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What may be guessed at from Valot’s lyrical account, but is not explicitly stated, is that the results of the Darbonouse parachute drop were less than optimal. The high wind distributed the parachutes and containers over a very large area and some were not found until years later hanging in the branches of fir trees or lying in the bottom of small depressions where they had plunged into deep snowdrifts. The contents of those that were found were enthusiastically pillaged, resulting in some groups having arms without ammunition, some ammunition without arms, some boxes of grenades, others the detonators, some surgical instruments which they didn’t know how to use and more woollen socks than they could ever possibly wear. There would, in due course, be a price to pay for all this undisciplined brigandage.
Much of what could be recovered in an organized fashion was stored in a nearby cave, the Grotte de l’Ours, and distributed later. The Maquis unit which had established itself at Malleval on the east of the plateau went to collect its share ten days after the drop and came back with an entire lorry full of arms and ammunition, storing it in the village presbytery.
Two days after the Darbonouse parachute drop, on 15 November, Francis Cammaerts was recalled to London, where he explained in detail his plans to hold the Valensole, the Beaurepaire and the Vercors plateaux as bridgeheads for paratroops in the event of a landing in the south of France. It was a message which would have been welcome in the British capital for, at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt had decided that ‘Operations against southern France (to include the use of trained and equipped French forces) should be undertaken to establish a lodgement in the Toulon and Marseille area to exploit northward in order to create a diversion in connection with Overlord. Air-nourished guerrilla operations in the southern Alps will, if possible, be initiated.’ Planning for the invasion of the Mediterranean coast of France began immediately under the codename Anvil. In a September minute to the Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, it was proposed that Anvil should be a diversionary operation to be carried out simultaneously with Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings. Its primary aim was not to capture territory but to draw German troops south, away from the Normandy beaches.
The Vercors may have lost its direct line to the highest level of the Free French command in London, but events elsewhere were conspiring to give it a potentially important role to play in the much bigger game which the Supreme Allied Command was now planning – the invasion of the European mainland.
On the Vercors, however, the autumn of 1943 brought the Resistance more to worry about than the distant plans of the mighty. On 24 November, three German gonio radio-detector vehicles were seen in La Chapelle. It seemed that they found nothing, for they were reported at the end of the day returning home over the Col de Rousset ‘empty handed’. The plateau breathed a sigh of relief. But it was premature.
The following day, the Gestapo descended on Saint-Martin in force and, seeming to know exactly what they were looking for, headed straight for a large farmhouse complex, Les Berthonnets, a kilometre or so east of the village. This housed two clandestine radios and their operators, Gaston Vincent and Pierre Bouquet, working to the Algiers office of the American equivalent of the SOE, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Warned just in time, the two men fled, Vincent carrying his heavy radio set. After a short chase, a German soldier who got within range of the weighed-down Vincent shot and wounded him. Helped by the owner of Les Berthonnets, Vincent hid in a pile of hay in a barn. Here he was subsequently found by a German search party, covered in blood. Presuming him to be dead, they left him alone.
Bouquet, however, was caught and held, but then – surprisingly – released by the Gestapo. He re-established contact with the Resistance but was placed under discreet observation. His former colleagues concluded that he had been ‘turned’ while in captivity. His body was found on 23 December, riddled with bullets as a result of an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a Resistance execution.
Though this raid was small in comparison with later incursions, it indicated the Germans’ determination to ensure that the Vercors did not harbour activities against their interests. And it demonstrated their ability to invade the plateau and leave it again, whenever they chose to do so. The Vercors Resistants may have viewed the plateau as a safe area, but the Germans certainly did not.
The damage done by the Gestapo’s 25 November raid was minor, however, compared with that done not much more than a week later by the French regional military commanders.
In the early autumn Marcel Descour – accompanied by his ever-present counsellor/monk Dom Guétet – took up a new post as the Military Chief of Staff for Region 1 of the Secret Army, within which the Vercors fell. He was therefore, in effect, Alain Le Ray’s direct military commander. Descour’s job was to unify the disparate elements of the Resistance in his region under an effective military command. Criticisms of the Vercors Maquisards for their lax ways had already reached him and he may have taken their independence of spirit as a challenge to his authority. He may also have been irked by the fact that, while he was trying to unify fighting structures under military control, in the Vercors it was a civilian in the form of Patron Chavant who was formally in charge, and Le Ray seemed content with this.
Whether there is substance in this or not, the question of the Vercors and Le Ray as its military chief came to a head at a meeting called by Descour and attended by all the military commanders in the Lyon area in early December. Not long into the meeting, Descour himself started openly criticizing Le Ray for ‘feudalism’ and especially for the mishandling of the parachute drop at Darbonouse. Le Ray described what followed as an ‘Inquisition based on the unproven suspicions of the unidentified’. Finally unable to control himself, he exploded: ‘Well, if it’s my resignation you want, you have it.’
Descour returned fire with fire: ‘Resignation accepted!’
Both men were later to say that they regretted their hotheadedness – though Le Ray regarded an eventual rupture as inevitable. ‘The Vercors was seen as a trump card in the whole French Resistance organization. The authorities wanted to put someone there who they could be sure would be their man.’
However, even if both men had wanted to pull the moment back, they couldn’t. The die had been cast, the damage done. The Vercors had lost its most able commander and the only one who understood that guerrilla warfare was about constant mobility and the closest possible military/civilian integration, not fixed defences and conventional military control. Some believe that many of the tragedies which would ensue would not have happened if these few testosterone-fuelled seconds could have been avoided. Chavant was furious when he heard and wanted to disband the whole Vercors structure immediately. But Le Ray, who had been instructed to leave his post at the end of the following January, persuaded him not to, saying that no purpose could be served by adding revenge to rancour.
Everyone presumed that, after the ‘resignation’ of Le Ray, his deputy, the much liked and admired Roland Costa de Beauregard, would take his place. But Descour, true to Le Ray’s prediction that the Army wanted a man who would take the Army line, chose Narcisse Geyer, who was at the time still in the nearby Thivolet forest. Geyer, acknowledged by all to be a man of great courage, initiative and élan, had many qualities. Among them, however, were not tact, diplomacy, sensitivity or any kind of understanding of the role of the civilians in the struggle. Diminutive, right wing and haughty in his demeanour, Geyer was mostly to be seen in full uniform, complete with kepi and soft white cavalry gauntlets, riding around the plateau on his magnificent stallion Boucaro: Descour could hardly have chosen a person less likely to appeal to Eugène Chavant and his Socialist colleagues. It did not help that Geyer himself made it plain to all that he intended to marginalize the Combat Committee and place the plateau under overall military control.
The first meeting between Geyer and Chavant at a saw-mill near Saint-Julien-en-Vercors in the weeks before Christmas went as badly as might have been predicted. Chavant took an instant and intense dislike to his haughty new military partner, refusing to permit him to have any contact with the camps or give training to the Maquisards. Geyer reciprocated by making plain his distaste at having to discuss military matters with a civilian. This deep schism was widened by the different strategies followed by the Maquis fighters on the one hand and the professional military on the other. The military pursued a ‘wait and see’ policy whose aim was to avoid drawing German attention to themselves in order to gain the time and space to build up their units and train their men for the ‘big moment’ (D-Day) – when they could come out into the open and play a major part in the liberation of their country. The Maquisard leaders, however, pursued an activist policy which concentrated on small raids and sabotage designed to harry the Germans, make them feel insecure and deny them freedom of movement. This policy had the double advantage of hardening and professionalizing their guerrilla forces through action, while at the same time encouraging other young men to the cause.
The difference between these two approaches became evident in December 1943 when there was a sudden and sharp increase in the raids carried out from the Vercors plateau and the area around it. On the night of 1/2 December there was an attack on high-tension electricity lines near Bourg-de-Péage. At 08.20 the following day, an explosion rocked the Borne Barracks in Grenoble, killing twenty-three German and Italian soldiers and wounding 150 French civilians. In reprisal, the Germans shot thirteen hostages. On 10 December, railway locomotives were sabotaged at Portes-lès-Valence and, the following day, the Merlin-Gerin engineering works in Grenoble were attacked, causing an estimated 30 million francs’ worth of damage. On 15 December the Maquis group in the Malleval valley in the north-west corner of the plateau sabotaged the Valence-to-Grenoble railway. On the 20th, the Mayor of Vilnay was assassinated for collaboration and, two days later, another train was sabotaged at Vercheny. On 27 December, in what it is tempting to think of as an attempt to make the old year go out with a bang, there were raids and reprisals at Vercheny, Sainte-Croix, Pontaix and Barsac.
This increased level of sabotage and raids seems not to have been set back by the early and ferocious arrival of ‘General Winter’* (#ulink_8c546c82-f900-587f-896e-e39a8c4bec99) on the plateau. On 6 November, unseasonably early, the first heavy snow fell on the Vercors. Two weeks later, there was an even covering of 30 centimetres of fresh snow, right down to the mid-levels of the plateau. By Christmas, the snow was a metre deep at the Ferme d’Ambel.
This was the first winter which most of the young réfractaires had spent away from home and they found it very hard. Even the simplest chores required super-human effort. Almost worse than the cold was the sheer unrelieved, bone-numbing boredom, with nothing to do but get on each other’s nerves as the snow swirled outside their mountain refuges, while the days shortened and the nights, lit only by a single oil lamp, lengthened interminably. Morale plummeted and young men started slipping away for the comforts of their homes in the valleys. Of more than 400 réfractaires estimated to be in the camps in September, only 210 of the hardiest were left by Christmas. The camps at C8 and C11 fused together and descended to take refuge in the old, now deserted eleventh-century monastery of Our Lady of Esparron under the eastern ramparts of the plateau. Christmas, when it came, was celebrated by the young men in their mountain refuges and forest huts as best they could, given their conditions and heterogeneous beliefs. In Camp C3 above Méaudre, Christians gave readings from the Bible, the Jews from the Torah and the Communists from the texts of Karl Marx.
As early as October the camp at C2 had been abandoned when its inhabitants descended from the plateau to winter quarters in empty houses in the village of Malleval, nestling in a steep little bowl to which the only easy access was through the narrow gorge at Cognin, off the north-western quadrant of the plateau. Here the Maquisards under the leadership of Pierre Godart had an excellent relationship with all the local villagers, who despite the wartime restrictions still managed to organize a sumptuous Christmas for their young visitors. Godart sent one of his most devout men to Grenoble to ask the Bishop if he could provide a priest to take Christmas mass for the Maquisards in the little village church. But the answer was an abrupt no – ‘those who put themselves outside the law, are also outside the law of God’, as one later observer summed up the great churchman’s response. Eventually, however a priest was found to take confession and mass. On Christmas Eve, a French traditional réveillon de Noël* (#ulink_025105ae-c408-50e5-9967-ddb4e2292acd) began.
The little Malleval church was first decked out in full winter finery. Then, soon after dark, processions of torches started to wind their way down the tracks leading from the outlying farms where each Maquis section of sixteen was housed. Soon their voices could be heard carrying across the valley and the little dots of men’s figures could be picked out against the whiteness of the snow. In due course, each column arrived and filed into the church, Christian and Jew and Communist and atheist alike. ‘It seemed as if all the world was there, in the little white church lit by carbide lamps which cast a flickering glow, making the shadows dance and shooting their beams into even the darkest corners. The old people sat quietly, their walking sticks between their knees, as others squeezed up to make room for the new arrivals. Even the women joined us, including the mothers, wives and some fiancées of the Maquisards, giving our little ceremony some of the sweetness of home.’
Then the feasting began: ‘The menu would have dignified a prince … the food seemed to have come from every corner of the land. The baker at Cognin brought breads and cakes. A veal calf had been carried down from Rencurel and all the fish and fowl of the area seemed to have been gathered together in our church, especially to grace our Christmas. There were even two cases of champagne freshly arrived from Reims. The feasting went on all the night. Songs were sung; an accordion was brought out – then more songs and more songs until finally the dawn burst in among us. On this night, for us, the men of the Maquis, life was wonderful.’
Surely, next year – 1944 – the Allies would land and France would be free again. And then life would be wonderful every year.
* (#ulink_23940b9a-3a99-5bf5-952f-3fe8fdc43f8f) The phrase is a Russian one which is used to account for the fact that so many winter invasions of the country have failed. Russians also refer to ‘General Snow’ and ‘General Mud’.
* (#ulink_12d49c99-066b-5ec5-a852-4ec877bae9ae) Festivities at Christmas.
10
THE LABOURS OF HERCULES (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
As the men of the Malleval Maquis were celebrating the Christmas season waist deep in snow, Winston Churchill, dressed in his famous silk dressing gown emblazoned with a red dragon, was lying in bed in an airy room in General Eisenhower’s villa in Carthage (prophetically called La Maison Blanche), recovering from pneumonia and a heart attack. Denied his customary cigar and restrained in his consumption of alcohol, he was tetchy and fulminating against ‘the scandalous … stagnation’ of the Italian campaign.
It is tempting to believe that his complaints about the slow progress in Italy might have been a displacement activity for the much bigger personal setback he had just suffered at the hands of his ‘friend’ President Roosevelt at the Tehran Tripartite Conference which had just ended. At Tehran, the American President had blindsided Churchill by teaming up with Stalin to defeat one of the Prime Minister’s most ardent and long-favoured schemes, the invasion of what he called the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ on a line which began on the Pisa–Rimini axis in Italy and ran through the Balkans to the oilfields of Rumania. Churchill had invested hugely in arms, supplies and support for Tito’s Yugoslav guerrillas as a preparation for this assault, which was now, thanks to the US/Russian alliance, to be abandoned in favour of a simultaneous double invasion of France, one from the north across the Channel (Overlord) and the second from the south across the Mediterranean from Algiers (Anvil). It was easy to see why the Soviets were opposed to Churchill’s Balkan plans – they saw this area as their sphere of post-war influence and did not want the British anywhere near it. Roosevelt’s reasons were less understandable. He mistakenly believed he could establish a post-war strategic alliance with Stalin and needed Soviet support for what he saw as the cornerstone of this new relationship, the establishment of the United Nations. Churchill was left hurt and fuming at this first stark evidence of Britain’s coming weakness between the two superpowers in the post-war world. ‘There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo and, between the two, the poor little English donkey who was the only one … who knew the right way home.’
The decisions of Tehran had now shifted the entire axis of the Allied European war effort from the south and the east (Italy and the Balkans), where Churchill had made his greatest investment, to the north and the west (the Russian front and Overlord). Despite these crushing disappointments, the British Prime Minister was not a man to mope for long. If the overall strategy had changed, his must too. Now France, a country he knew well and loved deeply, was to be the main stage, not the Balkans. Within days of leaving his sickbed he was meeting members of the French Resistance in North Africa and planning how Britain, which had so far largely ignored French partisans in favour of those of Yugoslavia and Italy when supplying arms, could help foster the growth of the Resistance movement.
It is often said that Churchill was a dewy-eyed romantic when it came to partisans. He was. But his attachment to the fostering of internal resistance had a hard-edged military rationale, too; it was a way to keep occupied countries in a ferment of opposition against the Germans and to prevent them from relapsing into apathetic torpor, as France had done after the Armistice; it was also a means by which the ‘skill, dash and courage’ of British agents behind enemy lines could influence the outcome of events in ways which compensated for the relatively meagre matériel resources the country was able to commit at this stage of the war, compared with those of the US and Russian colossi. There were also those in Whitehall (perhaps even including Churchill himself) who thought that, in terms of blood and loss, France’s sacrifice during the war had so far been small. So it was no great thing to ask her now to risk a greater price for her own liberation.
Churchill had always admired de Gaulle, even if he did not like him. But up to now the French General had been just another leader-in-exile of a conquered European country and these were two to the penny in the London of 1941–3 – though, as Foreign SecretaryAnthony Eden ruefully admitted, de Gaulle stood out from the crowd because he caused ‘us [the British government] more difficulties than all our other European allies put together’. Now, however, with France the main stage for the next phase of the war in the West, de Gaulle, the territory of France and the capabilities of the French Resistance took on new strategic importance.
De Gaulle himself had started 1943 with few assets and even fewer friends. Disliked by Roosevelt, disregarded by the British war leadership and personally irksome to Churchill, he had almost nothing going for him – and very little he could call his own in France or among the Free French either. Like the Pope, of whom Stalin famously asked ‘How many Divisions does he have?’, de Gaulle may have been the spiritual embodiment of the French Resistance, but of actual ‘Divisions’ he had few.
De Gaulle might have expected that Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa and the liberation of the French colony of Algeria (where Eisenhower had now set up his headquarters), would have strengthened his position as the French leader with whom the Allies had to deal. In fact the opposite happened.
The Americans chose instead Henri Giraud, a French general who had been captured at the fall of France, been imprisoned in Königstein Castle, escaped under curious circumstances and made his way to Toulon where an Allied submarine had picked him up and delivered him to Gibraltar. He arrived on the Rock only a few hours before the start of Operation Torch. Eisenhower promptly asked him to assume command of all French troops in North Africa. Giraud at first refused because he was not commanding the whole Allied operation, but eventually relented. When he left Gibraltar for Algiers on 9 November 1942, Giraud remarked, ‘You may have seen something of the large De Gaullist demonstration that was held here last Sunday. Some of the demonstrators sang the Marseillaise. I entirely approve of that! Others sang the Chant du Départ [a military ballad]. Quite satisfactory! Others again shouted “Vive de Gaulle!” No objection. But some of them cried “Death to Giraud!” I don’t approve of that at all.’
Giraud knew perfectly well that de Gaulle was his deadly rival for the leadership of the free and the fighting French. But he also knew who was in the dominant position – he was, and by far. With the personal support of Roosevelt and the practical support of Eisenhower, he was in the place that mattered most – Algiers – and he commanded not only more French troops but also the only formed French units at that time fighting alongside their Allied comrades.
Giraud’s support inside France was less certain. But then so was de Gaulle’s. At the beginning of 1943, the Resistance was quarrelsome, fragmentary, diverse and riven by political rivalry. There were Gaullists to be sure. But also Giraudists. And many whose loyalties were to neither of the above, but to the Communists, the Socialists and even (still) to the Pétainists. The Secret Army was by comparison more Gaullist, but by no means uniformly so. Meanwhile, as de Gaulle understood very well, when it came to the actual government of France the relative position of the potential French leaders was going to be irrelevant, because the American President was planning to impose an Allied Military Government in Occupied Territories – known as an AMGOT. France would be governed for a period at least, as Italy had been, by foreigners. That was Roosevelt’s plan. That was what Giraud was acquiescing in. He, de Gaulle, would not.
But, at the start of 1943, de Gaulle’s chances of fulfilling his aim of being the leader who took his country back to freedom, self-government and eventually great-power status seemed ambitious to say the least. To succeed, he had to make himself the unchallenged leader of the free and fighting French inside and outside France. That meant going head to head with the most powerful man in the world, President Roosevelt, and wresting power from his favourite, Giraud. Then he had to make himself and his supporters so indispensable to the liberation of France that a French government would follow, not a government of transition drawn up in Roosevelt’s back office. And he had to achieve this with limited influence and only few assets to his name. These were the labours of Hercules indeed. But, remarkably, by the end of 1943, de Gaulle had accomplished all of them.
On 30 May 1943, de Gaulle arrived in Algiers, having finally negotiated terms for a partnership with Giraud. Five days after his arrival, on 4 June, de Gaulle took to the airwaves on Radio Algiers: ‘Everything is now in play – our army and our navy are playing a key part in a drama of indescribable importance. Our sacred duty is to show again what great things can be accomplished by the arms of France.’ Not since Lenin had been smuggled into Russia in a sealed train had such an insertion of poison been accomplished with such devastating consequences into the body politic of the ruling (in this case Giraudist) establishment. In a series of moves of cunning and ruthlessness, de Gaulle progressively sidelined and then summarily removed Giraud, leaving himself in sole charge. It would take until the D-Day landings of June 1944 for Roosevelt to come to terms with this reality, but there was little he could do. Giraud was the past. De Gaulle was now the future.
De Gaulle’s success in gaining control of the power structures in Algiers was replicated inside France. Francis Cammaerts, who had a ringside seat in the key months, saw the shift of opinion and remarked on its speed. ‘In March 1943, still, Gaullism was not necessarily the only salvation. By August 1943 it was. No one in the Resistance in France thought that there was any solution to the French future except through de Gaulle …’ This represented an astonishing success for the General for it gave him the means, not just to unseat Giraud, but to play a direct role alongside the Allies in his country’s liberation. No government in France could now be formed without de Gaulle’s consent and active participation. In short, if de Gaulle could build up the political effect of the Resistance and make it a potent military force, then Roosevelt’s plan for a transitional government in France would be a dead letter.
Such a project, however, was not without its complications. On the one hand, the Resistance gave de Gaulle legitimacy, but, as one sharp-eyed commentator put it after the war, de Gaulle ‘had to navigate between two contradictory pitfalls: on the one hand to convince the Allies of the necessity to support the armed struggle as a means of reinforcing the legitimacy of Gaullism; and on the other to control and channel the internal struggle in France in such a way as … more effectively to integrate its activities into the plans of the Allies and, above all, prevent, within the metropolitan Resistance, the emergence of “counter-forces” capable of contesting [de Gaulle’s] capacity to govern the country after the Liberation’.
De Gaulle’s second problem was that the French Resistance was held in very low regard by the British and American authorities. Churchill loved France and recognized its claims to great-power status. But he was not averse to making unflattering comparisons between the French Resistance and Tito’s Yugoslav partisans, who were tying down some twenty German divisions in bloody guerrilla warfare. Roosevelt, on the other hand, had something close to contempt for France, seeing it as a decadent imperial power which lacked the moral fibre Britain had shown in the early years of the war. On the question of the effectiveness of the 1943 French Resistance (or rather lack of it), the two leaders and their staffs were united: it could not in 1943, and would not in 1944, be able to deliver anything of weight to the coming battle on French soil. It was this opinion that de Gaulle had, by hook or by crook, to change.
Back in March 1943, the British War Cabinet had met to take the first of several decisions establishing the priorities for the supply of arms and equipment to partisan forces in Europe. It put France as third strategic priority behind the Italian-held islands, Corsica and Crete (taken as one) and Yugoslavia. These priorities were personally reconfirmed by Churchill himself in August and November of that year. A Cabinet paper at the end of March put total Resistance strength in France at 175,500. Yugoslavia, with a much smaller population, had partisans, they estimated, numbering 220,000. The paper included an annex showing Resistance strengths as a proportion of what it referred to as ‘net male population’. This showed that 30 per cent of ‘available’ men were in the Resistance in Norway, 6 per cent in Denmark and Poland, whereas in France, no doubt because of its internal divisions, it was just 3 per cent.
An SOE assessment in May and June 1943 pronounced the French Resistance ‘at its lowest ebb’ and added that its forces ‘could not be counted on to be a serious factor unless and until they were rebuilt on a smaller and sounder basis’. The paper ended by warning that this would require a ‘total reorganisation and reformation’. London’s reaction to the deficiencies in the Resistance organization was to send out tripartite ‘missions’ made up of representatives of France, Britain and the US with the task of assessing what needed to be done to mend the gaping holes left by Gestapo arrests and to create a new structure of organizational control. One of these missions in October 1943 estimated Resistance strength in the maquis of the Rhône-Alpes as 2,300 and described the Vercors camps they had visited as ‘modestly equipped and armed, adequately turned out given the very difficult conditions, good morale’.
Having elbowed Giraud out of the way, de Gaulle was now free to take further steps to reform the command and control of the Resistance by setting up Committees of Liberation in all the French departments and naming military delegates for each of the three administrative levels of the country – national, zonal and regional. The General was beginning to assemble a government for France, though it would take long tortuous months before first the British and then, finally and reluctantly, Roosevelt gave formal recognition to this. Over succeeding months this structure was progressively strengthened, in large part prompted by the fact that, by the end of November 1943, it was clear that an invasion of France was being planned and that, citing security as the reason, the British and Americans were going neither to involve, consult nor indeed even inform de Gaulle about what they had in mind.
De Gaulle was predictably furious at the snub. But it also presented him with a real practical problem. If he knew nothing of Allied plans, how could he ensure that the Resistance would be in a position to assist when the great moment came? His answer was to set up a special planning unit in December 1943 to prepare a ‘rational plan for the participation of Resistance activity in the eventuality of an Allied landing on French soil’, without having the first idea where the landings would be, what form they would take or how they would be exploited. De Gaulle made his position clear in a speech given on 8 October 1943, in liberated Corsica: ‘Victory is approaching. It will be the victory of liberty. How could such a victory not be the victory of France as well?’
One of the key staff in the planning unit de Gaulle had set up was an exceptionally able captain of Czech origin, Ferdinand Otto Miksche. On 20 January 1944, Miksche produced a study listing the options before the British and American planners, drawing conclusions about which in the end they would be most likely to choose. It was astonishingly accurate in predicting that one of the most likely landing points was Normandy – a conclusion which would have deeply worried France’s allies, who were trying desperately to keep the location of Overlord secret. This study also proposed possible military actions which could be undertaken by the Resistance to assist the invasion, wherever it occurred. These were discussed with the British, who ‘showed a great deal of interest and asked for a second … detailed study of the conditions under which French resistance would help in the landing’.
In Miksche’s second study he stressed (somewhat hopefully) that the Resistance ‘although not an ensemble of regular military units [should] be looked upon as a regular Army obeying orders from the Allied High Command’. He also identified several territorial zones of France and how the Resistance might be employed as the Allied breakout from the beachhead developed. Among these were areas where ‘redoubts of Resistance’ would be established ‘in districts geographically unsuitable for large scale military operations’, such as the Alps (including the Vercors). Miksche’s plan continued the drift towards something more ambitious and permanent than Dalloz’s original Plan Montagnards (of which at this stage he had no knowledge). ‘In these redoubts’, he wrote, ‘the Maquis would be organized and be in readiness for sabotage and guerrilla operation behind enemy lines … the creation of permanent redoubts [emphasis added] would inevitably expand, even before D-Day, through the arrival of patriots who refused to accept forced labour for the enemy.’
The idea of ‘Resistance redoubts’ (réduits in French) was not a new one. On 13 November 1943, a secret meeting in Switzerland between British SOE representatives and a gathering of Resistance and Secret Army leaders (who were also unaware of the existence of Plan Montagnards) concluded with a recommendation that the Vercors (among other possible ‘redoubt’ areas) should be held ‘as a fortress from which raids could be made’ on German lines of communication. Two weeks later, on 29 November 1943, an experienced French agent, in London at the time, wrote a paper picking up on the fortress idea and proposing the establishment of ‘geographic fortresses’ manned by ‘trained, disciplined, adequately armed and properly led forces’ in places like the Vercors. The aim was ‘to place at the disposition of the Allied High Command, forces under their direct control which could offer operational possibilities comparable with parachute troops dropped in advance. These should be kept hidden until after, or exceptionally a little before, D-Day.’ Note the key proposition here. The Maquis would not create an area for paratroopers, but would instead take on the role of paratroopers dropped in advance.
On 31 December 1943, an SOE paper followed up this thinking and proposed that ‘small controlled areas’ should be created for the delivery of weapons and paratroops after D-Day. These would be established where ‘the Maquis [could] occupy ground which can be comparatively easily defended and thus controlled’. This imprecise language left it open for some to believe that the Maquis could defend these controlled areas by themselves. In the fertile soil around this lacuna, muddled thinking, unclear orders and military folie de grandeur would take root, flourish and ultimately cost the lives of many hundreds of the young, the inexperienced and the innocent.
Pierre Dalloz arrived in Algiers on 25 November 1943 having completed a long and hazardous crossing of France under the false identity of René Brunet, an even more dangerous one over the snow-bound passes of the Pyrenees and a short stay in Gibraltar. He was horrified that no record of or interest in Plan Montagnards could be found in any quarter. He immediately sat down and reconstructed the plan from memory, dictating it to the personal secretary of one of de Gaulle’s most senior advisers (see Annex B). It was to be to no avail. When Dalloz finally arrived in London at the end of January 1944, he was to find that those who should have been aware of his plan were as ignorant of its existence in the British capital as their counterparts had been in the North African one.
The truth was that when it came to deciding the fate of the Vercors, the template now being used was not Dalloz’s carefully calibrated Plan Montagnards but something altogether more ambitious. Some among those, British and French, who were directing the Resistance from London were beginning to believe that the young men who had first taken refuge on the Vercors plateau and then been turned into a rough guerrilla fighting force might, in due course and with a little help, be able to take on a face-to-face defensive battle with the gathered might of the German Army.
Between Christmas and New Year – at about the same time that Churchill in his sickbed in Carthage was concluding he had to take the French Resistance more seriously – one of London’s ‘mission leaders’, who had now teamed up with the Maquisards on another of the planned redoubts, the Glières plateau east of Geneva, sent a message to London: ‘We consider that the Glières plateau is now an impregnable fortress.’
It would not be long before this boast, and with it the developing concept of the ‘defendable redoubt’, would be tested.
11
JANUARY 1944 (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigérie, aristocrat, adventurer, libertine, Socialist, one-time self-proclaimed Communist, eternal optimist, Resistance leader and senior member of de Gaulle’s government-in-exile in Algiers, was summoned to attend the British Prime Minister in the Villa Taylor in Marrakesh at 10.00 on 15 January 1944. De Gaulle himself had just flown back to Algiers, having been in Marrakesh for a morning parade of troops, over which he and Churchill had jointly presided as a show of unity between the two men. It may even have been that Churchill had deliberately waited for the General’s departure before calling d’Astier to see him.
D’Astier records that when he arrived at the Villa Taylor ‘Duff Cooper was there, as was Macmillan just back from Egypt … Clementine and Mary Churchill were on the terrace together with Diana Cooper, who despite her straw hat and chiffon veil looked like a Rossetti painting. Although it was winter it was as warm as a May day on the Île de France. An ADC came for me and led me through darkened rooms to a modest door which opened to reveal Churchill sitting in a large bed, a cigar clamped between his teeth. The nurse attending him stood up and left; the chamber was as small, sparse and white as a hospital room. Somewhat intimidated I stumbled into my first words in English but was soon at my ease … He was an accomplished verbal jouster – never quibbling over positions which he knew were untenable … always knowing when to feint and when to riposte, jumping from word to word, barking with anger from time to time, but chiefly for effect (though it brought the nurse scurrying back in on one occasion to relieve him of his cigar and put it out).’
At the end of two hours, Churchill, dressed in air-force-blue silk pyjamas, finally allowed de La Vigérie to turn the subject to the matter of Britain’s miserly approach to arming the French Resistance, about which d’Astier had complained publicly and vociferously. The Frenchman outlined the case for Britain to deliver something more than just warm words which, he claimed, was about all that had been given so far. Churchill appeared to listen and finally conceded, as though offering a great gift, ‘OK, we’ll give you what you need. I will give the orders myself. Come and see me in London and we will discuss it more.’ It was a piece of typical Churchillian gamesmanship, designed to get the maximum out of graciously conceding a position which had in fact been decided upon even before d’Astier entered the room.
On the day before this piece of theatre, an apparently hale and hearty Churchill had chaired a meeting with his Chiefs of Staff Committee of the War Cabinet in the splendid surroundings of Government House in Gibraltar. All his key advisers and naval, military and air force leaders were there. This was the moment when he had to shift British policy to accommodate the demise of his Balkan enthusiasms in favour of a strategy based on a simultaneous pincer movement through France, from the English Channel in the north and the Mediterranean in the south. But Churchill was constitutionally incapable of taking defeat lying down. He had grumpily come to terms with the Overlord landings on the Normandy beaches, but the grand strategist in him still balked at the Anvil landings on France’s Mediterranean coast. He would still have preferred to continue the Allies’ northern push through Italy ending with a swing west across the Alpine passes into the Savoie, the Isère and the Haute-Savoie.
The War Cabinet minutes record: ‘The Prime Minister … was inclined to agree that Overlord should be strengthened and that Anvil should revert to pre-Tehran dimensions’ (that is, at most, a possible diversionary attack to draw troops from the north, if needed). Churchill would in fact make several determined attempts to divert Roosevelt and Eisenhower away from Anvil, each more desperate than the last, as the date for the Mediterranean landings approached. For the moment, however, he was content to prepare the ground for a return to his preferred strategy if and when the opportunity arose. The minutes of the War Cabinet meeting that day at Government House in Gibraltar reflect this change of course very clearly. Having spent the last year denying that the French Resistance had any strategic importance (and consequently refusing them priority in the supply of arms), Churchill and his key advisers now agreed that ‘A vigorous plan should be worked out to stimulate guerrilla operations in the mountains of the Savoie and in the country between Ventimiglia and the Lake of Geneva.’
The implications of this decision for the Vercors and other possible Alpine redoubts were considerable. First, they would now have first place in the supply of arms they had so far been denied. And secondly, they had become key to whichever southern French strategy the Allies would finally decide on: to both Cammaerts’ ‘leapfrogging’ plan in the case of Anvil, and to Churchill’s Alpine passes plan if Anvil was dropped in favour of a push through Italy.
Miksche’s study had proposed six possible areas for the establishment of redoubts: the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the Morvan forest, the Vosges mountains, the Jura and the Alps. But of the options that were now being developed by the Allies (albeit unknown to the French) for the purpose of a southern invasion, only the Alps and the Jura would be relevant. If de Gaulle wanted the Resistance to coordinate its actions in a way which would make them most valuable to the Allies, it was in the Vercors and the other Alpine redoubts that he needed to invest. Unfortunately, he and his advisers had other ideas – ideas which, driven more by political considerations than military ones, would have profound implications for the Vercors.
The next substantive meeting between Churchill and d’Astier was at a conference chaired by Churchill in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street on 27 January. Again, all the British Prime Minister’s key advisers were there. First, Churchill played the Yugoslav card: ‘I aided Mihailovic – they were brave men. Now I am helping Tito. The more the Germans slaughter his men, the more ferocious they get. That’s what I am looking for.’ Then he questioned d’Astier about the reliability of the Resistance: ‘Can you assure me that you French will not use the weapons we provide to shoot each other? That you will follow strictly the orders of Eisenhower without question or considerations of a political nature?’ Finally, he reverted once more to his master card – gracious generosity. ‘I have decided’, he said at the end of the meeting, with the air of a kindly uncle giving money to an impecunious relative, ‘to help the French patriots.’
The minutes of the meeting, normally dry affairs, give a flavour of the event in which the Prime Minister’s peculiarly personal cadences can be easily detected: ‘The Prime Minster said that he wished and believed it possible to bring about a situation in the whole area between the Lake of Geneva and the Mediterranean comparable to the situation in Yugoslavia. Brave and desperate men could cause the most acute embarrassment to the enemy and it is right that we should do all in our power to foster and stimulate so valuable an aid to the Allied strategy.’ Perhaps more important than these fine words was the conclusion of the meeting, which was that the RAF’s first priority – after the bomber offensive on German cities – should now be ‘The French Maquis’. Churchill went on to stipulate that, as a start, arms sufficient to equip 8,000 Maquisards should be dropped into the Alpine region during the month of February 1944.
Though the Americans would also, in due course, throw their formidable weight behind the arming of the French Resistance, it was Churchill’s decision of 27 January 1944 which began the process which would, in the end, deliver 13,000 tonnes of arms by air to France, sufficient to equip some 425,000 Maquisards. Churchill reinforced the decision he had taken at the meeting with d’Astier by establishing a British committee specifically tasked with coordinating government action to aid the French Resistance. But Eisenhower, rightly spotting an attempt by Churchill at unilateral action in support of his own strategic preferences, insisted that the British committee should be subsumed into his command. And matters did not end there. On 3 March, Eisenhower complained to Churchill that aid to the Resistance in south-east France was being sent at the expense of assistance to the Maquis in the Normandy/Brittany area, where it was needed in support of Overlord, the Allies’ agreed first priority. In a typically terse handwritten note, Churchill rejected Eisenhower’s request to change the priorities he had set in the meeting with d’Astier on 27 January: ‘The Mountain people have had little enough. No alteration in my plans as arranged. WSC 4.3.44.’ This was not romance; far less was it charity. It was Churchill keeping his strategic options open in case, as he hoped, Anvil would be abandoned.
But, whatever Churchill’s motive, the effects for the Maquis in the Alps and the Jura was dramatic. Thanks to the Prime Minister’s personal intervention and the strategic opportunities he saw along the Italian/French Alpine border, the ‘Mountain people’ of south-east France had now leapt above those of central Bosnia as Britain’s first priority for supply and reinforcement from the air. Probably more than any other place in south-east France, it was the Vercors which would benefit most from this largesse, becoming, over the ensuing months, a huge depot and distribution centre for arms and supplies dropped, not just for the Vercors but for the Maquis in the neighbouring Belledonne, Chartreuse and Oisans ranges as well.
The first effects of the 1943 decision to encourage ‘air-nourished guerrilla operations in the southern Alps’ were felt in the Vercors on the night of 5/6 January 1944. In the early hours of 6 January, the Union Mission, together with twelve containers of arms and six packets containing 16.25 million francs, was parachuted to a landing site at Eymeux, under the western edge of the Vercors plateau. The three Union Mission members who parachuted into Eymeux that night were an ex-British schoolmaster turned SOE agent, Henry Thackthwaite, a US Marine called Peter Ortiz and a French radio operator.
The Union Mission’s task was to assess the state of the Resistance in the Savoie, Isère and Drôme (especially in relation to the Maquis’ needs in terms of weapons and clothing) and their possible deployment after D-Day. Although the Mission members dropped wearing civilian clothes, they brought uniforms with them and wore these for the rest of their visit – the first Allied officers to have been seen in uniform in metropolitan France since the fall in 1940.
The Mission’s first visit was to the Ferme d’Ambel. André Valot was there. Though his description suffers from a number of inaccuracies and is characteristically over-coloured, the general impression – and especially in his account of how this event was seen by the Maquisards – is probably fairly accurate: ‘[One day] a huge yellow limousine arrived … magnificently decorated with three flags flying from its bonnet: the French Tricolour in the centre and the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes fluttering proudly on either side. Even before the doors were fully open an extraordinary figure leapt out: a gangly red-haired giant with a lanky body, a bony face – sunburnt to the colour of coffee – and the expression of a child with a permanent grin on its face … “Hi, boys,” he said, pulling a hip flask out of his back pocket. “You sure are up pretty high here, but great country, yeah! I’m Lieutenant Jean-Pierre [Ortiz carried false identity documents in the name of Jean-Pierre Sellier]. Here have a drink. It’s whisky – the real McCoy. It came from the sky last night, like me. I would rather have broken my leg than break this. You bet!”’
Valot’s narrative continued: ‘In the back of the yellow limousine there was a coffer full of Chesterfield cigarettes and chocolates, whose distribution created an immediate, steadfast and unbreakable affection for the American Army in general and most particularly for its representative, who had so wonderfully fallen to us from the sky the previous night. Every time Ortiz met someone new he pulled out his indestructible hip flask, filled up a small drinking cup which also acted as its metal cap and ordered, “Here have a drink.” He was rarely refused, roaring with laughter and slapping the poor unfortunate recipient on the back with a force sufficient to dislocate the collarbones of the unwary.’
The reports submitted to London by Thackthwaite, both by coded signal from France and on his return in May, were comprehensive. He recommended that ‘The Vercors plateau offered the best strategic position on which the Maquis could be based. From here they would have the best chance of attacking and hindering the Germans, whether or not the expected invasion of the southern coast of France materialised.’ For this reason he especially asked for heavy weapons to be sent to the Vercors – a plea which was to be repeated many times, always in vain.
Thackthwaite made other notable recommendations and observations: ‘All sorts of expedients were … used [by the Maquisards] to obtain money, including stocks of tobacco … taken from shops [which] are sold on the black market, and … acts of brigandage … [We] found men in the Maquis barefoot and with one blanket between them … [there was a general] lack of equipment and especially transport … the Maquis surgeons need … surgical knives, scissors, forceps, anaesthetic masks, dissecting scissors, basins, amputating saws, morphine, quinine, permanganate of potassium, syringes, needles and tourniquets … The civilian population are very impatient for D-Day to come … Politically de Gaulle is the only head the people look to … morale is good and improving now the winter is over … The civilian soldiers [Maquis] show a great deal more bite than the ex-officers of the Armistice Army … Maquis lack of confidence in such men is easily understood … many officers … gave us the impression that all serious fighting can be left to the Allies … It might be possible to control places like the Vercors … but the numbers at present are insufficient … [they] would have to be reinforced by parachute troops … 7,000 men are necessary for the Vercors.’
The third week of January 1944 saw a spell of bright, settled and warm, almost spring-like, weather in the Vercors. The roads were suddenly free of snow – unusual in any January, but doubly so in a winter such as this.
Perhaps it was the good weather which, on 17 January, tempted Narcisse Geyer to move his troops from the Forêt de Thivolet off the west of the plateau to Les Combes, a large farmhouse in the woods above Saint-Martin-en-Vercors. He was preparing for his take-over of command from Alain Le Ray at the end of the month. His first action was to conduct a brief inspection of the Maquis camps which made up his new command. Afterwards, he returned to his base full of complaint about what he had seen in the camps: ‘It is just not possible to take seriously a war with these people who seem incapable of even the smallest sign of discipline.’
Marcel Descour had also decided that the growing strength of the Vercors meant that he should establish his regional headquarters on the plateau. He chose a large farmhouse, Peyronnet, in the little village of La Matrassière, only 3 kilometres or so from Geyer. On 4 January he sent an advance party of staff and radio operators, one of whom was Pierre Lassalle, to begin preparations. Descour and his counsellor/monk Dom Guétet would follow later. Despite the relatively clement weather and the kindness of the inhabitants of Peyronnet farm, life was tough, especially for the operators working their radios and Morse keys in the farm’s barns. ‘For fifteen straight days’, Pierre Lassalle recounted afterwards, ‘my life was divided between brief visits from our hosts and long hours submerged under a mountain of blankets, listening to broadcasts, my headphones permanently clamped on my head and my numb fingers twiddling radio dials.’
Perhaps it was the same good weather that also tempted Herr Bold and Herr Schönfeld, both German officials from Valence, a Dutch journalist, Meneer Koneke, and an interpreter to take a drive through the middle of the Vercors the next day. The tourists requisitioned a car from a Valence garage and instructed the owner to drive them to the Vercors, approaching the heart of the plateau through the Gorges de la Bourne. They got as far as the narrow steep-arched bridge which crosses the Bourne torrent at the Pont de la Goule Noire (literally the Bridge of the Black Hole). The bridge is a perfect spot for an ambush position – which was exactly what it was that day. The ‘tourists’ were immediately taken prisoner and escorted to Geyer at Les Combes farm. Here they were politely but firmly interrogated and then incarcerated under armed guard in a shepherd’s hut behind Geyer’s headquarters.
The following day, fifteen-year-old Gilbert Carichon was walking down with his brother, having been collecting wood in the forest above Rousset – the village in which he lived – when he saw a requisitioned Peugeot 202 car with four German soldiers. The Germans were asking questions about the four who had gone missing the previous day – had anyone seen them? Gilbert and his brother walked quietly past the group being interrogated and slipped down a back alley to the small village grocer’s shop. There they found Marcel Roudet, the corrupt ex-policeman who led the Maquis Raoul. As they watched, the German soldiers drove off north towards La Chapelle. Roudet suddenly pulled out a whistle and blew it hard just as the Germans were passing the cemetery on the outskirts of the village. Immediately eight to ten Maquisards popped up behind the graveyard wall and sprayed the enemy vehicle with machine-gun fire. The car immediately slewed into the ditch. Inside was one soldier wounded in the back who was quickly finished off (afterwards they said he had reached for a weapon). The other three got away. One vanished into the forest; a second, wounded in the foot, managed to struggle up the mountain to the Col de Rousset, where he phoned for help. A third reappeared some time later near La Chapelle and was quickly captured and imprisoned.
Everyone knew what would come next – and come it did. Early in the morning of 22 January, reports started arriving of a German column of 300 soldiers, equipped with heavy machine guns and two 37mm cannon, moving up the precarious mountain road leading from Sainte-Eulalie, at the mid-point of the western edge of the plateau, to the tunnels which give access to the Vercors at Les Grands Goulets. This vertiginous terrain is not difficult ground to defend. The Resistants first tried a blocking position above the little town of Échevis halfway up the valley along which the road runs. But this was quickly pushed aside by overwhelming German force. Next, Marcel Roudet overturned a lorry on the narrow road to block the Germans’ passage. But this too was summarily destroyed by the 37mm cannon and the column, barely halted, swept on. Next came the most difficult part, the portion of the road running along a narrow ledge midway up a cliff face. Here, following a determined attempt made by the Resistance, the German column was halted – but only briefly. Soon Alpine troops could be seen swarming up the slopes to get above the Maquis positions, and the defenders had to pull back. A final attempt at defence was made at the tunnels, which open onto the plateau proper, but again the Maquis positions were quickly turned by Alpine troops suddenly appearing above them. The order to retreat was given. Within minutes the Germans were pouring through the tunnels and on to the plateau, burning the village of Les Barraques and pressing on to La Chapelle. Here they spared the village because they found their missing wounded soldier well cared for in the local Gendarmerie. Before leaving, however, they burnt a number of houses in Rousset in reprisal.
The day after the burning of Les Barraques and Rousset, a German Fieseler Storch light observation aircraft (the Maquisards called them mouches – flies) spent some time flying idly round the bowl in which the village of Malleval lay – but no one paid it much attention.
Although the Vercors had suffered during the German incursion of 22 January, the damage was by no means all one-sided. The Resistance campaign of sabotage continued apace, much of it the work of Pierre Godart’s Maquis in Malleval. This progressive and destructive thumbing of Resistance noses at the German occupiers came to a head on the night of 27/28 January, when sixteen locomotives were blown up at the railway marshalling yards at Portes-lès-Valence, causing the divisional commander Generalleutnant Pflaum to announce that, from now on, he was taking personal charge of all anti-partisan operations.
Things were changing on the Resistance side as well. On 25 January there was a large meeting in the Hôtel de la Poste at Méaudre to establish, in accordance with de Gaulle’s instructions, a Liberation Committee which would, among other things, coordinate all Resistance military and political action in the area. Exceptionally, Alain Le Ray was invited by Chavant to attend, despite the fact that he was about to leave the Vercors. Significantly Geyer was not. One of the conclusions of the conference was to confirm that the Vercors would not fall under either the Drôme or the Isère Resistance structures, but would have its own autonomous organization under Eugène Chavant’s leadership, because ‘the redoubt is supposedly under the control of the supreme Allied Command’.
During the meeting there was a heated discussion as to whether the best policy was to remain hidden until D-Day or to become active immediately. In the course of this one of the delegates warned, ‘If, on the great day, I am asked to go to the Vercors, I shall immediately refuse. In my opinion the Vercors is nothing more than a trap.’ Although no one at the meeting knew it, just the kind of trap he was warning about was already beginning to close.
In Malleval an attempt had been made by an ex-Alpine regimental commander to conscript the young men of the Malleval Maquis into a reconstituted version of his old unit. This caused serious tensions between the Maquisards and the French Alpine soldiers in the little closed valley. To the horror of the Maquisards, their much loved and trusted commander, Pierre Godart, was first effectively dismissed and then, on 20 January, replaced by Gustave Eysseric, an Alpine unit officer. When some of the Maquis attempted to raise a petition to express their concerns, they were cut short. ‘This is the Army. You don’t have personal opinions and we do not recognize petitions.’ Disgusted, almost half the Maquisards left the Malleval valley. They were the lucky ones.
In the very early hours of 29 January, the day after Pflaum had announced he was taking personal charge of anti-partisan operations, German units arrived in the little town of Cognin, lying across the narrow mouth of the Gorges du Nant, which, at the time, provided the only properly motorable access to the steep-sided amphitheatre of the Malleval valley. A little after dawn, a German column set off up the winding, snow-covered road over one shoulder of the gorge, heading for Malleval village. They took a local man as hostage. They seemed to know exactly what they were aiming for, having been, some said, informed by a local spy. At 08.20, with the hostage walking in front of the first vehicle, the German column emerged out of the gorge and took Eysseric’s guard post at the mill below Malleval village completely by surprise. The outpost’s defenders were overrun after a brief but ferocious fight. The telephone line to Eysseric in the village was cut but not before a warning had been phoned through.
Eysseric tried desperately to rally his scattered and sleeping troops but he soon realized that he had no hope of holding the attack and ordered a withdrawal into the forest behind the village. As his men ran for cover, they were cut down by Alpine troops who had skied in over the high passes the previous night and, in their white camouflaged uniforms, taken up positions around the village, cutting off all the possible exits. Only very few got away from the slaughter. One who didn’t was Gustave Eysseric himself. After the raid, all the wounded and some of the prisoners were shot, including some Yugoslav deserters who had arrived to join the Resistance in Malleval only days before. Later, the villagers were interrogated and beaten: six of them, including a Jewish woman refugee, were shoved into a nearby building and burnt alive. The village itself was sacked and burnt. In total at Malleval, thirty-three were killed and twenty-six buildings destroyed.
By the end of January 1944, it should have been clear to all from the burning of Les Barraques that the Germans could mount punitive expeditions on the plateau at will. And the disaster at Malleval illustrated their strategy for doing it. Surround – attack – annihilate the enemy – destroy their bases and the property of those who helped them. Unhappily even after these two January tragedies, too many of the Vercors commanders continued to act as though neither Les Barraques nor Malleval had ever happened.
And in this they were not alone. Even as Malleval was burning, young Maquisards were already gathering, on the ‘impregnable fortress’ of the Glières plateau, 200 kilometres north of the Vercors. They, too, believed they were in a fortress, when in fact they were in a trap.
12
OF GERMANS AND SPIES (#ud9d702c4-3750-5a70-a8a7-fe04ad7a0ee6)
One thing was clear from the string of setbacks suffered by the Organisation Vercors in January 1944. German knowledge of what was happening on the plateau was detailed and accurate. By late 1943 both the Germans and the Resistance had developed extensive networks for gathering intelligence on each other.
Right from the start the Vichy intelligence services, including the Milice, had managed to infiltrate many of the réfractaires’ camps and build up a network of informers among the local French population. During the summer of 1943, the able young Resistance commander of Camp C2 near Villard-de-Lans, Pierre Faillant de Villemarest, was so concerned about infiltration that he suggested to the Vercors’ civil and military leaders that a proper intelligence and security service be established on the plateau. It was agreed that he and a girl called Charlotte Mayaud from Villard should undertake the task. The two quickly established an intelligence network among local doctors and set up a rudimentary surveillance service and a warning system to sound the alert in the event of an approaching threat. Villemarest very soon realized that the problem was much worse than he had thought, and concluded that the whole of the Organisation Vercors was deeply penetrated.
In September 1943, a man called Henri Weiss suddenly appeared and took over the running of a café in Villard. Surveillance quickly revealed that he was in contact with a Belgian named Lecuy who appeared to have no visible means of support but was staying in Villard’s most luxurious hotel, the Splendide. Further investigation uncovered a ‘spy ring’ which included two hotel owners and a groom called ‘Mistigri’, who was himself a member of one of the réfractaires’ camps. It was obvious to Villemarest that, between them, they had perfect oversight of everyone who arrived and left the town. Further surveillance established that the Belgian, Lecuy, held regular clandestine meetings with a German official in Grenoble who turned out to be none other than the infamous Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. Villemarest gave a full report with supporting evidence to Chavant, but le Patron dismissed it all as ‘too imaginative’. Not long afterwards, the body of the Belgian, Lecuy, was found in a wood outside Villard. Local rumour said that he had been tempted to the spot by a Villard lady of relaxed virtue and that Villemarest had had something to do with the death.
Disgusted by Chavant’s naivety, Villemarest relinquished his job and left the plateau in February 1944. In the first half of 1944, however, Villemarest’s worst suspicions were confirmed when several Maquisards deserted from the camps. Some of these were suspected of being Milice infiltrators. One, Cémoi (we know only his alias), who had joined one of the camps in February, deserted to the Milice on 24 April. He was later captured and executed. It was not until June 1944 that a proper system of security was finally established on the plateau.
Although the plateau itself was riddled with insecurity, there were active and successful Resistance intelligence networks operating in the Grenoble area which were able to provide the Vercors leaders with reliable information on German intentions. These included many in the Vichy civil administration and the local police as well as the Gendarmerie. Post offices were also a fruitful source of information, as were local telephone-exchange operators who turned their well-known habit of listening to conversations into a patriotic duty. Others on whom the Organisation Vercors could normally rely included especially the local restaurateurs, who formed an extensive intelligence network of their own. This included establishing an organization for stealing side-arms from Germans dining at local restaurants and smuggling these to the Resistance in the forests.
Alongside the local intelligence organizations operating in the Vercors during this period there were also a number of French and Allied secret services doing the same thing. These included the French intelligence services based in London, SOE, SIS (also known as MI6), MI9 (Britain’s secret service dedicated to helping escaped PoWs and airmen), the intelligence service of the Polish government-in-exile and the American Office of Strategic Services, which ran, among other agents, Gaston Vincent, who was based in Saint-Agnan-en-Vercors until his death in June 1944.
On the other side, the German and Milice networks often made use of those involved in the black market and, it was said, brothel keepers, barbers and barmen. In his Union report, Thackthwaite added to this list waitresses in small-town and village restaurants, who were used as agents provocateurs. Apart from human sources, the Germans also put considerable effort into gathering signals intelligence and closing down secret radio stations. In one case a Milice agent who had been successfully infiltrated into one of the Vercors’ clandestine radio teams had to be got rid of because, ‘although he was assigned as a trustworthy person’, further enquiries were made and ‘It was discovered that his brother was a Milicien and his sister-in-law worked for the Gestapo.’
German intelligence even successfully took over some Resistance radio networks in their entirety. For example, a Greek called Guy Alexander Kyriazis was sent by the German secret service to work in a British-run SIS network called Alliance. Posted to Grenoble, he was paid 7,000 francs a month and appears to have operated until the end of the war, planting false messages and passing back codebooks to his masters. When subsequently interrogated by the Allies, he claimed that ‘the Germans … knew the details of the wireless procedure which was being used at Grenoble [and] were intercepting messages’.
The job of German intelligence was made much easier by that fact that the radio security of both the Resistance in the field and their Free French controllers in London was very lax and their codes extremely insecure. The British government became very concerned about this, especially now that planning had started on the greatest secret of the war, the date and location of D-Day. On 13 January 1944, the British War Cabinet took the decision that, because of the insecurity of the French codes, all signals or messages sent by the French in London and Algiers had to be transmitted through the British communication systems or use British or US codes. De Gaulle was predictably furious, calling it ‘an outrage and an insult’.
An SOE report on French radio security dated 29 January 1944, just a few days before the Malleval disaster, gives some indication of the scale of the problem: ‘[French] Security … is lamentable … Continual losses of [Resistance] chiefs, money, codes, archives, couriers, list of names which [were] unparalleled … we have continually pointed out over a year that [their] codes are fundamentally insecure and badly coded … We have finally been reduced to breaking them [the French codes] ourselves to prove [to the French] their insecurity … It must be assumed that every [French] message code can be read by the Germans as easily as by ourselves [emphasis in original].’
