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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’.
