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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.
