The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944

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

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.