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

By this stage of the war the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and were able to provide SOE with the complete text of a cable sent by Japan’s Ambassador to France giving his analysis of the state of the Resistance, following a visit to Vichy in the middle of 1943. This document revealed that the Gestapo had penetrated the entire Resistance movement and were also anticipating ‘a hypothetical D Day which they feared might be imminent’. The Ambassador predicted that the Gestapo would soon unleash a ‘heavy drive’ against Resistance structures with the aim of emasculating them before any landing could take place. At the end of April agents in France were also reporting to London that the Germans were making detailed plans to combat an Allied invasion in the summer.

By the time of the Japanese Ambassador’s visit to Vichy the ‘heavy drive’ had, in fact, already started. Following the arrest of Aimé Pupin’s wife in the Café de la Rotonde on 3 March, the Italians raided the Ferme d’Ambel. But, warned by Fabien Rey, the young occupants fled before the enemy party got there. Then on 18 March Italian mountain troops tried to surprise the C4 réfractaire camp on La Grande Cournouse, the great forest-covered buttress of rock which overlooks the Gorges de la Bourne. Once again the Maquis were warned in time and managed to slip away in good order. By now similar operations were taking place against réfractaire camps across the whole of the region and even in Grenoble.

On 19 April the Italians tried again on the plateau, this time raiding C7 camp on the Plateau de Saint-Ange. ‘The Italians arrived so quickly that our sentries didn’t have time to warn us and everyone tried to find the best hiding place they could, some taking refuge in holes, others scrambling towards the nearest pine tree … No fewer than a dozen of us ended up sitting perched, rucksacks on our backs, in the branches of one especially large fir. “Now this really is what I call a Christmas tree,” one wit remarked. The camp dog, thinking it was all some kind of game, tore after us yelping as we ran for our hiding place and then insisted on sitting down at the base of the tree staring intently at our merry pantomime, while we tried in vain to persuade it to go away. The Italians, the black feathers on their Alpine hats waving in the wind, ran past us not ten metres away.’

Alain Le Ray, who spent much of his time travelling from one camp to the other checking on wellbeing, security and training, saw the danger early and issued instructions: ‘At the smallest sign of trouble, get out, cover your tracks and keep moving for as long as possible.’

By the beginning of May, the Maquisards of C4 camp arrived back at their original site on La Grande Cournouse after a long series of peregrinations, only to be woken in the early morning of 18 May by their sentry shouting ‘Les Ritals! Les Ritals!’ (slang for Italians). In a later coded message to London Aimé Pupin reported that a force of Italian Alpini ‘three thousand’ strong, guided by the Milice, had scaled the sheer slopes from the Gorges on to the plateau overnight. But again the attack appears to have been bungled for, of the eighty in the camp, at the time, the Alpini managed to catch only four, whom they surprised returning from collecting food. De Gaulle himself sent a message to the young Maquisards congratulating them on ‘thwarting the attack’.

And so began what the Vercors fugitives called the ‘summer of nomadisation’ with the réfractaires and their leaders playing a game of cat and mouse with the Italian Army which the Maquisards almost invariably won. But it meant constant changes of camp, hurried last-minute exits and lengthy marches across the mountains often at dead of night. Uncomfortable as it was, the hardships of this period served to toughen soft city bodies and create a real sense of teamwork, comradeship and trust in their leaders.

On one occasion a troop of fleeing Maquisards (after two weeks of nomadisation) passed through the little settlement at Col de Rousset where the redoubtable Jeanne Bordat, known as Mémé Bordat, kept a bar/café/rest house for the refreshment of travellers crossing the Col. Hot on the fugitives’ tail came a troop of Alpini led by an Italian officer who demanded to know where the Maquis were. Mémé Bordat denied any knowledge of the Maquis – indeed, she wanted to know what exactly were these mythical creatures, ‘the Maquis’, for she had never seen them. The Italian officer replied that they were the young men who lived in the mountains. Again Mémé Bordat professed ignorance. Again the Italian returned to the charge, demanding in more insistent terms to know where the fugitives were. Finally, according to Vercors legend, the good Mme Bordat lifted her skirt, pulled down her knickers and, pointing to her bottom, told the officer that if he really wished to know where the young men were, no doubt he could find them up there. The officer left, red faced, taking his Alpini with him.

The importance of this story lies not so much in its veracity as in the indication it provides that, although the disruption caused by nomadisation was uncomfortable, the French Resistance in the Vercors did not regard the Italian Army as a serious threat. As one Maquis leader put it ‘The “Piantis”* were less troublesome and much easier to fool than their allies and friends [the Germans].’ Francis Cammaerts, a British SOE agent in south-eastern France, had the same view: ‘the morale of the Italian Army was so low that [they] … presented no difficulty to the French resistance movements, as nearly all their work was left to the French police’.

Meanwhile, progress continued to be made on the Montagnards plan. In April, Jean Moulin sent a further 1.6 million francs to Dalloz for Montagnards and asked London for a further 40 million to fund his work across France.

On 6 April 1943, just ten days after his return from London and right in the middle of the early Italian raids on the plateau, Delestraint, on Jean Moulin’s instructions, attended a meeting of the Montagnards leaders in the main reception room of Pierre Dalloz’s house at La Grande Vigne, looking out over Grenoble and the Alps on the other side of the Grésivaudan valley. It was a beautiful day, with early-spring light streaming through the windows and the brilliance of the snow on the distant mountains, reflecting in the gilt mirrors on the Villa’s walls. Here, protected by sentries posted at all the main points around the house and on the neighbouring roads, Delestraint was briefed in detail by Dalloz and his co-conspirators on the state of Montagnards. This included presentations on the camps, the Maquisards, the logistics, lorries and cars, mountain refuges, parachute sites and landing zones, resources and food.

Dalloz wrote: ‘We told him that we had no doubt that the Allies would land on the beaches of Provence and that the Germans would try to reinforce their positions before the attack by moving their forces along the north–south line of the valley of the Rhône and the Route des Alpes. But they would be very concerned about their line of retreat. At this moment the Vercors would rise and block the access roads to the plateau at the ten points marked in red on the map. The Allies could then launch paratroop units with their full armament on to the plains of the Vercors at Vassieux, Autrans and Lans … This would be the signal for the whole region to rise. Lyon would fall.’

That night the whole company had a convivial dinner at the Restaurant des Côtes at Sassenage and the following day accompanied Delestraint on a tour of inspection of the plateau. They went first to Saint-Nizier, the gateway to the northern half of the plateau. Delestraint immediately identified this as the weak point in the Vercors’ natural defences and warned prophetically, ‘Without mountain artillery, or at least mortars, you cannot expect to hold the plain of Villard-de-Lans for very long. In these circumstances it might be best to defend instead the southern, more mountainous part of the Vercors.’

Over lunch in a restaurant at La Balme-de-Rencurel in the Bourne gorges, the old General turned to Aimé Pupin and asked, ‘Why did you choose the Vercors?’

‘Pure romanticism, mon Général,’ Pupin replied. ‘I was always fascinated by the fact that Mandrin [an eighteenth-century brigand with a Robin Hood reputation] was able to escape the police when he took refuge here.’

It had been a good day and Delestraint, who expressed himself well satisfied, thanked everyone for their work and promised that ‘The Vercors will play an important role when eventually the Allies land in France.’

Throughout April and early May, despite Italian Army raids on the camps, the Montagnards preparations continued, including a plan to install a high-powered transmitter in Villard-de-Lans which could be used by General de Gaulle to broadcast to the whole of France when he set up his government on the plateau after the Allied landings. Chavant, Pupin and others even began to search for appropriate houses to be used as de Gaulle’s personal accommodation when he arrived.

This high mood of hope and optimism was reflected in London. On 4 May, de Gaulle addressed a reception for young people at the Grosvenor House Hotel. He said ‘France can return again to her force of arms and her hopes, waiting for the day when, her liberation accomplished and her victories achieved, she can escape from her pains and ruins to claim her greatness and her place among the ranks of the great nations again.’

Despite such intoxicating dreams, there were more prosaic problems which needed urgent solutions – the Maquisards in the camps lacked boots. A raid was duly mounted to appropriate a large number of boots and shoes from a nearby government depot, which were distributed for the comfort of blistered feet across the plateau. This success was followed by several other raids on the valley to obtain what the plateau lacked, attracting the attention of the Italian secret police, OVRA. Whatever the ineffectiveness of the Italian Army, the same could not be said of this organization which worked closely with the Gestapo. On 24 April OVRA agents arrested and tortured Dr Leon Martin, then imprisoned him in the Fort d’Esseillon in Modane close to the Italian border. ‘I sent Benoit to see if it might be possible to spring him,’ Aimé Pupin explained. ‘But he came back saying it was hopeless.’

OVRA’s next chance came not through their own work but through a mixture of complacency, braggadocio and stupidity on the part of the Maquisards. It began one day in mid-May when a garage owner with known Resistance sympathies was asked to hide two full ex-Army petrol bowsers in his garage until they could be collected. He was given a password and firm instructions that he should on no account allow the vehicles to be stolen or captured by the Italians. This was easier said than done since Italian soldiers were billeted in a house not fifty metres from his garage. He made the vehicles safe by chocking them up on bricks, removing their wheels and distributor heads, and repainting them in the livery of the Water and Forestry Department.

For a week or so, nothing happened. But then, when the owner arrived at his garage as usual on 27 May, he found the doors had been forced overnight. The vehicles were still there, though there had clearly been an attempt to replace their wheels. But the bowsers were empty. Two days later the garagist was arrested and questioned by OVRA and accused of providing petrol to the Maquis. Only then did it emerge that the break-in at his garage had been carried out by a team of eleven armed Maquisards from Villard-de-Lans who had attempted to ‘liberate’ the vehicles and take them on to the plateau, where the petrol was desperately needed to keep the Huillier buses running. On the way down from the plateau, the ‘commandos’ had stopped at a bar in Grenoble well known for its Resistance sympathies. Here they met a fellow Resistant leader who, hearing of the exploit, told them that it was extremely foolish, since he could easily get false papers to allow the vehicles to be driven up to the plateau without any risk. But the leader of the Villard commandos insisted on pressing ahead with his plans. Of course, since no warning had been given to the owner, the commando team had no option but to break into his garage, where they duly discovered that the vehicles were immovable. Realizing there was nothing further they could do, they set off to return to the plateau. But, breaking all the normal security rules, they chose to travel back by the same route by which they had come down. At the Pont de Claix just outside Grenoble they ran into an OVRA checkpoint in the early hours of the morning. A search of the back of the lorry revealed that it was full of quietly sleeping ‘commandos’, their arms stacked neatly by their sides. All ten were arrested, interrogated and in due course deported to Italy.

The next day, 28 May, the OVRA and the Milice swooped. A black OVRA car supported by a lorry full of Alpini arrived in Villard in mid-morning and arrested Victor Huillier, four other key Resistance organizers and finally, after a lengthy search, Aimé Pupin himself, hiding in a loft. At the same time, a Milice search of the village turned up a cache of some 6 tonnes of dynamite hidden near by. Almost the entire leadership of the Vercors Resistance had been decapitated in a single morning. Other arrests of those further down the chain swiftly followed. Thanks to fast footwork, Farge, Le Ray, Chavant and Dalloz among the main leaders managed to escape (Dalloz’s wife Henriette Gröll fled her home in La Grande Vigne in the middle of a reception for forty guests moments before Italian troops roared in to take possession of the house). However, thanks to Pupin’s habit of keeping neat centralized records, all were now hunted fugitives.

On 28 May London sent instructions to Delestraint to refrain from all military action. That afternoon Farge had a clandestine meeting with Dalloz in a grove of acacia trees on the Quai de France, alongside the Isère in Grenoble. ‘My friend,’ said Farge, ‘you and I have the money in our pockets and the clothes we stand up in. We have nothing else now. No job, no home, no family, no name. From now on we live the clandestine life, or we don’t live.’ Chavant hurriedly left Grenoble to find refuge in a village west of Grenoble, Farge fled for Paris, Dalloz for Aix-les-Bains and Le Ray for the plateau.

On 2 June, Dalloz received instructions to meet Delestraint in a restaurant in Lyon, where the old General instructed him that Alain Le Ray and Jean Prévost were to take over the Vercors Resistance structures and Dalloz himself was to go to Paris where he should meet the General again on the terrace of the Chez Francis restaurant by the Alma-Marceau exit of the Métro at 18.00 on 6 June 1943. When the two conspirators met in Paris they found the restaurant too crowded for safe discussion, so they walked together to the house where Dalloz had found temporary refuge in Paris. Here Delestraint told Dalloz that, if anything happened to him, Dalloz should go to London where he would help to prepare the way for Plan Montagnards.

Dalloz may have been lucky. Three days after his meeting at Chez Francis, Delestraint was arrested emerging from another Métro station, La Muette, on his way to a meeting with another Resistance leader. He was handed over to the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo, and interrogated for more than fifty no doubt terrible hours, before being sent, as a Nacht und Nebel* prisoner, to Natzweiller-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace. He was shot in Dachau three weeks before the German surrender in 1945.

On 18 June, a message from Jean Moulin written before Delestraint’s arrest arrived in London. Moulin’s report warned: ‘the safety of the Vercors has been compromised. Many arrests have taken place owing to indiscretions committed by some of them [the leaders of the Vercors]. The Commander of the Groups [Le Ray] and his Chief of Staff [Prévost] have had to go into hiding and the Vercors must therefore be left for the moment and reconstituted later … No one is to take to the maquis until further orders. All direct wireless communications between the Vercors and London is to cease.’ Moulin’s decision to ‘put the Vercors to sleep’ was a wise one, for by now a wave of Gestapo arrests was sweeping the whole of France, north and south.

Despite these events, a meeting of the Directing Committee for the whole of the southern zone, chaired by Moulin himself, was held as planned on 21 June in the outskirts of Lyon. The location was betrayed and in a Gestapo swoop Moulin, together with seven other key Resistance leaders, was seized. Moulin was handed over to Klaus Barbie and tortured to death.

The leadership and structure of the Resistance in southern France now lay in ruins. It was not just the Vercors that had been decapitated. Similar operations had taken place in Isère, the Haute-Savoie and the Alpes-Maritimes. A British Cabinet paper of the day estimated that ‘fifteen principals and several hundred subordinates of the Fighting French organisation were arrested’ in the Gestapo swoops. An SOE paper quoting a secret French source put the figure much higher: ‘some three thousand members of resistance groups were rounded up and put in prison by the Germans, the majority being in Fresnes [the notorious Gestapo prison in Paris]’.

One element, however, made the Vercors different from all others affected. While the Resistance structures on the plateau could be rebuilt, the crucial connection between Plan Montagnards and those at the very top of the Free French leadership, which had given the Vercors a prime position in French plans for the liberation of southern France, had been irretrievably broken.

* Another nickname for the Italian troops – perhaps a corruption of ‘les Chiantis’.

* Literally ‘Night and fog’. It meant he was allowed no contact with the outside world whatsoever. The purpose was to make people completely disappear so that no one knew their whereabouts or their fate.

8

RETREAT, RETRENCHMENT AND RECONSTRUCTION

For Alain Le Ray and Jean Prévost, standing now almost alone amid the wreckage of the Vercors Resistance, the first and most pressing problem was money and how to rebuild their organization. Le Ray managed to make contact with one of the few members of the Moulin organization in Lyon who had survived the summer purges and who was able to provide enough money to cover the plateau’s immediate needs. His next task was to try to make contact with those who had survived the May arrests. Pierre Dalloz, with Delestraint’s last words instructing him to go to London ringing in his ears, had already set out on what would be a long and hazardous odyssey out of France.

Eugène Chavant, however, seemed to have vanished. In fact Chavant, who had first taken refuge in the countryside outside Grenoble, soon decided he was safer with trusted friends in the city, one of whom ran the Perrin sports shop in the Place des Postes. One day, quite by chance it seems, Chavant spotted a young, impressive-looking man buying fishing tackle and asked who he was. He was told that the man was an Army officer connected with the Resistance. A meeting was arranged at which a personal bond was immediately established between the two. The forty-nine-year-old Chavant, whose socialist background made him instinctively suspicious of the military and their right-wing ways, found in Le Ray, thirty-two at the time, an energetic and politically sensitive partner. For his part, Le Ray, who had an understanding of the importance of close politico-military cooperation which was unusual for French officers of the day, saw the older man as a wise counsellor and effective political operator. A close working relationship was quickly established.

At the end of June a meeting of key leaders in the Vercors region was held at the Château de Murinais under the western edge of the plateau. Its purpose was to re-establish a functional organization in place of the one which had been destroyed by the May arrests. A second Combat Committee made up of five men and two women was created under the overall control of Eugène Chavant (now increasingly referred to as le Patron). The two military representatives on the Committee were Alain Le Ray and one of his lieutenants, Roland Costa de Beauregard.

Though there would be changes to the personnel at the top, this second Vercors Combat Committee, known throughout the Resistance simply as the ‘Organisation Vercors’, would form the basic structure responsible for the direction of all Resistance operations on the Vercors right through to the end of the war. It did not, however, have either the attention of the Free French leadership in London or the direct communication with them that its predecessor had enjoyed.

To start with, Chavant himself stayed in Grenoble, making regular visits to the plateau on the tram to Saint-Nizier and Villard. But in September he moved to take up permanent residence at Saint-Martin on the Vercors itself. By the end of the year effective civilian control of almost all Resistance activities on the Vercors had been established, with Chavant presiding over two administrative sub-units, one covering the northern and the other the southern half of the plateau. Given that this was all done under the noses of a seemingly alert enemy, Chavant’s organization was astonishingly comprehensive. It incorporated the postal and telecoms services in the area, the co-ordination of friendly Gendarme units where these existed, the setting up of a system of ‘sentinels’ linked by phone and courier, the direction of the plateau’s hydroelectric generating plants and a system of motorcycle couriers based at the western edge of the plateau at Saint-Nazaire-en-Royans, who were ready round the clock to carry messages and alert the plateau of impending danger.

Alain Le Ray, replicating Chavant’s civilian structure, split his military ‘command’ in two as well, appointing Costa de Beauregard as commander of the north and another of his officers the south. Over the summer months and into the early autumn, Le Ray concentrated on reorganizing, training and, as far as he could, arming the Vercors camps, always ensuring that everything he did was coordinated with Chavant and his civilian partners. Far from lazing around in ‘holiday camps’, most of the Vercors réfractaires – when they weren’t out in the fields helping to get in the harvest – spent this summer on forced marches, on learning to live off the land and on repeated military manoeuvres under the direction of professional military officers who had by now been appointed to command each of the camps on the plateau.

Le Ray himself embarked on a tireless round of the camps, checking on their security, seeing to their needs and instructing them about their role and importance. A flavour of these events is given in an account of Le Ray’s visit to the Vercors’ first camp, the Ferme d’Ambel. After a dinner sitting, quiet and unannounced, among the réfractaires around the rough wooden tables of Ambel’s refectory, Le Ray called for silence and spoke: ‘From today you will be a part of a new French force which General de Gaulle has created, with the support of our powerful Allies, to recover our independence and rediscover the true strength of our country. This is the great task which is before you, the glory which is yours to achieve. You have responded to this appeal even before it was made. You have taken your posts, even before they were assigned to you … The role you have already accepted to play is one of the most important in the battle for our freedom. This is what your leaders confirm today, placing their trust in your courage. Now you must wait for their orders – they will not be long in coming. In a few months – in a few weeks, perhaps – the signal will be given. You must be ready. I am here today to give you my assurance that the service you will give – the sacrifice you will perhaps have to make – will be fully recognized and will contribute decisively to the victory your courage will have delivered.’

After the war Le Ray outlined what he was trying to achieve during his push for better organization and coordination in the late spring and early summer of 1943: