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

The Commanding General of the Secret Army

Vidal

On the night of 19/20 March, another Lysander flew Moulin and Delestraint back to France, where the flame of resistance was beginning to take hold. This change of mood was due, principally, to three factors.

The first was the increasing severity of German reprisals. In the beginning, hostages were taken at random, held against some required action by the French civil authorities and then released. But when Germans started to be assassinated, things took a much darker turn. On 20 October 1941 the German military commander of Nantes was shot dead. The Germans responded by taking fifty hostages from the local community and summarily executed them. As this practice became more and more widespread French outrage and anger deepened and the ranks of the Resistance swelled.

The second event which transformed the nature of the Resistance movement in France began at dawn on 8 November 1942, when Allied troops stormed ashore on the beaches of French North Africa. The strategic consequences of Operation Torch were very quickly understood by the Germans. Now the defeat of their forces under Field Marshal Rommel and the Allied occupation of the whole of the North African coast were only a matter of time. Germany’s hold on continental Europe could now be threatened not just from the Channel in the north, but also from the Mediterranean in the south. Three days after Torch, the Germans swept aside the barriers on the Demarcation Line and, amid squeals of protest from the Vichy government, sent their armoured columns surging south to complete their occupation of the whole of metropolitan France. This destroyed the Vichy government’s constitutional legality and laid bare the bankruptcy of their claim to be the protectors of what remained of French pride and sovereignty.

It also had another, even more powerful effect. The Vichy Armistice Army, or Armée de l’Armistice, created from the broken elements of France’s defeated armies, was immediately disbanded, causing some of its units to take to the maquis. Some dispersed individually and reassembled under their commanders in the forests, taking with them their structures, their ranks, their customs and even their regimental standards. From about January 1943 onwards, senior ex-Armistice Army officers, including two who will be important in our story, Henri Zeller and Marcel Descour, began to work more closely with Delestraint’s Secret Army. To start with, both forces, though co-operating closely with each other, maintained their separate autonomy. But in December 1943 they agreed to fuse together to form a single military structure, the FFI – the French Forces of the Interior, or Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur – under de Gaulle’s command.

The third and arguably greatest factor which turned many French men and women from relative apathy to armed resistance was Germany’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for resources and manpower. The Germans demanded 60 per cent of all France’s agricultural production, amounting to some 600,000 tonnes of food and equipment a month, causing severe rationing and acute food shortages, especially in the cities. Inevitably this in turn gave birth to an extensive, all-pervasive (and all-providing) black market. It was, however, Germany’s demand for labour which, more than anything else, provided the French Resistance with the recruits it needed to become a genuine popular movement.

It all began with a bargain which seemed, given the exigencies of war and France’s position as a subjugated nation, reasonable enough. With so many of her male population under arms, Germany was desperate for labour to run her industries and work her farms. Programmes to attract workers from France were implemented. These included a Sauckel/Laval scheme initiated in June 1942 (known in France as La Relève – the levy)under which the Germans would exchange prisoners of war for specialised volunteer workers on a ratio of 1 to 3. But by late summer 1942 La Relève had produced only some 40,000 new workers – nothing like enough for Germany’s needs; Sauckel demanded more.

To fulfil these new German demands, Pétain and Laval signed a law on 4 September 1942 requiring all able-bodied men aged between eighteen and fifty and all single women between twenty-one and thirty-five ‘to do any work that the Government deems necessary’. By these means the Sauckel/Laval deal was completed, albeit a month late, in November 1942. But this merely encouraged the Germans to demand even more. This time, in exchange for 250,000 French workers, an equal number of French PoWs would be given, not their freedom, but the status of ‘free workers’ in Germany. Laval agreed, but soon found that he could not keep his side of the bargain without adopting new measures of coercion. A law was passed on 16 February 1943 which required all males over twenty to be subject to the Compulsory Labour Organization (known as the STO after its French name – Service du Travail Obligatoire) and regulations governing the STO were issued the same day, calling up all those aged twenty to twenty-three for compulsory work in Germany. In March 1943, Sauckel again upped the stakes, demanding a further 400,000 workers, 220,000 of whom would go to Germany while the remainder would be handed over to Organisation Todt, the German-run labour force in France.

Of all the events in the early years of the German occupation which helped turn France against her occupiers, undermined the Vichy administration and boosted the cause of the Resistance, none did so more, or more quickly, than the establishment of the STO. The German Ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, later remarked: ‘If ever the Maquis were to erect monuments in France, the most important should be dedicated to “Our best recruitment agent, Gauleiter Sauckel”.’

There were public demonstrations against the STO across France, one being in the little market town of Romans under the western edge of the Vercors. Here, on 9 and 10 March 1943, the entire population occupied the railway station shouting, ‘Death to Laval! Death to Pétain! Long live de Gaulle!’ and stood in front of the train taking their young men away to Germany. Huge numbers of young men, now known as réfractaires, took to the maquis to avoid being sent to Germany. SOE agents reported to London on 12 March 1943 that the number of young men who had gone into hiding in the Savoie and Isère departments alone had reached 5,000 and was rising at an increasing rate every week.

These young men fled to the maquis for a complex set of reasons, not all of them to do with patriotism. For some it was simply a matter of avoiding being sent to Germany. For others it was seen as a form of civil disobedience. For many it was the romance of living the clandestine life in the mountains and the forests. Down there on the plain, men and women lived lives which were inevitably tainted by the daily exigencies of coexistence with the enemy. But up there in the high places and the forests the air was clean and freedom was pure and uncompromised.

But whatever their motives, all now lived as outlaws who had to rely on the already established Resistance movements for their food, shelter and protection. London recognized the opportunity and sent huge sums of money, mostly through Jean Moulin, to pay for food and shelter for the réfractaires. The French Resistance movements now found themselves with a growing of pool of young men whom they quickly set about turning into fully trained, armed and committed Maquisards.

It was probably in response to the new threat posed by this rise of the Resistance that, on 30 January 1943, Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval created – with help from the Germans – a new and much hated paramilitary force, the black-shirted Milice Française or French Militia, whose exclusive task was to fight the Resistance. Made up chiefly of Frenchmen who supported fascism, but including many from the criminal fraternity, the Milice by 1944 achieved a total strength in Vichy France, including part-time members, of perhaps 30,000. Although they worked very closely with both the Italians and the Germans, they were largely autonomous from any Vichy authority outside their own line of command, often operating outside the law and beyond its reach when it came to the torture, summary execution and assassination of their fellow French men and women.

And so it was that, by the early months of 1943, the forests and fastnesses of places like the Vercors had become home and refuge to a polyglot collection of the broken elements of defeated France: its new generations, its old administrators, its competing political parties, its heterodox communities and the scattered fragments of its once proud army. With the United States now in the war, with the Allied landings in North Africa and, just ten days later, the German defeat before the gates of Stalingrad, de Gaulle knew, as did almost every thinking French man and woman, that a turning point had been passed. It was now inevitable that Germany would lose. Only three questions remained. How long would it take? How could the Resistance be welded together into a force strong enough to play a part in the liberation of their country? And what would be the best military strategy to follow?

3

BEGINNINGS

The notion that the Vercors might become a citadel of liberty against France’s invaders began to take root in several places, among very different people and in very different ways, during the first half of 1941. According to Vercors legend it was first discussed one early-spring day in March 1941 when two old friends, both mountaineers, both writers and both members of France’s intellectual elite, were cutting down a dead walnut tree in a meadow above a small villa called La Grande Vigne, near the town of Côtes-de-Sassenage, a few kilometres north-west of Grenoble.

La Grande Vigne, which lies so close under the northern flank of the Vercors that the plateau’s slopes and woods seem to look in at every window, was – and remains still – the family home of the Dalloz family. In 1941, its occupants were the forty-one-year-old architect, writer, one-time government servant and ardent mountaineer Pierre Dalloz and his painter wife, Henriette Gröll. On this March day, the couple were entertaining two of their closest friends – and frequent visitors to La Grand Vigne – Jean Prévost and his doctor wife, Claude. Prévost, a year younger than Dalloz, was a startlingly handsome man with an arresting gaze and a character which combined love of action with a sturdy intellectual independence. A pacifist, an early and enthusiastic anti-fascist, Prévost had fiercely opposed the Munich settlement but had nevertheless heavily criticized the pre-war anti-German mood in France. He was best known as one of the foremost young writers in France, having written several well-received books, along with articles in the prestigious French magazine Paris-soir. Indeed it was writing which formed one of the major bonds between the two men – at the time of their tree-cutting exploit Dalloz was working on a translation of St Bernard’s Treatise on Consideration, while Prévost was preparing a study on Stendhal which would be published to widespread acclaim in Lyon on 9 November 1942, just two days before the German invasion of France’s ‘free’ southern zone.

According to Dalloz’s account, the two men were busy cutting down the old walnut tree – with Prévost offering his friend unsolicited advice on the best way to accomplish the task – when Dalloz stopped, leant on his axe and looked up at the cliffs of the Vercors rising above them into the blue March sky. ‘You could look at that up there as a kind of island on terra firma,’ he said, ‘a huge expanse of Alpine pasture protected on all sides by these vast Chinese walls of rock. The gates into it are few and carved out of the living rock. Once closed, paratroopers could be dropped clandestinely. The Vercors could then explode behind the enemy lines.’

There the conversation ended and the thought seemed to die. ‘I thought that the idea was probably a bit naive,’ Dalloz was later to explain. ‘This was more the kind of thing that the military would be considering, rather than me.’ It would take eighteen months, disillusion with the military leaders and a France more ready for resistance to bring it back to life.

A few kilometres away in Grenoble, General André Laffargue, a divisional commander in the Armistice Army, was also desperate to return to the struggle and spoke of the Vercors as ‘a vast closed Alpine fortress protected by a continuous solid wall of limestone rock’. He even drew up plans to protect the plateau against all comers with fixed defences made up of a ring of 75mm mountain guns sunk into concrete casements – a sort of Alpine Maginot Line, as though the recent failure of the first one had not been enough.

Some of Laffargue’s junior officers had a more realistic notion about what should be done to plan for the day when they would again take up their fight against the occupier and had begun to stockpile hidden weapons for future use. From late 1940 right through to the German invasion of Vichy France in November 1942, arms, ammunition and a wide range of matériel, including vehicles, fuel, optical equipment, engineering material, radios and medical stores, were spirited out of the city and into the surrounding countryside, and in particular on to the Vercors. All sorts of imaginative methods were used: lorries with false floors, carts loaded with hay, empty water and petrol bowsers, accumulator batteries emptied of acid and reserve petrol tanks on vehicles. They also made use of forged travel permissions so that the arms could be transported in official vehicles.

One of the chief smugglers who would in due course lead a local Resistance group in his own right, later described one of their hiding places: ‘An office of one of the Justices of the Peace in Grenoble became a veritable arsenal: heavy, medium and light machine guns, rifles, revolvers, munitions, explosives and aircraft incendiary bombs were hidden under the protection of the sword of Justice. The Court clerk, assisted by his men, buried the ammunition and concealed the arms in the walls. The judges of the police tribunals never guessed that under the defendants’ bench were hidden light machine guns, while sub-machine guns were piled up underneath the floorboard on which they sat holding court.’

By these means and many others, some thirty-five secret arms depots were established during the first months of 1941. At the time of the German invasion of Vichy, this number had increased to 135. These depots contained, it is estimated, 300 light and heavy machine guns, 3,000 revolvers together with a variety of other light arms, thirty 75mm mountain guns, four 81mm mortars, 4 tonnes of optical instruments such as binoculars, 5 tonnes of explosives, eight full petrol tankers and more than 200 vehicles of all types.

Another clandestine Armistice Army unit, meanwhile, forged false papers for military personnel imprisoned for breaking Vichy laws and those who had already gone underground.

On a fine August afternoon in 1941, five men sitting round a table in a working-class café behind Grenoble station took a decision which, though they did not know it, would link their fate indissolubly to the young military arms smugglers just up the road, even though their motives were entirely political and not military.

The Second World War had taken a surprising turn in June 1941 when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of Russia. Until this point, Hitler’s 1939 non-aggression pact with Stalin had meant that the war had been largely located in the west. Now the full force of his armies would strike east. Widely recognized as the key military turning point (and Hitler’s biggest mistake) of the early years of the war, Barbarossa had an effect on the populations of occupied western Europe that is often overlooked. Before Hitler’s invasion, the fact that Russia had stood aside from the struggle against fascism had constrained the attitude of the Communists in particular and the European left in general. Now, however, there was a common front against a common enemy. The French Communists and (though for very different reasons) their partners on the left, the French Socialist Party, shifted from an attitude of wait and see to one of activism – a process which greatly accelerated later in 1941 when, on 5 December, the Germans were beaten back from the gates of Moscow and, three days after that, following Pearl Harbor, the United States entered the war.

The five conspirators sitting in the Café de la Rotonde on the Rue du Polygone would have felt the ripples of these faraway events and would have known what they meant. Now there was hope; now there was a distant, dangerous possibility of liberation.

The Café de la Rotonde, set slightly back from the main thoroughfare, was a pink-stuccoed building on whose front façade three brown-shuttered windows functioned as a permanent prop for sheaves of bicycles. The area, just behind Grenoble freight station, was a working-class district, grimy with the soot of trains and permanently resonating with the clash of shunting engines, the hiss of steam and the day-round passage of lorries to and from the loading quays of the great station. Though graced by the name of café, La Rotonde was more like a bistro which depended for its custom on the railway workers at the station, the drivers of goods lorries and the workers at a nearby gas works, all of whom knew they could get a good cheap lunch here, washed down with the rough white wine of the nearby Grésivaudan valley.

At first sight, the five conspirators, all of whom held strong left-wing views, had nothing in common with the two intellectuals who had cut down a walnut tree at Sassenage four months earlier. They had even less in common with the young Army officers who, for months past, had been smuggling lorryloads of arms and ammunition past the front door of the café. But all three groups were in reality bound to a single purpose that would, in due course, bring them together in a common enterprise which would transcend their political differences: the distant but now growing possibility that some time – some time soon perhaps – their country might be free again.

Among those seated at the table that afternoon was a figure of medium height, round shoulders and powerful build whose face was underpinned by a sharply etched chin and enlivened by eyes which missed little that went on around him. Aimé Pupin, the patron of La Rotonde, was normally to be found behind its dark wooden counter, chatting to his customers and overseeing the service at the tables. Passionate about rugby – he had been a formidable hooker in his youth – Pupin had received, like so many of his class in pre-war France, only the bare minimum of education. But he had a force of personality, matched by firm opinions and a propensity for action, which made him a natural if at times obstinate and impetuous leader. He also had a marked sense of idealism for the brotherhood of man and the Socialist cause, and this was ardently shared by the four men sitting around him, all of whom were not only fellow members of the Socialist Party but also Masons.

Beside Pupin sat Eugène Chavant, forty-seven years old, stocky, pipe-smoking, taciturn, the haphazardly trimmed moustache on his upper lip complementing an unruly shock of hair greying at the temples. Chavant’s quiet demeanour hid an iron will and unshakeable convictions. As a young man he had followed his father into the shoe-making trade. During the First World War he had been quickly promoted to sergeant and platoon commander in the 11th Dragoons and received the Médaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre with four citations for bravery. When the First World War finished, he returned to Grenoble, became a leading member of the French Socialist Party and was elected on the first ballot with the entire Socialist list in the 1936 elections. For this he was summarily sacked from his post as foreman in a local shoe factory, forcing him to go into the café business in order to pursue his political convictions. He had later been elected Mayor of the Grenoble suburb of Saint-Martin-d’Hères and was now, like Pupin, the patron of a restaurant in a working-class district of the city.

Others round the table included a railway worker at the station, a garage owner and Léon Martin, who practised as a doctor and pharmacist in the city. At sixty-eight, Martin was the oldest of the five, a past Socialist Mayor of Grenoble city and a strong opponent of the Vichy government. He told his co-conspirators that he believed the time had come to set up a Resistance cell in the Grenoble area. The others enthusiastically agreed, and the meeting broke up – but not before the conspirators marked their passage into the shadows by distributing aliases. Chavant’s clandestine name would henceforth be Clément and that of Pupin, Mathieu. Slowly, over the following months, the little group drew more and more supporters to their meetings in the back room of Dr Martin’s pharmacy at 125 Cours Berriat, which lies under the rim of the Vercors at the western edge of the city.

Although the daily lives of those who lived on the Vercors itself were less affected by the fall of France and the establishment of the Vichy government than those in Grenoble, the plateau was by no means immune from its consequences.

On 28 September 1940, the prestigious Polish school in Paris, the Lycée Polonais Cyprian-Norwid, which had decamped from the capital shortly after the Germans arrived, formally re-established itself in Villard-de-Lans on the northern half of the plateau. A month later, on 28 October, it opened its doors to students – chiefly the children of Polish refugees from the north – in the Hôtel du Parc et du Château, a famous pre-war skiing establishment in the town.

On 23 May 1941, a trainload of French refugees, driven out of their homes in Alsace-Lorraine by incoming German families, arrived in the station at Romans, below the western edge of the Vercors. They were kept on the station for three days while the Vichy authorities found houses in the region, many of them in the Villard-de-Lans area. To add to these new arrivals, Jewish families soon started to arrive as well, fleeing the early round-ups in the northern zone, later replicated by the Vichy government in the south as well. Even by the standards of a town used to the annual influx of winter-sports visitors, life in Villard was becoming unusually cosmopolitan.

Some time during the late summer or early autumn of 1941, a quite separate group of conspirators, also Socialists and Masons, started meeting in secret in Villard-de Lans. The moving spirit of this group, who were initially unaware of their Grenoble co-conspirators, was another doctor/pharmacist called Eugène Samuel. A Rumanian by origin, Dr Samuel, who had come to Villard to join his wife after the fall of France in 1940, held his meetings in the back room of his pharmacy under the cover of a Hunting Committee. The Villard group was as varied as its Grenoble equivalent, consisting, apart from Samuel himself, of a hotelier, the local tax inspector, the director of the Villard branch of the Banque Populaire and the three brothers, Émile, Paul and Victor Huillier, who ran the local transport company. Not long after their formation, the Villard group began searching for other organized Resistants in the area. Through the good offices of one of their number they were put in touch with Léon Martin in Grenoble.

On Easter Monday (6 April) 1942, ‘the day the history of [the Resistance] in the Vercors started’, according to Léon Martin, the two groups met together in Villard and agreed to form a single organization to promote the Socialist cause and foment resistance in the area. The journey had begun that would take this handful of idealistic plotters from furtive meetings in the back rooms of local pharmacies to a fully fledged, 4,000-strong partisan army ready to take on the full might of the German Wehrmacht.

Marcel Malbos, one of the teachers at the Polish school in Villard, summed up the mood of these early resisters: ‘When the life of a whole people is mortally threatened, when the tyrant sets out to destroy a whole civilization along with both its culture and its people, when the shipwreck is upon you – then, just when all seems lost, suddenly a conjunction of events occurs, as is so often found in history, which offers the possibility of hope. [In our case] it was the creation on our mountain plateau of a patch of dry land above the flood – above the tumult – where a few men came together to create a kind of rebirth. And soon this tiny plot above the waves would become a rock, a refuge, a home and a fortress …’