prudence – these are our best defences.’
He then outlined three possible future strategies. The first was a fortress strategy in which the Vercors would be held against all comers. The second, which he called the ‘hedgehog’ strategy, was to use the plateau as a base from which raids could be mounted on the Germans in the valley, with the raiders disappearing into the forests if they themselves were attacked. The third strategy was effectively Plan Montagnards – a proposal to turn the Vercors into an airbase to be held as an advanced bastion for a few days only, so as to enable airborne troops to fly in, consolidate and then begin attacking German lines of communications in the valley, while at the same time widening the secure base to other areas. It was this latter view which won the day, though some were worried it gave the starring role to the incoming paras, leaving the Maquisards as bystanders to the main action.
Despite the incessant rain, which caused the convocation to break up on 11 August, everyone realized that a watershed had passed. They had a united organization and a clear strategy to follow: ‘Never had the Vercors been more confident. Never had it been more sure of itself. Never had it been so united.’
Some time in August 1943 a tall Englishman with unusually large feet came to the Vercors for a meeting with Eugène Chavant. The twenty-seven-year-old Francis Cammaerts, alias ‘Roger’, was arguably one of the most successful of all SOE agents in wartime France. He had been landed by Lysander on 21 March 1943, two days after Moulin and Delestraint had landed at Melay. Equipped with a false identity in the name of Charles Robert Laurent, he had orders to assess the work of an SOE ‘circuit’ run by Peter Churchill and his courier Odette Sansom near Annecy in the Savoie. But he soon realized that Churchill’s security was so bad that it was only a matter of time before his organization was penetrated by the Gestapo. In fact Cammaerts only just managed to avoid the catastrophe when Churchill and many of his colleagues were arrested. Cammaerts duly set about constructing his own network under his SOE codename Jockey, which extended across the whole of the south and east of France. By the time ‘Grands Pieds’ (as he was quickly christened by Chavant) came to the Vercors he was, despite his youth, already respected even by hardened Maquis leaders twice his age and had become a marked man, much sought after by the Germans. One of the reasons for Cammaerts’ success was the scrupulous attention he paid to security and to the welfare of his agents and the fact that he ran his network through a series of isolated and unconnected cells so as to limit the danger of total collapse if one was penetrated.
‘I met … Eugène Chavant … and we walked up [the mountain] together and met a couple of the military chaps,’* (#ulink_b484f993-0a47-58f3-b62e-e700831948bc) Cammaerts said later of this visit. ‘It was obvious that Plan Montagnards had an enormous amount to commend it and I backed it as much as I could … The supposition was that after Normandy there would be either a sea landing in the south of France very shortly or an airborne landing where the troops, backed by the Resistance … [would land in mountainous areas such as the Vercors] which we could have held … against anything the Germans could put up … for the forty-eight hours it would take them [the parachutists] to gather their material together and be in combat trim.’
What is striking about these events of July and August is that the Italians, who had caused so many problems for the Vercors Maquisards earlier in the year, seem effectively to have vanished from the scene, more concerned perhaps with events at home in Italy than with what happened in the country they were occupying. On 17 August, a week after the Darbonouse gathering broke up, the Allies declared Sicily (which had been invaded once North Africa had been secured) free of Axis troops. Allied forces were now poised only a stone’s throw from the Italian mainland with an invasion expected any day.
Despite the easing of Italian pressure, the task facing leaders of the Organisation Vercors as they attempted to coordinate action on the plateau remained challenging. The temporary vacuum of local leadership caused by the May and June arrests had resulted in a climate of free-for-all when it came to forming new Resistance organizations. Now anyone could start their own Maquis – and they did. These newly formed Resistance groups varied greatly in quality – some good, many bad and a few deeply corrupt.
Among the latter category was a Maquis group led by an ex-policeman from Lyon called Marcel Roudet. A close collaborator of the equally dubious Chief of Police in Lyon, Roudet bought a café in La Chapelle some time in 1943 and started his own Maquis, which he used to ‘legitimize’ what was essentially a criminal gang specializing in theft, the black market and extortion. In due course Roudet, himself a heroin addict, became so powerful that he was even capable of terrorizing Eugène Samuel and was said by many to have ‘the whole of the south in his pocket’. As Albert Darier recalled, ‘He was big, strong and had the look of a real gangster chief about him. Roudet was impressive, even menacing, to look at. Always explosive, always on the edge, always prone to pulling out his revolver at the slightest provocation, he was at his most terrifying when he needed a “fix”. Then he would go into the nearest chemist and demand an ampoule of morphine with menaces. As soon as he had left the shop, one of his men, whose job it was, would take out the syringe which he always carried, and inject Roudet’s arm then and there on the street.’
Another ‘freelance’ Maquis, but one of a very different nature, was the Groupe Vallier, founded by the twenty-four-year-old Paul Gariboldy, a one-time draughtsman at the Merlin-Gerin engineering works in Grenoble. This group of audacious young desperadoes quickly became famous for their flamboyant dress, insouciance in the face of danger and expertise at assassinating collaborators even in broad daylight on the streets of Grenoble. Gariboldy himself was described by a Resistance comrade as ‘An extraordinary man. Full of passion. He was afraid of nothing. He was maybe brave to the point of foolhardiness. He just didn’t know where or how to stop.’
But when it came to assassination, no one was more feared on the plateau than ‘Petit René’ (his real name was René Lefèvre), who had been forced to watch when his mother and father had been summarily executed by the Germans. He had sworn implacable vengeance against the occupiers and all who collaborated with them. Small of stature, with finely drawn lips, a nervous rictus smile and a facial tattoo illustrating the four aces, he killed without pity – always, according to Vercors legend, downing a glass of undiluted anisette in one gulp to steady his nerves before each execution. René was rumoured, by mid-1944, to have executed more than fifty targets, chiefly collaborators of one sort or another, though this figure is certainly a gross exaggeration.
During the winter of 1943/4, Le Ray and Chavant did their best, with varying degrees of success, to bring these independent groups under central control. Chavant in particular was strongly opposed to summary executions and insisted, especially latterly, that the death penalty for traitors should be carried out only after due process – even though this was, initially at least, of a fairly rudimentary sort.
By this time, the social base of the local Resistance movement had widened. The Vercors women, involved right from the start in the first Resistance structures, were now playing a more important role. Alongside the domestic burdens of keeping families together while husbands and sons were in the forests and delivering bread, pails of milk or bags of pâté and cheeses to groups of desperate, hungry young men, the women of the Vercors also carried heavy loads when it came to more direct engagement in the active work of the Resistance. Some like Paulette Jacquier led a Maquis group in their own right. Others such as Charlotte Mayaud and Geneviève Blum-Gayet were closely involved from the start in the second Combat Committee which had been established in June. Gaby Lacarrière and Jacqueline Gröll from Sassenage, still in their teens, acted as spies and couriers, carrying out numerous sorties by bicycle through the checkpoints and into Grenoble on missions to gather information or carry vital packages and messages both to and from the plateau. Léa Blain, a young girl from the village of Chatte west of the Vercors Massif, came to the plateau to help with the coding and decoding of secret telegrams for London and subsequently paid for it with her life. As did Rose Jarrand, the schoolmistress at the little village of Les Chabottes close to Saint-Agnan on the plateau, whose classrooms were used for a period as an arms depot.
Pierrette Fave later wrote to her new husband Robert, who was already in the Resistance, explaining why she wanted to join him: ‘The circumstances demanded that we young should be active, not passive … For some, I was just a young girl who ran off. But I was utterly committed – I wanted to join the Resistance as you had done. At 20 you want to change the world. Or at least you want to try. I regret none of it, but it was hard.’ Pierrette Fave was not alone in rejecting passivity in favour of action.
Many local priests felt the same. The Catholic Church within France had initially responded to the Franco-German Armistice by recognizing the legitimacy of the Vichy government and declaring that armed resistance was a mortal sin. At the introduction of the STO the Church hierarchy, fearing civil war, ordered obedience to Laval’s order and advised those called up to follow instructions and leave for Germany. The long-serving Bishop of Grenoble, Alexandre Caillot, known as the ‘most Pétainist Bishop in France’, retained this view till the end of the war. There was also at least one churchman suspected of passing information to the Germans.
But these ‘collaborators’ were the exception. By early 1944, the majority of ordinary priests adopted an increasingly militant, pro-Resistance stance. Some were leaders of Maquis groups – Abbé Pierre led one in the Vercors on the Sornin plateau – while many others served as ordinary footsoldiers. The beautiful twelfth-century abbey and convent at Léoncel, below the south-western edge of the plateau, was used by the wireless operators of at least two clandestine radios in direct communication with London. As one Vercors combatant, no lover of the Church and its ways, put it: ‘The Vercors priests were a rugged breed, and not at all like the soft idiots in the Bishop’s palace. They were deeply integrated into their villages and communities, where the leadership of the priest was much respected. Throughout the long period of suffering and pain of the occupation they never hesitated to show their commitment by publicly castigating from their pulpits, both the Nazis and the French who served them.’ A British officer in the Vercors described one of the local priests bending down to pray over the body of a dead Maquisard, causing his surplice to lift up at the back, revealing ‘the leather belt around his cassock, fixed onto which was a Colt 45 automatic pistol and about half a dozen [hand] grenades’.
Resistance sympathizers also included some who were supposed to be active servants of the Vichy state. Many town Gendarmeries were especially prone to turning a blind eye to Resistance activity – in some cases even participating themselves. By the end of the summer of 1943 most ordinary members of local communities were at least passively sympathetic to the Resistance, though, as we shall see, this may have had less to do with genuine commitment and more to do with the fact that there were almost no penalties attached to supporting or even assisting the Resistance. The Italian occupying forces did not, in the main, indulge in sanctions or reprisals against the civilian population. This was, however, about to change.
* (#ulink_00b064ff-0de5-5c1e-bd3a-b0610f8f9576) They were called sédentaires – that is, Resistants who stayed in the farms and communities in which they lived and continued their work as normal during the day, but trained secretly as Maquisards at the weekends.
* (#ulink_274d73a1-cddc-556e-b33a-d43bb8696565) Probably Le Ray and de Beauregard.
9
PRESSURE AND PARACHUTES (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
The Allies invaded Italy proper on 3 September 1943. Corsica rose the following day, thanks largely to the Communists but aided by the British. Peeved at being bypassed in the first French liberation victory, de Gaulle later commented sourly, ‘British intelligence, which ordinarily did not go out of their way to be generous without ulterior motive, procured ten thousand machine guns [for the Communists].’ Five days later, on 8 September, Marshal Badoglio (Mussolini had already been deposed on 25 July) signed an armistice between the Italian government and the Allies in Cassibile in Sicily.
The German response to the Italian surrender was pre-planned, swift and bloody. Since 15 July, ten days before the fall of Mussolini, French agents in the Savoie had reported to London that heavy German troop concentrations were seen moving south towards Grenoble. On 6 August, a German infantry division, redeployed from Brittany, was reported transiting the city, heading for the Italian border. On 30 August, the German 157th Reserve Division under the command of the fifty-two-year-old Generalleutnant Karl Ludwig Pflaum established its headquarters in the city.
Within hours of the Italian surrender, German troops occupied Grenoble, forcibly ejecting the Italians from their barracks. There were running battles between Italian and German troops on the streets of the city and a ‘massacre’ of Italian officers at the Hôtel les Trois Dauphins in Place Grenette. Some Italian soldiers immediately joined the Resistance, but most fled for home. Desperate Italian troops were seen passing through the Trièves area heading for the Italian border 70 kilometres away.
With Grenoble under German control, it was not long before the Gestapo arrived in the city. Their headquarters were established in the Hôtel Moderne, while another building, 28 Cours Berriat, was converted into an interrogation centre. This address was soon to become infamous in the city as a place of torture. The Gestapo rapidly found their hands full, not because of the Vercors, but because of what was happening outside their own front door. On a bright afternoon in October Paul Gariboldy emptied a whole magazine from the window of a speeding car at the Milice headquarters in the Hôtel de l’Angleterre less than a kilometre from Gestapo headquarters, shouting, ‘Get out. France is free,’ as his vehicle sped away to the sound of tinkling glass and the echoes of gunfire reverberating from the nearby buildings. On 6 October, a jumpy German sentry shot dead a local engineer who was fumbling in his pocket for his house key. By now, tension was rising dangerously in the city. On 11 November, the anniversary of the signing of the 1918 Armistice, the call went out from Resistance circles for a strong show of defiance to ‘raise our voices once more against the [German] oppression’.
At 10.00 on 11 November, more than 1,500 people turned out ‘as if from a signal’ and marched towards the Diables Bleus monument to the French Chasseurs Alpins to celebrate France’s First World War victory over the Germans. The demonstrators were stopped by a massive show of force by the Vichy police, who herded them back to the city centre where they found themselves blocked by a troop of Germans with machine guns. Caught in a sandwich between the police behind and the machine guns in front, they were embroiled in a tense stand-off. The German officer’s orders in these circumstances were to open fire, but the police intervened and, arresting many, dispersed the crowd. More than 600 protesters were subsequently tried and deported; 120 of them were never seen again.
Worse was to follow. Two days after the demonstrations at Les Diables Bleus, on the night of 13/14 November, Aimé Requet managed, single-handedly, to blow up 150 tonnes of ammunition at the old French artillery depot, the Polygone de l’Artillerie. The blast could be heard more than 50 kilometres away. German reaction was instantaneous and ferocious. On 15 November, reinforced by a troop of Miliciens drafted in from Lyon, they launched what has subsequently become known as the Grenoble St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It started with information given to the Gestapo by a French couple and was, as before, greatly assisted by the Resistance habit of keeping centralized records. By the time the massacre ended after some two ‘weeks of blood’, the Gestapo, assisted by the Milice, had cut a swathe through the Grenoble Resistance organization with arrests, deportations, summary executions and assassinations.
Denise Domenach-Lallich, who was nineteen in 1943, noted the new atmosphere of repression and fear in Lyon, writing in her diary in October: ‘the curfew sounds at ten o’clock in the evening and no one gives us passes because of the reprisal troops, Mongol-types who shoot anything that moves … One grows quickly in the moment when one doesn’t die … several of my friends have been caught and shot three days later.’
Paradoxically, with the Germans so busy in Grenoble and Lyon, these were relatively quiet weeks on the Vercors. On 11 October, the Gestapo arrested a Maquis leader in Saint-Jean-en-Royans. There was also a German raid on a camp on the south-western edge of the plateau, looking for a radio set which their gonio detection vans had identified in the area. (Gonio was an abbreviation of voitures de radiogonio.) But the camp’s inhabitants were able to disperse into the forests quickly enough to avoid capture; ‘we went three days with nothing to eat but artichokes which we found in a shepherd’s garden’, one complained afterwards, ‘… before finally ending up at the Grande Cabane [a mountain refuge] below the Grand Veymont’.
Although the Germans had so far mostly left the plateau alone, events in Grenoble caused some nervousness in the camps. The diary of Lieutenant Louis Rose in the Forêt de Thivolet records a number of false alerts in October, including an excitable sentry who called the unit to arms at 04.00 because he feared they were about to be attacked by what turned out to be a troop of badgers foraging in the woods.
And then, on 13 November 1943, just one day after the full moon and the same night that Aimé Requet blew up the ammunition store at the Polygone de l’Artillerie in Grenoble, the plateau received its first major parachute drop at Darbonouse, the isolated Alpine pasture on the eastern side of the plateau which had been the site of the Resistance gathering of 10/11 August. The arming of the Vercors had begun.
In fact there is good evidence that the original plan had been to begin this process a month earlier, during the moon period in October 1943. The logbook for one of the Tempsford RAF squadrons shows that on the night of 16/17 October a Halifax bomber took off from the airfield on a mission to parachute containers to a site identified as ‘Trainer 96’, a codeword which in relation to other missions refers to Vassieux. This supposition is supported by the list of code phrases for parachute drops to be carried out in the October 1943 moon period which were given out in the BBC’s nightly broadcast to France on 30 September. This list contains one phrase whose main elements would later become indelibly linked with the Vercors: ‘Le chamois bondit’ (‘The chamois leaps’). Unfortunately, however, if such a drop was planned, it never took place for the pilot’s logbook notes that the mission had to be aborted because the ‘A/c [aircraft] caught fire’.
In some ways the choice of the Darbonouse for this drop was a strange one, for access to this high pasture is by difficult, barely motorable forest tracks and mountain paths. A drop on the parachute sites previously identified by Dalloz, on the open plain near the village of Vassieux or in the wide valleys around Saint-Martin and Villard, would have been much easier for all. It may be, however, that the October German activity in the south-west of the plateau and in Grenoble made it wiser to choose somewhere further away from habitation and main roads.
André Valot, at the time the second-in-command at the Ferme d’Ambel, recalled this momentous drop on 13 November: ‘It was a Sunday. Louis Bourdeaux and I were sitting … in the dining room after dinner smoking and listening somewhat distractedly to the “Messages personnels” section [of the BBC] broadcast … Suddenly I was transfixed. I felt myself go pale and the shock caused Bourdeaux to drop his cigarette. Had we not just heard our codeword “Nous avons visité Marrakech” [“We visited Marrakesh”]? Disbelieving, we listened again; the voice said it again – more insistently this time. The message we had been waiting for! The aircraft we had been longing for were at last coming! They were coming just as promised … Now the voice was gone and they were playing some recorded music. We looked at each other, our eyes filled with tears, our spirits full of disbelieving laughter. We hugged each other. At last our hopes had been fulfilled; our resolution rewarded; our confidence confirmed. “Shall we go?” I said. “You bet,” Louis replied. “I will telephone to make the arrangements.”’
Valot and Bourdeaux quickly gathered their men and set off in trucks for the Darbonouse pasture. They were not alone. The entire plateau had either heard the BBC broadcast or heard of it and knew what it meant. As Valot’s gazogène trucks wheezed up the steep tracks leading to the eastern plateau, threading their way through the forest, it seemed as if half the Vercors were there as well. Young men from other camps marching along, singing patriotic songs, groups of peasants driving pack mules, old carts drawn by oxen and, of course, more ubiquitous gazogène trucks, all making their way to the drop site – all intent on carrying away at least a share of the booty which the distant BBC voice had promised would fall from the sky that very night.
It was 22.00 by the time Valot and his team reached the shepherd’s hut at Darbonouse. Here they joined a small crowd who had already arrived from other camps, milling around an assortment of trucks, carts and motorcycles. Around them a recent fall of snow had gathered in drifts at the edges of the forest and in the pasture’s shallow undulations. And in the distance the great mass of the Grand Veymont looked down, its summit capped with snow, sparkling in the moonlight.
Eugène Samuel and Roland Costa de Beauregard had already taken charge of the drop site. Three-man sentry posts, each with a machine gun, had been placed on all the points of access and bonfires were already being prepared. There was plenty of time. H-hour – when the aircraft would arrive – was not until an hour after midnight. Valot described the scene:
By midnight, all was ready and there was nothing to do but wait …
… The moon slowly slipped towards the horizon threatening to leave us alone under a silent and empty sky.
And then suddenly, borne on the wind, there was a sound like a far-off whispering. Almost nothing. No more than the rustle leaves make in a breeze. But quickly it became more constant, heavier somehow and with a kind of strong underlying beat. Soon we could tell where it came from – the north-west. It was them – it was undoubtedly them!
We stood in the middle of the site and the Commander pulled out a large electric torch. Pointing it in the direction of the noise, he started to flash a series of dots and dashes in Morse code. Suddenly – there! – up there! A new star suddenly appeared and flashed back the same sequence at us! They had seen us …
‘Light the fires!’
Immediately a lance of flame, fanned almost flat by the wind, leapt out of the darkness near by. Then another and another and another until a vast letter T was picked out in flames around us – four bonfires long and three across. Above us we heard the still invisible aircraft turning as though enclosing us in a wide circle of noise, holding us in an embrace of friendship. We suddenly felt – wonderfully – that we were not alone.
And then the miracle happened. One of the aircraft burst out of the darkness above us following the line of the long stroke of the T. And suddenly, beneath it, a great white flower blossomed against the darkness of the sky. It did not appear to us as something falling, but rather as something sprouting out of nothing – as though it was the product of magic conjured into existence by the black shape above and by the noise it made. And then there was another and another and another. The wind made them all dance as though in some fantastical aerial ballet. The spectacle was one of utterly intoxicating, utterly astonishing beauty. Now we could see the round circles of the parachutes jostling each other for position. Below each one swung a long black, cylindrical shape. At first we thought they were men. Then a dull heavy thud, then two, then three, then four, five, six, ten, twenty, thirty, repeated and repeated and repeated. The white flowers now lay deflated, exhausted, dead and lifeless on the ground around us. The miraculous cargo had arrived.
Everyone, even the sentries rushed to the landing ground – if an enemy had attacked us then we would all have been caught like rats in a feeding frenzy …
We rushed to the dark forms lying inert in the grass … and began to unpack our treasures. They were contained in long aluminium tubes shaped like torpedoes: rifles, stripped-down machine guns, wicker baskets covered in cloth containing bandages and surgical instruments. Here were heavy iron boxes containing ammunition and explosives and there were bundles of clothing and waterproof covers and woollen wear. No presents could have been more welcome … thank you, Father Christmas!
[In the end, however], the arms, the explosives, the equipment – though all were magnificent, our nocturnal visitors brought us an even more special gift. They brought us back our confidence, our enthusiasm and, with these, the sure knowledge that we were not, after all isolated, abandoned and alone.
What may be guessed at from Valot’s lyrical account, but is not explicitly stated, is that the results of the Darbonouse parachute drop were less than optimal. The high wind distributed the parachutes and containers over a very large area and some were not found until years later hanging in the branches of fir trees or lying in the bottom of small depressions where they had plunged into deep snowdrifts. The contents of those that were found were enthusiastically pillaged, resulting in some groups having arms without ammunition, some ammunition without arms, some boxes of grenades, others the detonators, some surgical instruments which they didn’t know how to use and more woollen socks than they could ever possibly wear. There would, in due course, be a price to pay for all this undisciplined brigandage.
Much of what could be recovered in an organized fashion was stored in a nearby cave, the Grotte de l’Ours, and distributed later. The Maquis unit which had established itself at Malleval on the east of the plateau went to collect its share ten days after the drop and came back with an entire lorry full of arms and ammunition, storing it in the village presbytery.
Two days after the Darbonouse parachute drop, on 15 November, Francis Cammaerts was recalled to London, where he explained in detail his plans to hold the Valensole, the Beaurepaire and the Vercors plateaux as bridgeheads for paratroops in the event of a landing in the south of France. It was a message which would have been welcome in the British capital for, at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt had decided that ‘Operations against southern France (to include the use of trained and equipped French forces) should be undertaken to establish a lodgement in the Toulon and Marseille area to exploit northward in order to create a diversion in connection with Overlord. Air-nourished guerrilla operations in the southern Alps will, if possible, be initiated.’ Planning for the invasion of the Mediterranean coast of France began immediately under the codename Anvil. In a September minute to the Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, it was proposed that Anvil should be a diversionary operation to be carried out simultaneously with Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings. Its primary aim was not to capture territory but to draw German troops south, away from the Normandy beaches.
The Vercors may have lost its direct line to the highest level of the Free French command in London, but events elsewhere were conspiring to give it a potentially important role to play in the much bigger game which the Supreme Allied Command was now planning – the invasion of the European mainland.
On the Vercors, however, the autumn of 1943 brought the Resistance more to worry about than the distant plans of the mighty. On 24 November, three German gonio radio-detector vehicles were seen in La Chapelle. It seemed that they found nothing, for they were reported at the end of the day returning home over the Col de Rousset ‘empty handed’. The plateau breathed a sigh of relief. But it was premature.
The following day, the Gestapo descended on Saint-Martin in force and, seeming to know exactly what they were looking for, headed straight for a large farmhouse complex, Les Berthonnets, a kilometre or so east of the village. This housed two clandestine radios and their operators, Gaston Vincent and Pierre Bouquet, working to the Algiers office of the American equivalent of the SOE, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Warned just in time, the two men fled, Vincent carrying his heavy radio set. After a short chase, a German soldier who got within range of the weighed-down Vincent shot and wounded him. Helped by the owner of Les Berthonnets, Vincent hid in a pile of hay in a barn. Here he was subsequently found by a German search party, covered in blood. Presuming him to be dead, they left him alone.
Bouquet, however, was caught and held, but then – surprisingly – released by the Gestapo. He re-established contact with the Resistance but was placed under discreet observation. His former colleagues concluded that he had been ‘turned’ while in captivity. His body was found on 23 December, riddled with bullets as a result of an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a Resistance execution.
Though this raid was small in comparison with later incursions, it indicated the Germans’ determination to ensure that the Vercors did not harbour activities against their interests. And it demonstrated their ability to invade the plateau and leave it again, whenever they chose to do so. The Vercors Resistants may have viewed the plateau as a safe area, but the Germans certainly did not.
The damage done by the Gestapo’s 25 November raid was minor, however, compared with that done not much more than a week later by the French regional military commanders.
In the early autumn Marcel Descour – accompanied by his ever-present counsellor/monk Dom Guétet – took up a new post as the Military Chief of Staff for Region 1 of the Secret Army, within which the Vercors fell. He was therefore, in effect, Alain Le Ray’s direct military commander. Descour’s job was to unify the disparate elements of the Resistance in his region under an effective military command. Criticisms of the Vercors Maquisards for their lax ways had already reached him and he may have taken their independence of spirit as a challenge to his authority. He may also have been irked by the fact that, while he was trying to unify fighting structures under military control, in the Vercors it was a civilian in the form of Patron Chavant who was formally in charge, and Le Ray seemed content with this.
Whether there is substance in this or not, the question of the Vercors and Le Ray as its military chief came to a head at a meeting called by Descour and attended by all the military commanders in the Lyon area in early December. Not long into the meeting, Descour himself started openly criticizing Le Ray for ‘feudalism’ and especially for the mishandling of the parachute drop at Darbonouse. Le Ray described what followed as an ‘Inquisition based on the unproven suspicions of the unidentified’. Finally unable to control himself, he exploded: ‘Well, if it’s my resignation you want, you have it.’
Descour returned fire with fire: ‘Resignation accepted!’
Both men were later to say that they regretted their hotheadedness – though Le Ray regarded an eventual rupture as inevitable. ‘The Vercors was seen as a trump card in the whole French Resistance organization. The authorities wanted to put someone there who they could be sure would be their man.’
However, even if both men had wanted to pull the moment back, they couldn’t. The die had been cast, the damage done. The Vercors had lost its most able commander and the only one who understood that guerrilla warfare was about constant mobility and the closest possible military/civilian integration, not fixed defences and conventional military control. Some believe that many of the tragedies which would ensue would not have happened if these few testosterone-fuelled seconds could have been avoided. Chavant was furious when he heard and wanted to disband the whole Vercors structure immediately. But Le Ray, who had been instructed to leave his post at the end of the following January, persuaded him not to, saying that no purpose could be served by adding revenge to rancour.
Everyone presumed that, after the ‘resignation’ of Le Ray, his deputy, the much liked and admired Roland Costa de Beauregard, would take his place. But Descour, true to Le Ray’s prediction that the Army wanted a man who would take the Army line, chose Narcisse Geyer, who was at the time still in the nearby Thivolet forest. Geyer, acknowledged by all to be a man of great courage, initiative and élan, had many qualities. Among them, however, were not tact, diplomacy, sensitivity or any kind of understanding of the role of the civilians in the struggle. Diminutive, right wing and haughty in his demeanour, Geyer was mostly to be seen in full uniform, complete with kepi and soft white cavalry gauntlets, riding around the plateau on his magnificent stallion Boucaro: Descour could hardly have chosen a person less likely to appeal to Eugène Chavant and his Socialist colleagues. It did not help that Geyer himself made it plain to all that he intended to marginalize the Combat Committee and place the plateau under overall military control.
The first meeting between Geyer and Chavant at a saw-mill near Saint-Julien-en-Vercors in the weeks before Christmas went as badly as might have been predicted. Chavant took an instant and intense dislike to his haughty new military partner, refusing to permit him to have any contact with the camps or give training to the Maquisards. Geyer reciprocated by making plain his distaste at having to discuss military matters with a civilian. This deep schism was widened by the different strategies followed by the Maquis fighters on the one hand and the professional military on the other. The military pursued a ‘wait and see’ policy whose aim was to avoid drawing German attention to themselves in order to gain the time and space to build up their units and train their men for the ‘big moment’ (D-Day) – when they could come out into the open and play a major part in the liberation of their country. The Maquisard leaders, however, pursued an activist policy which concentrated on small raids and sabotage designed to harry the Germans, make them feel insecure and deny them freedom of movement. This policy had the double advantage of hardening and professionalizing their guerrilla forces through action, while at the same time encouraging other young men to the cause.
The difference between these two approaches became evident in December 1943 when there was a sudden and sharp increase in the raids carried out from the Vercors plateau and the area around it. On the night of 1/2 December there was an attack on high-tension electricity lines near Bourg-de-Péage. At 08.20 the following day, an explosion rocked the Borne Barracks in Grenoble, killing twenty-three German and Italian soldiers and wounding 150 French civilians. In reprisal, the Germans shot thirteen hostages. On 10 December, railway locomotives were sabotaged at Portes-lès-Valence and, the following day, the Merlin-Gerin engineering works in Grenoble were attacked, causing an estimated 30 million francs’ worth of damage. On 15 December the Maquis group in the Malleval valley in the north-west corner of the plateau sabotaged the Valence-to-Grenoble railway. On the 20th, the Mayor of Vilnay was assassinated for collaboration and, two days later, another train was sabotaged at Vercheny. On 27 December, in what it is tempting to think of as an attempt to make the old year go out with a bang, there were raids and reprisals at Vercheny, Sainte-Croix, Pontaix and Barsac.
This increased level of sabotage and raids seems not to have been set back by the early and ferocious arrival of ‘General Winter’* (#ulink_8c546c82-f900-587f-896e-e39a8c4bec99) on the plateau. On 6 November, unseasonably early, the first heavy snow fell on the Vercors. Two weeks later, there was an even covering of 30 centimetres of fresh snow, right down to the mid-levels of the plateau. By Christmas, the snow was a metre deep at the Ferme d’Ambel.
This was the first winter which most of the young réfractaires had spent away from home and they found it very hard. Even the simplest chores required super-human effort. Almost worse than the cold was the sheer unrelieved, bone-numbing boredom, with nothing to do but get on each other’s nerves as the snow swirled outside their mountain refuges, while the days shortened and the nights, lit only by a single oil lamp, lengthened interminably. Morale plummeted and young men started slipping away for the comforts of their homes in the valleys. Of more than 400 réfractaires estimated to be in the camps in September, only 210 of the hardiest were left by Christmas. The camps at C8 and C11 fused together and descended to take refuge in the old, now deserted eleventh-century monastery of Our Lady of Esparron under the eastern ramparts of the plateau. Christmas, when it came, was celebrated by the young men in their mountain refuges and forest huts as best they could, given their conditions and heterogeneous beliefs. In Camp C3 above Méaudre, Christians gave readings from the Bible, the Jews from the Torah and the Communists from the texts of Karl Marx.
As early as October the camp at C2 had been abandoned when its inhabitants descended from the plateau to winter quarters in empty houses in the village of Malleval, nestling in a steep little bowl to which the only easy access was through the narrow gorge at Cognin, off the north-western quadrant of the plateau. Here the Maquisards under the leadership of Pierre Godart had an excellent relationship with all the local villagers, who despite the wartime restrictions still managed to organize a sumptuous Christmas for their young visitors. Godart sent one of his most devout men to Grenoble to ask the Bishop if he could provide a priest to take Christmas mass for the Maquisards in the little village church. But the answer was an abrupt no – ‘those who put themselves outside the law, are also outside the law of God’, as one later observer summed up the great churchman’s response. Eventually, however a priest was found to take confession and mass. On Christmas Eve, a French traditional réveillon de Noël* (#ulink_025105ae-c408-50e5-9967-ddb4e2292acd) began.
The little Malleval church was first decked out in full winter finery. Then, soon after dark, processions of torches started to wind their way down the tracks leading from the outlying farms where each Maquis section of sixteen was housed. Soon their voices could be heard carrying across the valley and the little dots of men’s figures could be picked out against the whiteness of the snow. In due course, each column arrived and filed into the church, Christian and Jew and Communist and atheist alike. ‘It seemed as if all the world was there, in the little white church lit by carbide lamps which cast a flickering glow, making the shadows dance and shooting their beams into even the darkest corners. The old people sat quietly, their walking sticks between their knees, as others squeezed up to make room for the new arrivals. Even the women joined us, including the mothers, wives and some fiancées of the Maquisards, giving our little ceremony some of the sweetness of home.’
Then the feasting began: ‘The menu would have dignified a prince … the food seemed to have come from every corner of the land. The baker at Cognin brought breads and cakes. A veal calf had been carried down from Rencurel and all the fish and fowl of the area seemed to have been gathered together in our church, especially to grace our Christmas. There were even two cases of champagne freshly arrived from Reims. The feasting went on all the night. Songs were sung; an accordion was brought out – then more songs and more songs until finally the dawn burst in among us. On this night, for us, the men of the Maquis, life was wonderful.’
Surely, next year – 1944 – the Allies would land and France would be free again. And then life would be wonderful every year.
* (#ulink_23940b9a-3a99-5bf5-952f-3fe8fdc43f8f) The phrase is a Russian one which is used to account for the fact that so many winter invasions of the country have failed. Russians also refer to ‘General Snow’ and ‘General Mud’.
* (#ulink_12d49c99-066b-5ec5-a852-4ec877bae9ae) Festivities at Christmas.
10
THE LABOURS OF HERCULES (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
As the men of the Malleval Maquis were celebrating the Christmas season waist deep in snow, Winston Churchill, dressed in his famous silk dressing gown emblazoned with a red dragon, was lying in bed in an airy room in General Eisenhower’s villa in Carthage (prophetically called La Maison Blanche), recovering from pneumonia and a heart attack. Denied his customary cigar and restrained in his consumption of alcohol, he was tetchy and fulminating against ‘the scandalous … stagnation’ of the Italian campaign.
It is tempting to believe that his complaints about the slow progress in Italy might have been a displacement activity for the much bigger personal setback he had just suffered at the hands of his ‘friend’ President Roosevelt at the Tehran Tripartite Conference which had just ended. At Tehran, the American President had blindsided Churchill by teaming up with Stalin to defeat one of the Prime Minister’s most ardent and long-favoured schemes, the invasion of what he called the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ on a line which began on the Pisa–Rimini axis in Italy and ran through the Balkans to the oilfields of Rumania. Churchill had invested hugely in arms, supplies and support for Tito’s Yugoslav guerrillas as a preparation for this assault, which was now, thanks to the US/Russian alliance, to be abandoned in favour of a simultaneous double invasion of France, one from the north across the Channel (Overlord) and the second from the south across the Mediterranean from Algiers (Anvil). It was easy to see why the Soviets were opposed to Churchill’s Balkan plans – they saw this area as their sphere of post-war influence and did not want the British anywhere near it. Roosevelt’s reasons were less understandable. He mistakenly believed he could establish a post-war strategic alliance with Stalin and needed Soviet support for what he saw as the cornerstone of this new relationship, the establishment of the United Nations. Churchill was left hurt and fuming at this first stark evidence of Britain’s coming weakness between the two superpowers in the post-war world. ‘There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo and, between the two, the poor little English donkey who was the only one … who knew the right way home.’
The decisions of Tehran had now shifted the entire axis of the Allied European war effort from the south and the east (Italy and the Balkans), where Churchill had made his greatest investment, to the north and the west (the Russian front and Overlord). Despite these crushing disappointments, the British Prime Minister was not a man to mope for long. If the overall strategy had changed, his must too. Now France, a country he knew well and loved deeply, was to be the main stage, not the Balkans. Within days of leaving his sickbed he was meeting members of the French Resistance in North Africa and planning how Britain, which had so far largely ignored French partisans in favour of those of Yugoslavia and Italy when supplying arms, could help foster the growth of the Resistance movement.
It is often said that Churchill was a dewy-eyed romantic when it came to partisans. He was. But his attachment to the fostering of internal resistance had a hard-edged military rationale, too; it was a way to keep occupied countries in a ferment of opposition against the Germans and to prevent them from relapsing into apathetic torpor, as France had done after the Armistice; it was also a means by which the ‘skill, dash and courage’ of British agents behind enemy lines could influence the outcome of events in ways which compensated for the relatively meagre matériel resources the country was able to commit at this stage of the war, compared with those of the US and Russian colossi. There were also those in Whitehall (perhaps even including Churchill himself) who thought that, in terms of blood and loss, France’s sacrifice during the war had so far been small. So it was no great thing to ask her now to risk a greater price for her own liberation.
Churchill had always admired de Gaulle, even if he did not like him. But up to now the French General had been just another leader-in-exile of a conquered European country and these were two to the penny in the London of 1941–3 – though, as Foreign SecretaryAnthony Eden ruefully admitted, de Gaulle stood out from the crowd because he caused ‘us [the British government] more difficulties than all our other European allies put together’. Now, however, with France the main stage for the next phase of the war in the West, de Gaulle, the territory of France and the capabilities of the French Resistance took on new strategic importance.
De Gaulle himself had started 1943 with few assets and even fewer friends. Disliked by Roosevelt, disregarded by the British war leadership and personally irksome to Churchill, he had almost nothing going for him – and very little he could call his own in France or among the Free French either. Like the Pope, of whom Stalin famously asked ‘How many Divisions does he have?’, de Gaulle may have been the spiritual embodiment of the French Resistance, but of actual ‘Divisions’ he had few.
De Gaulle might have expected that Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa and the liberation of the French colony of Algeria (where Eisenhower had now set up his headquarters), would have strengthened his position as the French leader with whom the Allies had to deal. In fact the opposite happened.
The Americans chose instead Henri Giraud, a French general who had been captured at the fall of France, been imprisoned in Königstein Castle, escaped under curious circumstances and made his way to Toulon where an Allied submarine had picked him up and delivered him to Gibraltar. He arrived on the Rock only a few hours before the start of Operation Torch. Eisenhower promptly asked him to assume command of all French troops in North Africa. Giraud at first refused because he was not commanding the whole Allied operation, but eventually relented. When he left Gibraltar for Algiers on 9 November 1942, Giraud remarked, ‘You may have seen something of the large De Gaullist demonstration that was held here last Sunday. Some of the demonstrators sang the Marseillaise. I entirely approve of that! Others sang the Chant du Départ [a military ballad]. Quite satisfactory! Others again shouted “Vive de Gaulle!” No objection. But some of them cried “Death to Giraud!” I don’t approve of that at all.’
Giraud knew perfectly well that de Gaulle was his deadly rival for the leadership of the free and the fighting French. But he also knew who was in the dominant position – he was, and by far. With the personal support of Roosevelt and the practical support of Eisenhower, he was in the place that mattered most – Algiers – and he commanded not only more French troops but also the only formed French units at that time fighting alongside their Allied comrades.
Giraud’s support inside France was less certain. But then so was de Gaulle’s. At the beginning of 1943, the Resistance was quarrelsome, fragmentary, diverse and riven by political rivalry. There were Gaullists to be sure. But also Giraudists. And many whose loyalties were to neither of the above, but to the Communists, the Socialists and even (still) to the Pétainists. The Secret Army was by comparison more Gaullist, but by no means uniformly so. Meanwhile, as de Gaulle understood very well, when it came to the actual government of France the relative position of the potential French leaders was going to be irrelevant, because the American President was planning to impose an Allied Military Government in Occupied Territories – known as an AMGOT. France would be governed for a period at least, as Italy had been, by foreigners. That was Roosevelt’s plan. That was what Giraud was acquiescing in. He, de Gaulle, would not.
But, at the start of 1943, de Gaulle’s chances of fulfilling his aim of being the leader who took his country back to freedom, self-government and eventually great-power status seemed ambitious to say the least. To succeed, he had to make himself the unchallenged leader of the free and fighting French inside and outside France. That meant going head to head with the most powerful man in the world, President Roosevelt, and wresting power from his favourite, Giraud. Then he had to make himself and his supporters so indispensable to the liberation of France that a French government would follow, not a government of transition drawn up in Roosevelt’s back office. And he had to achieve this with limited influence and only few assets to his name. These were the labours of Hercules indeed. But, remarkably, by the end of 1943, de Gaulle had accomplished all of them.
On 30 May 1943, de Gaulle arrived in Algiers, having finally negotiated terms for a partnership with Giraud. Five days after his arrival, on 4 June, de Gaulle took to the airwaves on Radio Algiers: ‘Everything is now in play – our army and our navy are playing a key part in a drama of indescribable importance. Our sacred duty is to show again what great things can be accomplished by the arms of France.’ Not since Lenin had been smuggled into Russia in a sealed train had such an insertion of poison been accomplished with such devastating consequences into the body politic of the ruling (in this case Giraudist) establishment. In a series of moves of cunning and ruthlessness, de Gaulle progressively sidelined and then summarily removed Giraud, leaving himself in sole charge. It would take until the D-Day landings of June 1944 for Roosevelt to come to terms with this reality, but there was little he could do. Giraud was the past. De Gaulle was now the future.
De Gaulle’s success in gaining control of the power structures in Algiers was replicated inside France. Francis Cammaerts, who had a ringside seat in the key months, saw the shift of opinion and remarked on its speed. ‘In March 1943, still, Gaullism was not necessarily the only salvation. By August 1943 it was. No one in the Resistance in France thought that there was any solution to the French future except through de Gaulle …’ This represented an astonishing success for the General for it gave him the means, not just to unseat Giraud, but to play a direct role alongside the Allies in his country’s liberation. No government in France could now be formed without de Gaulle’s consent and active participation. In short, if de Gaulle could build up the political effect of the Resistance and make it a potent military force, then Roosevelt’s plan for a transitional government in France would be a dead letter.
Such a project, however, was not without its complications. On the one hand, the Resistance gave de Gaulle legitimacy, but, as one sharp-eyed commentator put it after the war, de Gaulle ‘had to navigate between two contradictory pitfalls: on the one hand to convince the Allies of the necessity to support the armed struggle as a means of reinforcing the legitimacy of Gaullism; and on the other to control and channel the internal struggle in France in such a way as … more effectively to integrate its activities into the plans of the Allies and, above all, prevent, within the metropolitan Resistance, the emergence of “counter-forces” capable of contesting [de Gaulle’s] capacity to govern the country after the Liberation’.
De Gaulle’s second problem was that the French Resistance was held in very low regard by the British and American authorities. Churchill loved France and recognized its claims to great-power status. But he was not averse to making unflattering comparisons between the French Resistance and Tito’s Yugoslav partisans, who were tying down some twenty German divisions in bloody guerrilla warfare. Roosevelt, on the other hand, had something close to contempt for France, seeing it as a decadent imperial power which lacked the moral fibre Britain had shown in the early years of the war. On the question of the effectiveness of the 1943 French Resistance (or rather lack of it), the two leaders and their staffs were united: it could not in 1943, and would not in 1944, be able to deliver anything of weight to the coming battle on French soil. It was this opinion that de Gaulle had, by hook or by crook, to change.
Back in March 1943, the British War Cabinet had met to take the first of several decisions establishing the priorities for the supply of arms and equipment to partisan forces in Europe. It put France as third strategic priority behind the Italian-held islands, Corsica and Crete (taken as one) and Yugoslavia. These priorities were personally reconfirmed by Churchill himself in August and November of that year. A Cabinet paper at the end of March put total Resistance strength in France at 175,500. Yugoslavia, with a much smaller population, had partisans, they estimated, numbering 220,000. The paper included an annex showing Resistance strengths as a proportion of what it referred to as ‘net male population’. This showed that 30 per cent of ‘available’ men were in the Resistance in Norway, 6 per cent in Denmark and Poland, whereas in France, no doubt because of its internal divisions, it was just 3 per cent.
An SOE assessment in May and June 1943 pronounced the French Resistance ‘at its lowest ebb’ and added that its forces ‘could not be counted on to be a serious factor unless and until they were rebuilt on a smaller and sounder basis’. The paper ended by warning that this would require a ‘total reorganisation and reformation’. London’s reaction to the deficiencies in the Resistance organization was to send out tripartite ‘missions’ made up of representatives of France, Britain and the US with the task of assessing what needed to be done to mend the gaping holes left by Gestapo arrests and to create a new structure of organizational control. One of these missions in October 1943 estimated Resistance strength in the maquis of the Rhône-Alpes as 2,300 and described the Vercors camps they had visited as ‘modestly equipped and armed, adequately turned out given the very difficult conditions, good morale’.
Having elbowed Giraud out of the way, de Gaulle was now free to take further steps to reform the command and control of the Resistance by setting up Committees of Liberation in all the French departments and naming military delegates for each of the three administrative levels of the country – national, zonal and regional. The General was beginning to assemble a government for France, though it would take long tortuous months before first the British and then, finally and reluctantly, Roosevelt gave formal recognition to this. Over succeeding months this structure was progressively strengthened, in large part prompted by the fact that, by the end of November 1943, it was clear that an invasion of France was being planned and that, citing security as the reason, the British and Americans were going neither to involve, consult nor indeed even inform de Gaulle about what they had in mind.
De Gaulle was predictably furious at the snub. But it also presented him with a real practical problem. If he knew nothing of Allied plans, how could he ensure that the Resistance would be in a position to assist when the great moment came? His answer was to set up a special planning unit in December 1943 to prepare a ‘rational plan for the participation of Resistance activity in the eventuality of an Allied landing on French soil’, without having the first idea where the landings would be, what form they would take or how they would be exploited. De Gaulle made his position clear in a speech given on 8 October 1943, in liberated Corsica: ‘Victory is approaching. It will be the victory of liberty. How could such a victory not be the victory of France as well?’
One of the key staff in the planning unit de Gaulle had set up was an exceptionally able captain of Czech origin, Ferdinand Otto Miksche. On 20 January 1944, Miksche produced a study listing the options before the British and American planners, drawing conclusions about which in the end they would be most likely to choose. It was astonishingly accurate in predicting that one of the most likely landing points was Normandy – a conclusion which would have deeply worried France’s allies, who were trying desperately to keep the location of Overlord secret. This study also proposed possible military actions which could be undertaken by the Resistance to assist the invasion, wherever it occurred. These were discussed with the British, who ‘showed a great deal of interest and asked for a second … detailed study of the conditions under which French resistance would help in the landing’.
In Miksche’s second study he stressed (somewhat hopefully) that the Resistance ‘although not an ensemble of regular military units [should] be looked upon as a regular Army obeying orders from the Allied High Command’. He also identified several territorial zones of France and how the Resistance might be employed as the Allied breakout from the beachhead developed. Among these were areas where ‘redoubts of Resistance’ would be established ‘in districts geographically unsuitable for large scale military operations’, such as the Alps (including the Vercors). Miksche’s plan continued the drift towards something more ambitious and permanent than Dalloz’s original Plan Montagnards (of which at this stage he had no knowledge). ‘In these redoubts’, he wrote, ‘the Maquis would be organized and be in readiness for sabotage and guerrilla operation behind enemy lines … the creation of permanent redoubts [emphasis added] would inevitably expand, even before D-Day, through the arrival of patriots who refused to accept forced labour for the enemy.’
The idea of ‘Resistance redoubts’ (réduits in French) was not a new one. On 13 November 1943, a secret meeting in Switzerland between British SOE representatives and a gathering of Resistance and Secret Army leaders (who were also unaware of the existence of Plan Montagnards) concluded with a recommendation that the Vercors (among other possible ‘redoubt’ areas) should be held ‘as a fortress from which raids could be made’ on German lines of communication. Two weeks later, on 29 November 1943, an experienced French agent, in London at the time, wrote a paper picking up on the fortress idea and proposing the establishment of ‘geographic fortresses’ manned by ‘trained, disciplined, adequately armed and properly led forces’ in places like the Vercors. The aim was ‘to place at the disposition of the Allied High Command, forces under their direct control which could offer operational possibilities comparable with parachute troops dropped in advance. These should be kept hidden until after, or exceptionally a little before, D-Day.’ Note the key proposition here. The Maquis would not create an area for paratroopers, but would instead take on the role of paratroopers dropped in advance.
On 31 December 1943, an SOE paper followed up this thinking and proposed that ‘small controlled areas’ should be created for the delivery of weapons and paratroops after D-Day. These would be established where ‘the Maquis [could] occupy ground which can be comparatively easily defended and thus controlled’. This imprecise language left it open for some to believe that the Maquis could defend these controlled areas by themselves. In the fertile soil around this lacuna, muddled thinking, unclear orders and military folie de grandeur would take root, flourish and ultimately cost the lives of many hundreds of the young, the inexperienced and the innocent.
Pierre Dalloz arrived in Algiers on 25 November 1943 having completed a long and hazardous crossing of France under the false identity of René Brunet, an even more dangerous one over the snow-bound passes of the Pyrenees and a short stay in Gibraltar. He was horrified that no record of or interest in Plan Montagnards could be found in any quarter. He immediately sat down and reconstructed the plan from memory, dictating it to the personal secretary of one of de Gaulle’s most senior advisers (see Annex B). It was to be to no avail. When Dalloz finally arrived in London at the end of January 1944, he was to find that those who should have been aware of his plan were as ignorant of its existence in the British capital as their counterparts had been in the North African one.
The truth was that when it came to deciding the fate of the Vercors, the template now being used was not Dalloz’s carefully calibrated Plan Montagnards but something altogether more ambitious. Some among those, British and French, who were directing the Resistance from London were beginning to believe that the young men who had first taken refuge on the Vercors plateau and then been turned into a rough guerrilla fighting force might, in due course and with a little help, be able to take on a face-to-face defensive battle with the gathered might of the German Army.
Between Christmas and New Year – at about the same time that Churchill in his sickbed in Carthage was concluding he had to take the French Resistance more seriously – one of London’s ‘mission leaders’, who had now teamed up with the Maquisards on another of the planned redoubts, the Glières plateau east of Geneva, sent a message to London: ‘We consider that the Glières plateau is now an impregnable fortress.’
It would not be long before this boast, and with it the developing concept of the ‘defendable redoubt’, would be tested.
11
JANUARY 1944 (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigérie, aristocrat, adventurer, libertine, Socialist, one-time self-proclaimed Communist, eternal optimist, Resistance leader and senior member of de Gaulle’s government-in-exile in Algiers, was summoned to attend the British Prime Minister in the Villa Taylor in Marrakesh at 10.00 on 15 January 1944. De Gaulle himself had just flown back to Algiers, having been in Marrakesh for a morning parade of troops, over which he and Churchill had jointly presided as a show of unity between the two men. It may even have been that Churchill had deliberately waited for the General’s departure before calling d’Astier to see him.
D’Astier records that when he arrived at the Villa Taylor ‘Duff Cooper was there, as was Macmillan just back from Egypt … Clementine and Mary Churchill were on the terrace together with Diana Cooper, who despite her straw hat and chiffon veil looked like a Rossetti painting. Although it was winter it was as warm as a May day on the Île de France. An ADC came for me and led me through darkened rooms to a modest door which opened to reveal Churchill sitting in a large bed, a cigar clamped between his teeth. The nurse attending him stood up and left; the chamber was as small, sparse and white as a hospital room. Somewhat intimidated I stumbled into my first words in English but was soon at my ease … He was an accomplished verbal jouster – never quibbling over positions which he knew were untenable … always knowing when to feint and when to riposte, jumping from word to word, barking with anger from time to time, but chiefly for effect (though it brought the nurse scurrying back in on one occasion to relieve him of his cigar and put it out).’
At the end of two hours, Churchill, dressed in air-force-blue silk pyjamas, finally allowed de La Vigérie to turn the subject to the matter of Britain’s miserly approach to arming the French Resistance, about which d’Astier had complained publicly and vociferously. The Frenchman outlined the case for Britain to deliver something more than just warm words which, he claimed, was about all that had been given so far. Churchill appeared to listen and finally conceded, as though offering a great gift, ‘OK, we’ll give you what you need. I will give the orders myself. Come and see me in London and we will discuss it more.’ It was a piece of typical Churchillian gamesmanship, designed to get the maximum out of graciously conceding a position which had in fact been decided upon even before d’Astier entered the room.
On the day before this piece of theatre, an apparently hale and hearty Churchill had chaired a meeting with his Chiefs of Staff Committee of the War Cabinet in the splendid surroundings of Government House in Gibraltar. All his key advisers and naval, military and air force leaders were there. This was the moment when he had to shift British policy to accommodate the demise of his Balkan enthusiasms in favour of a strategy based on a simultaneous pincer movement through France, from the English Channel in the north and the Mediterranean in the south. But Churchill was constitutionally incapable of taking defeat lying down. He had grumpily come to terms with the Overlord landings on the Normandy beaches, but the grand strategist in him still balked at the Anvil landings on France’s Mediterranean coast. He would still have preferred to continue the Allies’ northern push through Italy ending with a swing west across the Alpine passes into the Savoie, the Isère and the Haute-Savoie.
The War Cabinet minutes record: ‘The Prime Minister … was inclined to agree that Overlord should be strengthened and that Anvil should revert to pre-Tehran dimensions’ (that is, at most, a possible diversionary attack to draw troops from the north, if needed). Churchill would in fact make several determined attempts to divert Roosevelt and Eisenhower away from Anvil, each more desperate than the last, as the date for the Mediterranean landings approached. For the moment, however, he was content to prepare the ground for a return to his preferred strategy if and when the opportunity arose. The minutes of the War Cabinet meeting that day at Government House in Gibraltar reflect this change of course very clearly. Having spent the last year denying that the French Resistance had any strategic importance (and consequently refusing them priority in the supply of arms), Churchill and his key advisers now agreed that ‘A vigorous plan should be worked out to stimulate guerrilla operations in the mountains of the Savoie and in the country between Ventimiglia and the Lake of Geneva.’
The implications of this decision for the Vercors and other possible Alpine redoubts were considerable. First, they would now have first place in the supply of arms they had so far been denied. And secondly, they had become key to whichever southern French strategy the Allies would finally decide on: to both Cammaerts’ ‘leapfrogging’ plan in the case of Anvil, and to Churchill’s Alpine passes plan if Anvil was dropped in favour of a push through Italy.
Miksche’s study had proposed six possible areas for the establishment of redoubts: the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the Morvan forest, the Vosges mountains, the Jura and the Alps. But of the options that were now being developed by the Allies (albeit unknown to the French) for the purpose of a southern invasion, only the Alps and the Jura would be relevant. If de Gaulle wanted the Resistance to coordinate its actions in a way which would make them most valuable to the Allies, it was in the Vercors and the other Alpine redoubts that he needed to invest. Unfortunately, he and his advisers had other ideas – ideas which, driven more by political considerations than military ones, would have profound implications for the Vercors.
The next substantive meeting between Churchill and d’Astier was at a conference chaired by Churchill in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street on 27 January. Again, all the British Prime Minister’s key advisers were there. First, Churchill played the Yugoslav card: ‘I aided Mihailovic – they were brave men. Now I am helping Tito. The more the Germans slaughter his men, the more ferocious they get. That’s what I am looking for.’ Then he questioned d’Astier about the reliability of the Resistance: ‘Can you assure me that you French will not use the weapons we provide to shoot each other? That you will follow strictly the orders of Eisenhower without question or considerations of a political nature?’ Finally, he reverted once more to his master card – gracious generosity. ‘I have decided’, he said at the end of the meeting, with the air of a kindly uncle giving money to an impecunious relative, ‘to help the French patriots.’
The minutes of the meeting, normally dry affairs, give a flavour of the event in which the Prime Minister’s peculiarly personal cadences can be easily detected: ‘The Prime Minster said that he wished and believed it possible to bring about a situation in the whole area between the Lake of Geneva and the Mediterranean comparable to the situation in Yugoslavia. Brave and desperate men could cause the most acute embarrassment to the enemy and it is right that we should do all in our power to foster and stimulate so valuable an aid to the Allied strategy.’ Perhaps more important than these fine words was the conclusion of the meeting, which was that the RAF’s first priority – after the bomber offensive on German cities – should now be ‘The French Maquis’. Churchill went on to stipulate that, as a start, arms sufficient to equip 8,000 Maquisards should be dropped into the Alpine region during the month of February 1944.
Though the Americans would also, in due course, throw their formidable weight behind the arming of the French Resistance, it was Churchill’s decision of 27 January 1944 which began the process which would, in the end, deliver 13,000 tonnes of arms by air to France, sufficient to equip some 425,000 Maquisards. Churchill reinforced the decision he had taken at the meeting with d’Astier by establishing a British committee specifically tasked with coordinating government action to aid the French Resistance. But Eisenhower, rightly spotting an attempt by Churchill at unilateral action in support of his own strategic preferences, insisted that the British committee should be subsumed into his command. And matters did not end there. On 3 March, Eisenhower complained to Churchill that aid to the Resistance in south-east France was being sent at the expense of assistance to the Maquis in the Normandy/Brittany area, where it was needed in support of Overlord, the Allies’ agreed first priority. In a typically terse handwritten note, Churchill rejected Eisenhower’s request to change the priorities he had set in the meeting with d’Astier on 27 January: ‘The Mountain people have had little enough. No alteration in my plans as arranged. WSC 4.3.44.’ This was not romance; far less was it charity. It was Churchill keeping his strategic options open in case, as he hoped, Anvil would be abandoned.
But, whatever Churchill’s motive, the effects for the Maquis in the Alps and the Jura was dramatic. Thanks to the Prime Minister’s personal intervention and the strategic opportunities he saw along the Italian/French Alpine border, the ‘Mountain people’ of south-east France had now leapt above those of central Bosnia as Britain’s first priority for supply and reinforcement from the air. Probably more than any other place in south-east France, it was the Vercors which would benefit most from this largesse, becoming, over the ensuing months, a huge depot and distribution centre for arms and supplies dropped, not just for the Vercors but for the Maquis in the neighbouring Belledonne, Chartreuse and Oisans ranges as well.
The first effects of the 1943 decision to encourage ‘air-nourished guerrilla operations in the southern Alps’ were felt in the Vercors on the night of 5/6 January 1944. In the early hours of 6 January, the Union Mission, together with twelve containers of arms and six packets containing 16.25 million francs, was parachuted to a landing site at Eymeux, under the western edge of the Vercors plateau. The three Union Mission members who parachuted into Eymeux that night were an ex-British schoolmaster turned SOE agent, Henry Thackthwaite, a US Marine called Peter Ortiz and a French radio operator.
The Union Mission’s task was to assess the state of the Resistance in the Savoie, Isère and Drôme (especially in relation to the Maquis’ needs in terms of weapons and clothing) and their possible deployment after D-Day. Although the Mission members dropped wearing civilian clothes, they brought uniforms with them and wore these for the rest of their visit – the first Allied officers to have been seen in uniform in metropolitan France since the fall in 1940.
The Mission’s first visit was to the Ferme d’Ambel. André Valot was there. Though his description suffers from a number of inaccuracies and is characteristically over-coloured, the general impression – and especially in his account of how this event was seen by the Maquisards – is probably fairly accurate: ‘[One day] a huge yellow limousine arrived … magnificently decorated with three flags flying from its bonnet: the French Tricolour in the centre and the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes fluttering proudly on either side. Even before the doors were fully open an extraordinary figure leapt out: a gangly red-haired giant with a lanky body, a bony face – sunburnt to the colour of coffee – and the expression of a child with a permanent grin on its face … “Hi, boys,” he said, pulling a hip flask out of his back pocket. “You sure are up pretty high here, but great country, yeah! I’m Lieutenant Jean-Pierre [Ortiz carried false identity documents in the name of Jean-Pierre Sellier]. Here have a drink. It’s whisky – the real McCoy. It came from the sky last night, like me. I would rather have broken my leg than break this. You bet!”’
Valot’s narrative continued: ‘In the back of the yellow limousine there was a coffer full of Chesterfield cigarettes and chocolates, whose distribution created an immediate, steadfast and unbreakable affection for the American Army in general and most particularly for its representative, who had so wonderfully fallen to us from the sky the previous night. Every time Ortiz met someone new he pulled out his indestructible hip flask, filled up a small drinking cup which also acted as its metal cap and ordered, “Here have a drink.” He was rarely refused, roaring with laughter and slapping the poor unfortunate recipient on the back with a force sufficient to dislocate the collarbones of the unwary.’
The reports submitted to London by Thackthwaite, both by coded signal from France and on his return in May, were comprehensive. He recommended that ‘The Vercors plateau offered the best strategic position on which the Maquis could be based. From here they would have the best chance of attacking and hindering the Germans, whether or not the expected invasion of the southern coast of France materialised.’ For this reason he especially asked for heavy weapons to be sent to the Vercors – a plea which was to be repeated many times, always in vain.
Thackthwaite made other notable recommendations and observations: ‘All sorts of expedients were … used [by the Maquisards] to obtain money, including stocks of tobacco … taken from shops [which] are sold on the black market, and … acts of brigandage … [We] found men in the Maquis barefoot and with one blanket between them … [there was a general] lack of equipment and especially transport … the Maquis surgeons need … surgical knives, scissors, forceps, anaesthetic masks, dissecting scissors, basins, amputating saws, morphine, quinine, permanganate of potassium, syringes, needles and tourniquets … The civilian population are very impatient for D-Day to come … Politically de Gaulle is the only head the people look to … morale is good and improving now the winter is over … The civilian soldiers [Maquis] show a great deal more bite than the ex-officers of the Armistice Army … Maquis lack of confidence in such men is easily understood … many officers … gave us the impression that all serious fighting can be left to the Allies … It might be possible to control places like the Vercors … but the numbers at present are insufficient … [they] would have to be reinforced by parachute troops … 7,000 men are necessary for the Vercors.’
The third week of January 1944 saw a spell of bright, settled and warm, almost spring-like, weather in the Vercors. The roads were suddenly free of snow – unusual in any January, but doubly so in a winter such as this.
Perhaps it was the good weather which, on 17 January, tempted Narcisse Geyer to move his troops from the Forêt de Thivolet off the west of the plateau to Les Combes, a large farmhouse in the woods above Saint-Martin-en-Vercors. He was preparing for his take-over of command from Alain Le Ray at the end of the month. His first action was to conduct a brief inspection of the Maquis camps which made up his new command. Afterwards, he returned to his base full of complaint about what he had seen in the camps: ‘It is just not possible to take seriously a war with these people who seem incapable of even the smallest sign of discipline.’
Marcel Descour had also decided that the growing strength of the Vercors meant that he should establish his regional headquarters on the plateau. He chose a large farmhouse, Peyronnet, in the little village of La Matrassière, only 3 kilometres or so from Geyer. On 4 January he sent an advance party of staff and radio operators, one of whom was Pierre Lassalle, to begin preparations. Descour and his counsellor/monk Dom Guétet would follow later. Despite the relatively clement weather and the kindness of the inhabitants of Peyronnet farm, life was tough, especially for the operators working their radios and Morse keys in the farm’s barns. ‘For fifteen straight days’, Pierre Lassalle recounted afterwards, ‘my life was divided between brief visits from our hosts and long hours submerged under a mountain of blankets, listening to broadcasts, my headphones permanently clamped on my head and my numb fingers twiddling radio dials.’
Perhaps it was the same good weather that also tempted Herr Bold and Herr Schönfeld, both German officials from Valence, a Dutch journalist, Meneer Koneke, and an interpreter to take a drive through the middle of the Vercors the next day. The tourists requisitioned a car from a Valence garage and instructed the owner to drive them to the Vercors, approaching the heart of the plateau through the Gorges de la Bourne. They got as far as the narrow steep-arched bridge which crosses the Bourne torrent at the Pont de la Goule Noire (literally the Bridge of the Black Hole). The bridge is a perfect spot for an ambush position – which was exactly what it was that day. The ‘tourists’ were immediately taken prisoner and escorted to Geyer at Les Combes farm. Here they were politely but firmly interrogated and then incarcerated under armed guard in a shepherd’s hut behind Geyer’s headquarters.
The following day, fifteen-year-old Gilbert Carichon was walking down with his brother, having been collecting wood in the forest above Rousset – the village in which he lived – when he saw a requisitioned Peugeot 202 car with four German soldiers. The Germans were asking questions about the four who had gone missing the previous day – had anyone seen them? Gilbert and his brother walked quietly past the group being interrogated and slipped down a back alley to the small village grocer’s shop. There they found Marcel Roudet, the corrupt ex-policeman who led the Maquis Raoul. As they watched, the German soldiers drove off north towards La Chapelle. Roudet suddenly pulled out a whistle and blew it hard just as the Germans were passing the cemetery on the outskirts of the village. Immediately eight to ten Maquisards popped up behind the graveyard wall and sprayed the enemy vehicle with machine-gun fire. The car immediately slewed into the ditch. Inside was one soldier wounded in the back who was quickly finished off (afterwards they said he had reached for a weapon). The other three got away. One vanished into the forest; a second, wounded in the foot, managed to struggle up the mountain to the Col de Rousset, where he phoned for help. A third reappeared some time later near La Chapelle and was quickly captured and imprisoned.
Everyone knew what would come next – and come it did. Early in the morning of 22 January, reports started arriving of a German column of 300 soldiers, equipped with heavy machine guns and two 37mm cannon, moving up the precarious mountain road leading from Sainte-Eulalie, at the mid-point of the western edge of the plateau, to the tunnels which give access to the Vercors at Les Grands Goulets. This vertiginous terrain is not difficult ground to defend. The Resistants first tried a blocking position above the little town of Échevis halfway up the valley along which the road runs. But this was quickly pushed aside by overwhelming German force. Next, Marcel Roudet overturned a lorry on the narrow road to block the Germans’ passage. But this too was summarily destroyed by the 37mm cannon and the column, barely halted, swept on. Next came the most difficult part, the portion of the road running along a narrow ledge midway up a cliff face. Here, following a determined attempt made by the Resistance, the German column was halted – but only briefly. Soon Alpine troops could be seen swarming up the slopes to get above the Maquis positions, and the defenders had to pull back. A final attempt at defence was made at the tunnels, which open onto the plateau proper, but again the Maquis positions were quickly turned by Alpine troops suddenly appearing above them. The order to retreat was given. Within minutes the Germans were pouring through the tunnels and on to the plateau, burning the village of Les Barraques and pressing on to La Chapelle. Here they spared the village because they found their missing wounded soldier well cared for in the local Gendarmerie. Before leaving, however, they burnt a number of houses in Rousset in reprisal.
The day after the burning of Les Barraques and Rousset, a German Fieseler Storch light observation aircraft (the Maquisards called them mouches – flies) spent some time flying idly round the bowl in which the village of Malleval lay – but no one paid it much attention.
Although the Vercors had suffered during the German incursion of 22 January, the damage was by no means all one-sided. The Resistance campaign of sabotage continued apace, much of it the work of Pierre Godart’s Maquis in Malleval. This progressive and destructive thumbing of Resistance noses at the German occupiers came to a head on the night of 27/28 January, when sixteen locomotives were blown up at the railway marshalling yards at Portes-lès-Valence, causing the divisional commander Generalleutnant Pflaum to announce that, from now on, he was taking personal charge of all anti-partisan operations.
Things were changing on the Resistance side as well. On 25 January there was a large meeting in the Hôtel de la Poste at Méaudre to establish, in accordance with de Gaulle’s instructions, a Liberation Committee which would, among other things, coordinate all Resistance military and political action in the area. Exceptionally, Alain Le Ray was invited by Chavant to attend, despite the fact that he was about to leave the Vercors. Significantly Geyer was not. One of the conclusions of the conference was to confirm that the Vercors would not fall under either the Drôme or the Isère Resistance structures, but would have its own autonomous organization under Eugène Chavant’s leadership, because ‘the redoubt is supposedly under the control of the supreme Allied Command’.
During the meeting there was a heated discussion as to whether the best policy was to remain hidden until D-Day or to become active immediately. In the course of this one of the delegates warned, ‘If, on the great day, I am asked to go to the Vercors, I shall immediately refuse. In my opinion the Vercors is nothing more than a trap.’ Although no one at the meeting knew it, just the kind of trap he was warning about was already beginning to close.
In Malleval an attempt had been made by an ex-Alpine regimental commander to conscript the young men of the Malleval Maquis into a reconstituted version of his old unit. This caused serious tensions between the Maquisards and the French Alpine soldiers in the little closed valley. To the horror of the Maquisards, their much loved and trusted commander, Pierre Godart, was first effectively dismissed and then, on 20 January, replaced by Gustave Eysseric, an Alpine unit officer. When some of the Maquis attempted to raise a petition to express their concerns, they were cut short. ‘This is the Army. You don’t have personal opinions and we do not recognize petitions.’ Disgusted, almost half the Maquisards left the Malleval valley. They were the lucky ones.
In the very early hours of 29 January, the day after Pflaum had announced he was taking personal charge of anti-partisan operations, German units arrived in the little town of Cognin, lying across the narrow mouth of the Gorges du Nant, which, at the time, provided the only properly motorable access to the steep-sided amphitheatre of the Malleval valley. A little after dawn, a German column set off up the winding, snow-covered road over one shoulder of the gorge, heading for Malleval village. They took a local man as hostage. They seemed to know exactly what they were aiming for, having been, some said, informed by a local spy. At 08.20, with the hostage walking in front of the first vehicle, the German column emerged out of the gorge and took Eysseric’s guard post at the mill below Malleval village completely by surprise. The outpost’s defenders were overrun after a brief but ferocious fight. The telephone line to Eysseric in the village was cut but not before a warning had been phoned through.
Eysseric tried desperately to rally his scattered and sleeping troops but he soon realized that he had no hope of holding the attack and ordered a withdrawal into the forest behind the village. As his men ran for cover, they were cut down by Alpine troops who had skied in over the high passes the previous night and, in their white camouflaged uniforms, taken up positions around the village, cutting off all the possible exits. Only very few got away from the slaughter. One who didn’t was Gustave Eysseric himself. After the raid, all the wounded and some of the prisoners were shot, including some Yugoslav deserters who had arrived to join the Resistance in Malleval only days before. Later, the villagers were interrogated and beaten: six of them, including a Jewish woman refugee, were shoved into a nearby building and burnt alive. The village itself was sacked and burnt. In total at Malleval, thirty-three were killed and twenty-six buildings destroyed.
By the end of January 1944, it should have been clear to all from the burning of Les Barraques that the Germans could mount punitive expeditions on the plateau at will. And the disaster at Malleval illustrated their strategy for doing it. Surround – attack – annihilate the enemy – destroy their bases and the property of those who helped them. Unhappily even after these two January tragedies, too many of the Vercors commanders continued to act as though neither Les Barraques nor Malleval had ever happened.
And in this they were not alone. Even as Malleval was burning, young Maquisards were already gathering, on the ‘impregnable fortress’ of the Glières plateau, 200 kilometres north of the Vercors. They, too, believed they were in a fortress, when in fact they were in a trap.
12
OF GERMANS AND SPIES (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
One thing was clear from the string of setbacks suffered by the Organisation Vercors in January 1944. German knowledge of what was happening on the plateau was detailed and accurate. By late 1943 both the Germans and the Resistance had developed extensive networks for gathering intelligence on each other.
Right from the start the Vichy intelligence services, including the Milice, had managed to infiltrate many of the réfractaires’ camps and build up a network of informers among the local French population. During the summer of 1943, the able young Resistance commander of Camp C2 near Villard-de-Lans, Pierre Faillant de Villemarest, was so concerned about infiltration that he suggested to the Vercors’ civil and military leaders that a proper intelligence and security service be established on the plateau. It was agreed that he and a girl called Charlotte Mayaud from Villard should undertake the task. The two quickly established an intelligence network among local doctors and set up a rudimentary surveillance service and a warning system to sound the alert in the event of an approaching threat. Villemarest very soon realized that the problem was much worse than he had thought, and concluded that the whole of the Organisation Vercors was deeply penetrated.
In September 1943, a man called Henri Weiss suddenly appeared and took over the running of a café in Villard. Surveillance quickly revealed that he was in contact with a Belgian named Lecuy who appeared to have no visible means of support but was staying in Villard’s most luxurious hotel, the Splendide. Further investigation uncovered a ‘spy ring’ which included two hotel owners and a groom called ‘Mistigri’, who was himself a member of one of the réfractaires’ camps. It was obvious to Villemarest that, between them, they had perfect oversight of everyone who arrived and left the town. Further surveillance established that the Belgian, Lecuy, held regular clandestine meetings with a German official in Grenoble who turned out to be none other than the infamous Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. Villemarest gave a full report with supporting evidence to Chavant, but le Patron dismissed it all as ‘too imaginative’. Not long afterwards, the body of the Belgian, Lecuy, was found in a wood outside Villard. Local rumour said that he had been tempted to the spot by a Villard lady of relaxed virtue and that Villemarest had had something to do with the death.
Disgusted by Chavant’s naivety, Villemarest relinquished his job and left the plateau in February 1944. In the first half of 1944, however, Villemarest’s worst suspicions were confirmed when several Maquisards deserted from the camps. Some of these were suspected of being Milice infiltrators. One, Cémoi (we know only his alias), who had joined one of the camps in February, deserted to the Milice on 24 April. He was later captured and executed. It was not until June 1944 that a proper system of security was finally established on the plateau.
Although the plateau itself was riddled with insecurity, there were active and successful Resistance intelligence networks operating in the Grenoble area which were able to provide the Vercors leaders with reliable information on German intentions. These included many in the Vichy civil administration and the local police as well as the Gendarmerie. Post offices were also a fruitful source of information, as were local telephone-exchange operators who turned their well-known habit of listening to conversations into a patriotic duty. Others on whom the Organisation Vercors could normally rely included especially the local restaurateurs, who formed an extensive intelligence network of their own. This included establishing an organization for stealing side-arms from Germans dining at local restaurants and smuggling these to the Resistance in the forests.
Alongside the local intelligence organizations operating in the Vercors during this period there were also a number of French and Allied secret services doing the same thing. These included the French intelligence services based in London, SOE, SIS (also known as MI6), MI9 (Britain’s secret service dedicated to helping escaped PoWs and airmen), the intelligence service of the Polish government-in-exile and the American Office of Strategic Services, which ran, among other agents, Gaston Vincent, who was based in Saint-Agnan-en-Vercors until his death in June 1944.
On the other side, the German and Milice networks often made use of those involved in the black market and, it was said, brothel keepers, barbers and barmen. In his Union report, Thackthwaite added to this list waitresses in small-town and village restaurants, who were used as agents provocateurs. Apart from human sources, the Germans also put considerable effort into gathering signals intelligence and closing down secret radio stations. In one case a Milice agent who had been successfully infiltrated into one of the Vercors’ clandestine radio teams had to be got rid of because, ‘although he was assigned as a trustworthy person’, further enquiries were made and ‘It was discovered that his brother was a Milicien and his sister-in-law worked for the Gestapo.’
German intelligence even successfully took over some Resistance radio networks in their entirety. For example, a Greek called Guy Alexander Kyriazis was sent by the German secret service to work in a British-run SIS network called Alliance. Posted to Grenoble, he was paid 7,000 francs a month and appears to have operated until the end of the war, planting false messages and passing back codebooks to his masters. When subsequently interrogated by the Allies, he claimed that ‘the Germans … knew the details of the wireless procedure which was being used at Grenoble [and] were intercepting messages’.
The job of German intelligence was made much easier by that fact that the radio security of both the Resistance in the field and their Free French controllers in London was very lax and their codes extremely insecure. The British government became very concerned about this, especially now that planning had started on the greatest secret of the war, the date and location of D-Day. On 13 January 1944, the British War Cabinet took the decision that, because of the insecurity of the French codes, all signals or messages sent by the French in London and Algiers had to be transmitted through the British communication systems or use British or US codes. De Gaulle was predictably furious, calling it ‘an outrage and an insult’.
An SOE report on French radio security dated 29 January 1944, just a few days before the Malleval disaster, gives some indication of the scale of the problem: ‘[French] Security … is lamentable … Continual losses of [Resistance] chiefs, money, codes, archives, couriers, list of names which [were] unparalleled … we have continually pointed out over a year that [their] codes are fundamentally insecure and badly coded … We have finally been reduced to breaking them [the French codes] ourselves to prove [to the French] their insecurity … It must be assumed that every [French] message code can be read by the Germans as easily as by ourselves [emphasis in original].’
Closer to D-Day, the British went further, refusing to allow anyone of any nationality to leave Britain whom they believed knew anything, or thought they knew anything, about D-Day.
The approach of D-Day was beginning to concentrate German minds, too. As 1943 drew to a close without an invasion, it was clear to all that it must happen in the spring or summer of 1944. This time, however, the task for the Germans would not just be to disrupt the Resistance control networks, as in 1943, but to destroy the Maquis units themselves. And this would involve not individual arrests outside Métro stations or swoops on safe houses, but a series of bloody battles in which no quarter would be given to the ‘terrorists’.
On 3 February 1944, the German Deputy Supreme Commander West, Luftwaffe Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, set out the policy with chilling clarity in what has become known as the ‘Sperrle-Erlass’ order, prescribing the behaviour of German troops in the struggle ahead:
1. We are not in the occupied western territories to allow our troops to be shot at and abducted by saboteurs who go unpunished …
2. If troops are attacked … countermeasures [must be taken] immediately;
These include an … immediate return of fire. If innocent persons are hit this is regrettable but entirely the fault of the terrorists.
The surroundings of any such incident are to be sealed off … and all the civilians in the locality, regardless of rank and person, are to be taken into custody.
Houses from which shots have been fired are to be burnt down …
… A slack and indecisive troop commander deserves to be severely punished because he endangers the lives of the troops … and produces a lack of respect for the German armed forces.
Measures that are regarded subsequently as too severe cannot in view of the present situation, provide reason for punishment.
A week later, on 12 February, the German military commander of France, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, also conscious of the impending invasion, issued an order calling for the urgent destruction of Maquis groups within the next months: ‘The main task in the coming weeks and months is … fully to repacify the areas which are contaminated by bandits and to break up the secret resistance organizations and to seize their weapons … In areas where gang centres form, these must be combated with a concentrated use of all available forces … The objective must be to break up all terrorist and resistance groups even before the enemy landing [emphasis in original].’
The Germans were moving on to the offensive and the main burden of their offensive in the northern Alps would fall on General Pflaum, who commanded 157th Reserve Division based in Grenoble. Pflaum’s division was, as its name suggests, not a front-line unit. Its main task was not combat but training. But it was also charged with a military task – the maintenance of order, especially where this threatened key German communications routes. Pflaum’s priority was to keep open at all costs the road and rail communications corridors running through the north and centre of his area of responsibility.
Karl Pflaum himself was a career officer with a good deal of active service as an infantry soldier on the eastern front where he had commanded a front-line division from the autumn of 1941 until he was relieved of his command because of heart disease. Pflaum’s direct superior in France was the commander of the Military Zone of the South of France, Generalleutnant Heinrich Niehoff, whose reporting line ran through Stülpnagel to the Supreme High Command of the German Army in Berlin and thence to Hitler’s bunker.
When it came to carrying the main burden of infantry fighting in Pflaum’s area, the only troops of true front-line quality he could rely on were his elite Alpine Gebirgsjäger Regiment – it was these troops that had come in overnight on skis to take up positions behind Malleval, cutting off the Maquisards trying to flee from the valley. Well trained and well led, the Gebirgsjäger were exceptionally capable in mountainous areas and winter conditions. But not many of Pflaum’s troops were of the same standard as his Alpine units. One experienced French officer in Grenoble in late 1943 and 1944 commented after the war that the units based in and around Grenoble were ‘mainly troops under instruction, with the exception of the officers and a few more experienced soldiers’. In the German tactic of surround, attack, annihilate, destroy, these were troops who would be employed chiefly in the first and last phases – cordoning before the operation started and reprisals after the fighting had finished.
For many German soldiers, France, and especially the south of France, was regarded as an easy, even idyllic posting. A German historian of the period wrote that those stationed at Annecy, where the headquarters of one of the Gebirgsjäger regiments was housed in an old hotel, enjoyed ‘A life lived in the midst of this jewel of nature. The fourteen-kilometre lake stretches its arms right into the centre of the city, making it into a veritable oasis designed to please the eye. The houses are beautifully maintained and surrounded by groves and vines, which also decorate the surrounding hills. And everywhere the sparkling lake with its canals crossed by many bridges seems to act as a silver adornment to the whole scene. The men of the Regiment saw themselves as the fortunate inhabitants of a paradise right in the middle of the Second World War.’
This paradise was, however, soon to turn into something far less pleasant. By the early months of 1944, the morale of many of the raw recruits who made up the majority of Pflaum’s division was low and their steadiness under fire shaky. By now they would have known that the war would be over in the next year or so and that Germany was not going to win. Moreover, by this time they had become hated occupiers, facing an increasingly well-armed and capable insurrection, in a country which grew more hostile by the day. What was going to happen to them when they had to get out?
In a coded message to London on 11 February 1944, a French agent remarked on the jumpiness of German troops in the Annecy area: ‘The Germans load their rifles when travelling through tunnels on the railway. In the streets in the evening, they keep turning round and are always careful to keep their distance from all active members of the Gestapo [for fear of being caught in a Resistance assassination attempt] … A German who had broken his leg at a winter sports station recently was to be taken to hospital … but the comrade who was to accompany him refused through fear of the Maquis.’ In his report on the Union Mission, Henry Thackthwaite was more blunt, describing some of these rear-area German troops as ‘corrupt and miserable’.
Beyond his own forces, Pflaum could also call on neighbouring units who, together with other specialized theatre units, supplied supporting troops for a number of anti-partisan operations carried out in his area. Finally, he could request assistance from outside the French theatre as well. In early spring 1944, experts in the conduct of anti-partisan operations in the Balkans were brought in to advise and train some key elements of Pflaum’s forces. On the darker side, among these additional troops were units known as the Eastern Troops made up of captured prisoners of war and Russian deserters from the eastern front. These included Turkmens, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis and Georgians. They wore German uniforms with armbands showing their nation of origin. At their peak these Eastern Troops, totalling almost half a million, were chiefly used to carry out reprisals in the ‘annihilation’ phase of anti-partisan operations on the Russian front, Yugoslavia and subsequently France. The French christened them ‘Mongols’ because of their Asian features and their reputation for acts of horror and atrocity.
These were not the only troops of non-German origin under Pflaum’s command. There were also some – perhaps up to 20 per cent – who came from other occupied countries. These included Slovenes and Poles. Thackthwaite’s Union Mission report describes the quality of these troops as ‘in general bad … [many] are … ready to join us on D-Day’.
On the face of it Pflaum himself was third in the German command hierarchy in France. But this is to give a false view of his true position. There were officers, especially within German security structures, who had at least as much influence as he did on anti-partisan operations. The most important of these was the head of the Sipo/SD, an umbrella organization which incorporated both the German Security Police and the Security Department. This body is often known as the ‘Gestapo’, though the Gestapo was in fact only one of the component units within the Sipo/SD. The chief of the Lyon Sipo/SD, which covered the Vercors area, was SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Knab, one of whose subordinates was Klaus Barbie.
Knab had a huge influence on the conduct and command of all anti-partisan operations in the Lyon area. Following some previous disagreement with his superiors he had been posted to the Ukraine, where he was assigned to one of the most notorious of the so-called ‘mobile killing units’ to ‘demonstrate his reliability’. This he succeeded in doing in quick order, gaining a reputation for the ruthless destruction of partisan units and unwanted elements such as Jews.
Pflaum himself, on the other hand, had first intended to wage a ‘clean war’ against the French Resistance. In fact, until around late April 1944 he believed (not perhaps without some justification) that the local population did not as a whole support the Resistance and that some were even hostile to it. By late spring 1944, however, Pflaum’s opinion and that of his division had become much more aggressive as the casualties from guerrilla actions started to rise. In the first five months of 1944, the division lost fifty-five of its soldiers, killed or wounded by the Resistance. In the ten weeks from June to mid-August that figure rose to 650. The totals for Resistance and civilians killed by the Germans rose commensurately – from sixty in February 1944 to 840 in July.
13
FEBRUARY 1944 (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
February 1944 saw the pace of events begin to quicken towards the great event which everyone knew was ahead – some time, somewhere – in the coming year: the Allied invasion of the northern European mainland.
On 5 February Pflaum launched 2,000 men against Maquis concentrations around the towns of Nantua and Oyonnax in the southern Jura. The Resistance in this area was led by a remarkably successful guerrilla leader called Henri Romans-Petit, who, like Alain Le Ray, understood that the art of guerrilla warfare was not to stand and fight, but to hit and run. Aided by an unusually heavy snowfall, he and his men melted away into the forests. The Germans called off the operation on 13 February. Although they had temporarily cleared the operational area of ‘terrorists’, Romans-Petit suffered few losses and was able to return to his old positions very soon afterwards.
This was to be the first of three major operations conducted by Pflaum in the ten weeks from 2 February to 18 April, all in the area immediately south and west of Lake Geneva (see map (#litres_trial_promo)). At this stage the Germans believed, like Churchill, that the main threat was not a southern landing but an Allied push through Italy, over the Alps and down the two communication corridors which ran south-west of Lake Geneva: the southern railway corridor past Aix-les-Bains and the Lac du Bourget and the western road corridor through to Nantua and Oyonnax.
This is not to say, however, that the Germans could afford to ignore the Vercors completely, for the Maquis on the plateau were still highly active. On the night of 1/2 February, for example, the transformers at the Saint-Bel works in Grenoble were sabotaged and 2,700 kilograms of explosive were stolen. On 19 February, another sabotage attack on the station at La Mure, south of Grenoble, destroyed a train and winding gear. On 29 February, a dozen or so locomotives were blown up at Veynes station, 15 kilometres south of the Vercors.
At dawn on 3 February, the day after the start of Pflaum’s operation in the Jura, Paul Adam was on guard duty in the deep snow, with a friend, a Sten gun, two grenades and a telephone. Their sentry post was positioned on a railway viaduct a kilometre or so north-east of the deserted thirteenth-century monastery of Our Lady of Esparron. Here, the previous November, he and his fellow Maquisards had taken refuge from the bitter winter. It was dark and one of Paul Adam’s Maquisard friends had just left, hitching a lift to a meeting on a passing train. He was followed a little later by another on his way home to pick up some washing from his mother. ‘[Suddenly] the noise of some vehicles attracted our attention,’ Paul Adam wrote later, ‘but we thought it was only the lorries arriving at the nearby saw-mill. I was just in the process of telephoning the monastery to ask for a change of guard, when my mate, who had gone to stretch his legs on the viaduct, suddenly came dashing back shouting, “Les Boches! Les Boches!”’
The two men started to climb the slope towards the monastery, ‘but halfway up we heard a shout which stopped us dead in our tracks. Thirty metres away, on the road leading up to the monastery, I saw vehicles. I got ready to fire on the ones in front of us which were full of troops, hoping to escape in the chaos which would ensue, when suddenly a huge German leading a patrol of twelve others came round the corner … beyond him there was an armoured car with machine guns mounted on a turntable which began to rotate towards us, its guns firing … Since it was clearly impossible to get back to the monastery where we could hear a fierce firefight already in progress … we went back to the viaduct through the woods. As we got there, a train arrived pulling cattle wagons. The doors were open and we could see that carriage after carriage was filled with Germans … After the train had passed, we saw, below the viaduct, some vehicles, one of which had a fat German leaning against his cab, chatting while he lit a cigarette. He took several deep pulls on his fag, stuck one hand in his pocket and began to admire the countryside. “It’s all over for you my friend,” I said to myself and, taking aim at some kind of badge he had on his chest, I fired. He dropped dead without even letting go of his cigarette … after a forced march over rocks and across mountain torrents we finally arrived at a station, where we knew a train would pass in an hour or so … The station master gave us each a blue denim working shirt and an old hat as disguise and let us board the train without tickets, our stripped-down Stens hidden in our haversacks.’
Back at the monastery, Jean Sadin was getting up when the German attack started: ‘It was just getting light … I was doing up my laces when suddenly I saw a signal maroon hanging in the sky … then a second and a third … We quickly woke everyone up. Suddenly a rattle of machine-gun fire hit the area round my window. I leapt to one side and took up a position where I was able to see some Germans enter a building not 30 metres away. After a brief attempt at resistance, our commander gave the order to disperse – every man for himself. My friend, not hearing my cries … dashed out and was immediately cut down … We managed to flee by a back door, taking refuge among the bushes and rocks near by. As we ran, a huge explosion rocked the monastery building behind us.’
Amazingly, only two of the Esparron Maquis were killed. If the German attack had been more efficiently prosecuted, if they had followed their normal practice and surrounded the monastery, many more would have died.
The unusually heavy February 1944 fall of snow also affected another gathering of Maquisards 60 kilometres to the north, on the ‘impregnable fortress’ of the Glières plateau, which dominates the main Geneva–Chamonix road and railway, some 15 kilometres north-east of Annecy. Many regarded this high plateau, which was an ideal site for the parachuting of arms, as more impregnable and easier to defend than the Vercors. On 7 February, Churchill was shown an urgent telegram from one of London’s agents describing the situation on the plateau: ‘VERY urgent. We have given the order to take strong action in the Savoie. We ask for instant despatch of parachute troops and arms, above all machine guns – and also air support. We are ready for action but we urgently need aid and assistance.’ The British Prime Minister was asked to give special priority to the plateau, whose fall would have ‘severe repercussions for the whole of the Resistance’.
Over the previous weeks, encouraged by calls by the French service of the BBC, Maquisards had flooded on to the Glières plateau, including some fifty Spanish republicans and numerous retired soldiers from the area. By the end of February, it was reported that there were now ‘350 trained and experienced men [who are] occupying an exceptionally strong position on the … plateau’. This was followed by a string of optimistic messages, which spoke of the ‘citadel of the Glières’ and ‘The high morale of our Maquis who take on … day by day, the semblance of regular troops who are disciplined and well led. If we can adequately supply them from the air, we will have here a body of men who can be used when D-Day comes.’ On 19 February material was sent from the plateau for use in a BBC broadcast: ‘We shall remain on this impregnable plateau with the banner: “Live in Freedom or Die”.’
In the second half of February a clandestine meeting, attended by senior Resistance leaders in the region, was held in Lyon to discuss overall strategy. The concept of establishing ‘redoubts of Resistance’, as proposed by Ferdinand Miksche in his report of 20 January, was discussed. Henry Thackthwaite, the SOE agent leading the Union Mission, was there and strongly opposed the idea of fixed defence, preferring a mobile defence in which the Maquisards would retire before a German advance, while keeping them under fire during the day and then attacking them on the flanks and from behind at night. He was supported by the then head of the Secret Army in the area, Albert Chambonnet. When it came to guerrilla warfare, Chambonnet, who was not of the French Army but an ex-Air Force officer, held the same opinion as Romans-Petit and Alain Le Ray. On 9 February he had issued instructions to the Maquis in his area, ‘Never accept frontal combat with the enemy. Pull back and attack his flanks without mercy.’ A few days after the Lyon meeting Chambonnet wrote a prophetic letter expanding on his views: ‘If we concentrate our forces in the most defendable mountainous areas, two possibilities will ensue; either the enemy will attack and destroy them, or they will be content to block them and our best forces will be locked up and neutralized.’ Later still, in April, Chambonnet wrote a note on the specific subject of the Vercors: ‘A vast apparatus [is being assembled] on the Vercors in order to strike a decisive and “brilliant” blow against key enemy positions along the main Alpine routes … I am firmly opposed.’ Tragically, Chambonnet’s warnings went unheeded.* (#ulink_8467610f-6751-58ee-b821-0d4e56f5cecd)
At the end of the second week of March the redoubt strategy was raised again when local Resistance leaders met in Annecy to decide what should be done about the Maquis groups now gathered in strength on the Glières plateau. Most of the local Resistance commanders were opposed to a fixed defence of the plateau. But their opinion was overruled by a representative from London who attended the Annecy meeting. According to one of those close to these events, London’s man told the gathering that they ‘had to give London the proof that the Resistance is not just talk, but a considerable force which the Germans will have to reckon with’. In the end, despite heavy reservations, it was this opinion which prevailed.
London’s message that the Resistance had to prove itself in the Glières was by no means an idle one. Churchill himself was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with what he saw as the reluctance of the French, despite all the arms he was dropping to them, to go on to the offensive. On 14 February, Desmond Morton, Churchill’s personal assistant, wrote a note to Lord Selborne, the minister in charge of SOE: ‘In general the PM thinks that we must make the French show much greater zeal in trying to remedy their own considerable defects.’
It was not long before the Annecy decision to defend the Glières as a redoubt was tested. On 26 March Pflaum launched a mixed force of 3,000 troops supported by artillery and aircraft against the plateau. Two battalions of Gebirgsjäger scaled the ramparts of the ‘impregnable fortress’ by night with relative ease. It was all over in less than four days and was followed by the usual shootings, burning of farms and an extensive programme of reprisals.
While most of the major Resistance actions in the month of February 1944 took place in and around the Glières plateau, the Vercors was not without its excitements. On 28 February, Peter Ortiz sent an urgent signal to London reporting that the Germans were about to mount an attack on the plateau with three mechanized battalions and some light tanks. In fact, the rumour (it was unsubstantiated) seems to have reached the Vercors a few days previously, for, on 25 February, Narcisse Geyer’s regimental journal reported a ‘Major alert: imminent powerful German attack’ and described the unit’s night flight to new positions. Elsewhere that night, across the plateau, other camps were hurriedly packing up kit, squirrelling away ammunition in nearby caves and then scurrying into the forest in small groups. The false alarm had a bad effect on morale, causing ‘a profound disappointment, even real irritation in all the camps … We had somehow waited for, even looked forward to, an attempt at a “heavy blow” [from the Germans], believing totally in the natural protection the plateau afforded us as the defenders. And now, at the first sign of serious threat, we were told to disperse and hide! It made us all feel very deflated,’ said André Valot.
By this time Francis Cammaerts was already back in the area. He had parachuted into France on the night of 9/10 February after three months in which he had been rebriefed and had taken some holiday with his wife. His arrival, however, was less congenial than he might have hoped for: the parachute site chosen for that night was at Castellane, 170 kilometres south-east of the Vercors. But when the Halifax arrived in the area, after an uncomfortable journey through heavy flak, they found the site completely obscured by cloud. ‘The dispatcher told me … the mission was aborted. The next thing I knew was him saying we’d have to jump – the aircraft was on fire … As I jumped I could see that it was ablaze. As I was descending I realised the huge canopy of the parachute fell more slowly through thick cloud than it would through clear sky. So I was going down very slowly. It was like being in a dense London smog virtually the whole time – I don’t know how many minutes it took from 10,000 feet but it seemed an eternity … When I finally came out of the cloud I had 25 metres to go! A potato patch is the softest part of a farm you could wish for and there one was, and I hit it. In that filthy weather I could have landed in the middle of Lyon, not on a lonely farm.’
Cammaerts’ orders for this, his second mission, instructed him to pursue his leapfrog plan to use the Valensole, Vercors and Beaurepaire plateaux as ‘bridgeheads’ on which Allied paratroopers could land, adding that this had now been formally approved for consideration as part of Operation Anvil, the Allies’ planned southern invasion on the Mediterranean coast. The strategic importance of the Vercors plateau in the event of either an invasion from the south or an attack across the Alpine passes had been confirmed.
* (#ulink_ff0e6cdf-096e-5124-b2db-a915fed48381) On 10 June, four days after D-Day, Albert Chambonnet was arrested by the Gestapo. He was shot on 27 July at Lyon.
14
MARCH 1944 (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
The instructions given by Winston Churchill in February 1944 that arms drops to the Resistance should be doubled in the month of March produced swift results, most, but not all of them, welcome to the Vercors. On 4 March, in what seems a desperate measure to dispatch arms by any means, the RAF carried out a ‘blind drop’* (#litres_trial_promo) of containers near Romans. Peter Ortiz, who was in the area at the time, complained bitterly to London in an ‘outspoken denunciation … As soon as he received the warning [of the drop] he left to try to stop the Germans recovering the material which had been dropped, but it was they who had the largest share. Such operations put the whole region into an excited state and expose the population to harsh reprisals as well as putting the reception committees to unjustifiable risks.’
On 10/11 March, the night of the March full moon, the first major parachute drop the plateau had received since Darbonouse four months previously took place when five Stirling heavy bombers successfully parachuted containers at a site codenamed Gabin, 2 kilometres west of Saint-Martin-en-Vercors, in an open valley surrounded by woods.
Five days later, at 01.05 hours on 16 March 1944, a Halifax bomber captained by Pilot Officer Caldwell took off from RAF Tempsford on Operation Bob 149. His mission was to drop eighteen containers packed with arms and seven packages to the Gabin site. Caldwell crossed the Channel and, skirting Paris, continued south over Burgundy and Bourg-en-Bresse to his final landmark, the Lac de Charavines, 60 kilometres north-west of his target. The lake was not difficult to spot, its silver surface shimmering like a mirror in the moonlight. Here Caldwell started his twenty-minute ‘dead reckoning’ run in to his target. His after-action report is brief: ‘Pinpointed lake WNW of Target & ground detail. Lights on when aircraft arrived’.
Judging from Caldwell’s description, he overflew the target from the north in order to establish its precise location and exchange code signals with the reception team: ‘Good reception and correct letter’. Banking his aircraft, he retraced his steps from the south, the moon now shining over his right shoulder. With the Gabin site visible, he reduced his height above the ground to a spine-tingling 120 metres. On his first run, he dropped nine containers and five packages before pulling out to avoid the high ground north of the Gorges de la Bourne, swinging the big Halifax round again and repeating the same procedure from the north to south, dispatching the remaining nine containers and two packages. Caldwell had arrived over Gabin at 04.02 hours and, twenty minutes later, his mission accomplished, he was heading home for Tempsford. He had an uneventful return journey, dropping leaflets over the little Burgundy town of Époisses, half hidden in the ‘ground haze over northern France’, and touching down at his home base a little before dawn at 07.10.
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