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

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].’

Closer to D-Day, the British went further, refusing to allow anyone of any nationality to leave Britain whom they believed knew anything, or thought they knew anything, about D-Day.

The approach of D-Day was beginning to concentrate German minds, too. As 1943 drew to a close without an invasion, it was clear to all that it must happen in the spring or summer of 1944. This time, however, the task for the Germans would not just be to disrupt the Resistance control networks, as in 1943, but to destroy the Maquis units themselves. And this would involve not individual arrests outside Métro stations or swoops on safe houses, but a series of bloody battles in which no quarter would be given to the ‘terrorists’.

On 3 February 1944, the German Deputy Supreme Commander West, Luftwaffe Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, set out the policy with chilling clarity in what has become known as the ‘Sperrle-Erlass’ order, prescribing the behaviour of German troops in the struggle ahead:

1. We are not in the occupied western territories to allow our troops to be shot at and abducted by saboteurs who go unpunished …

2. If troops are attacked … countermeasures [must be taken] immediately;

These include an … immediate return of fire. If innocent persons are hit this is regrettable but entirely the fault of the terrorists.

The surroundings of any such incident are to be sealed off … and all the civilians in the locality, regardless of rank and person, are to be taken into custody.

Houses from which shots have been fired are to be burnt down …

… A slack and indecisive troop commander deserves to be severely punished because he endangers the lives of the troops … and produces a lack of respect for the German armed forces.

Measures that are regarded subsequently as too severe cannot in view of the present situation, provide reason for punishment.

A week later, on 12 February, the German military commander of France, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, also conscious of the impending invasion, issued an order calling for the urgent destruction of Maquis groups within the next months: ‘The main task in the coming weeks and months is … fully to repacify the areas which are contaminated by bandits and to break up the secret resistance organizations and to seize their weapons … In areas where gang centres form, these must be combated with a concentrated use of all available forces … The objective must be to break up all terrorist and resistance groups even before the enemy landing [emphasis in original].’

The Germans were moving on to the offensive and the main burden of their offensive in the northern Alps would fall on General Pflaum, who commanded 157th Reserve Division based in Grenoble. Pflaum’s division was, as its name suggests, not a front-line unit. Its main task was not combat but training. But it was also charged with a military task – the maintenance of order, especially where this threatened key German communications routes. Pflaum’s priority was to keep open at all costs the road and rail communications corridors running through the north and centre of his area of responsibility.

Karl Pflaum himself was a career officer with a good deal of active service as an infantry soldier on the eastern front where he had commanded a front-line division from the autumn of 1941 until he was relieved of his command because of heart disease. Pflaum’s direct superior in France was the commander of the Military Zone of the South of France, Generalleutnant Heinrich Niehoff, whose reporting line ran through Stülpnagel to the Supreme High Command of the German Army in Berlin and thence to Hitler’s bunker.

When it came to carrying the main burden of infantry fighting in Pflaum’s area, the only troops of true front-line quality he could rely on were his elite Alpine Gebirgsjäger Regiment – it was these troops that had come in overnight on skis to take up positions behind Malleval, cutting off the Maquisards trying to flee from the valley. Well trained and well led, the Gebirgsjäger were exceptionally capable in mountainous areas and winter conditions. But not many of Pflaum’s troops were of the same standard as his Alpine units. One experienced French officer in Grenoble in late 1943 and 1944 commented after the war that the units based in and around Grenoble were ‘mainly troops under instruction, with the exception of the officers and a few more experienced soldiers’. In the German tactic of surround, attack, annihilate, destroy, these were troops who would be employed chiefly in the first and last phases – cordoning before the operation started and reprisals after the fighting had finished.

For many German soldiers, France, and especially the south of France, was regarded as an easy, even idyllic posting. A German historian of the period wrote that those stationed at Annecy, where the headquarters of one of the Gebirgsjäger regiments was housed in an old hotel, enjoyed ‘A life lived in the midst of this jewel of nature. The fourteen-kilometre lake stretches its arms right into the centre of the city, making it into a veritable oasis designed to please the eye. The houses are beautifully maintained and surrounded by groves and vines, which also decorate the surrounding hills. And everywhere the sparkling lake with its canals crossed by many bridges seems to act as a silver adornment to the whole scene. The men of the Regiment saw themselves as the fortunate inhabitants of a paradise right in the middle of the Second World War.’

This paradise was, however, soon to turn into something far less pleasant. By the early months of 1944, the morale of many of the raw recruits who made up the majority of Pflaum’s division was low and their steadiness under fire shaky. By now they would have known that the war would be over in the next year or so and that Germany was not going to win. Moreover, by this time they had become hated occupiers, facing an increasingly well-armed and capable insurrection, in a country which grew more hostile by the day. What was going to happen to them when they had to get out?

In a coded message to London on 11 February 1944, a French agent remarked on the jumpiness of German troops in the Annecy area: ‘The Germans load their rifles when travelling through tunnels on the railway. In the streets in the evening, they keep turning round and are always careful to keep their distance from all active members of the Gestapo [for fear of being caught in a Resistance assassination attempt] … A German who had broken his leg at a winter sports station recently was to be taken to hospital … but the comrade who was to accompany him refused through fear of the Maquis.’ In his report on the Union Mission, Henry Thackthwaite was more blunt, describing some of these rear-area German troops as ‘corrupt and miserable’.

Beyond his own forces, Pflaum could also call on neighbouring units who, together with other specialized theatre units, supplied supporting troops for a number of anti-partisan operations carried out in his area. Finally, he could request assistance from outside the French theatre as well. In early spring 1944, experts in the conduct of anti-partisan operations in the Balkans were brought in to advise and train some key elements of Pflaum’s forces. On the darker side, among these additional troops were units known as the Eastern Troops made up of captured prisoners of war and Russian deserters from the eastern front. These included Turkmens, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis and Georgians. They wore German uniforms with armbands showing their nation of origin. At their peak these Eastern Troops, totalling almost half a million, were chiefly used to carry out reprisals in the ‘annihilation’ phase of anti-partisan operations on the Russian front, Yugoslavia and subsequently France. The French christened them ‘Mongols’ because of their Asian features and their reputation for acts of horror and atrocity.

These were not the only troops of non-German origin under Pflaum’s command. There were also some – perhaps up to 20 per cent – who came from other occupied countries. These included Slovenes and Poles. Thackthwaite’s Union Mission report describes the quality of these troops as ‘in general bad … [many] are … ready to join us on D-Day’.

On the face of it Pflaum himself was third in the German command hierarchy in France. But this is to give a false view of his true position. There were officers, especially within German security structures, who had at least as much influence as he did on anti-partisan operations. The most important of these was the head of the Sipo/SD, an umbrella organization which incorporated both the German Security Police and the Security Department. This body is often known as the ‘Gestapo’, though the Gestapo was in fact only one of the component units within the Sipo/SD. The chief of the Lyon Sipo/SD, which covered the Vercors area, was SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Knab, one of whose subordinates was Klaus Barbie.

Knab had a huge influence on the conduct and command of all anti-partisan operations in the Lyon area. Following some previous disagreement with his superiors he had been posted to the Ukraine, where he was assigned to one of the most notorious of the so-called ‘mobile killing units’ to ‘demonstrate his reliability’. This he succeeded in doing in quick order, gaining a reputation for the ruthless destruction of partisan units and unwanted elements such as Jews.

Pflaum himself, on the other hand, had first intended to wage a ‘clean war’ against the French Resistance. In fact, until around late April 1944 he believed (not perhaps without some justification) that the local population did not as a whole support the Resistance and that some were even hostile to it. By late spring 1944, however, Pflaum’s opinion and that of his division had become much more aggressive as the casualties from guerrilla actions started to rise. In the first five months of 1944, the division lost fifty-five of its soldiers, killed or wounded by the Resistance. In the ten weeks from June to mid-August that figure rose to 650. The totals for Resistance and civilians killed by the Germans rose commensurately – from sixty in February 1944 to 840 in July.

13

FEBRUARY 1944

February 1944 saw the pace of events begin to quicken towards the great event which everyone knew was ahead – some time, somewhere – in the coming year: the Allied invasion of the northern European mainland.

On 5 February Pflaum launched 2,000 men against Maquis concentrations around the towns of Nantua and Oyonnax in the southern Jura. The Resistance in this area was led by a remarkably successful guerrilla leader called Henri Romans-Petit, who, like Alain Le Ray, understood that the art of guerrilla warfare was not to stand and fight, but to hit and run. Aided by an unusually heavy snowfall, he and his men melted away into the forests. The Germans called off the operation on 13 February. Although they had temporarily cleared the operational area of ‘terrorists’, Romans-Petit suffered few losses and was able to return to his old positions very soon afterwards.

This was to be the first of three major operations conducted by Pflaum in the ten weeks from 2 February to 18 April, all in the area immediately south and west of Lake Geneva (see map). At this stage the Germans believed, like Churchill, that the main threat was not a southern landing but an Allied push through Italy, over the Alps and down the two communication corridors which ran south-west of Lake Geneva: the southern railway corridor past Aix-les-Bains and the Lac du Bourget and the western road corridor through to Nantua and Oyonnax.

This is not to say, however, that the Germans could afford to ignore the Vercors completely, for the Maquis on the plateau were still highly active. On the night of 1/2 February, for example, the transformers at the Saint-Bel works in Grenoble were sabotaged and 2,700 kilograms of explosive were stolen. On 19 February, another sabotage attack on the station at La Mure, south of Grenoble, destroyed a train and winding gear. On 29 February, a dozen or so locomotives were blown up at Veynes station, 15 kilometres south of the Vercors.

At dawn on 3 February, the day after the start of Pflaum’s operation in the Jura, Paul Adam was on guard duty in the deep snow, with a friend, a Sten gun, two grenades and a telephone. Their sentry post was positioned on a railway viaduct a kilometre or so north-east of the deserted thirteenth-century monastery of Our Lady of Esparron. Here, the previous November, he and his fellow Maquisards had taken refuge from the bitter winter. It was dark and one of Paul Adam’s Maquisard friends had just left, hitching a lift to a meeting on a passing train. He was followed a little later by another on his way home to pick up some washing from his mother. ‘[Suddenly] the noise of some vehicles attracted our attention,’ Paul Adam wrote later, ‘but we thought it was only the lorries arriving at the nearby saw-mill. I was just in the process of telephoning the monastery to ask for a change of guard, when my mate, who had gone to stretch his legs on the viaduct, suddenly came dashing back shouting, “Les Boches! Les Boches!”’

The two men started to climb the slope towards the monastery, ‘but halfway up we heard a shout which stopped us dead in our tracks. Thirty metres away, on the road leading up to the monastery, I saw vehicles. I got ready to fire on the ones in front of us which were full of troops, hoping to escape in the chaos which would ensue, when suddenly a huge German leading a patrol of twelve others came round the corner … beyond him there was an armoured car with machine guns mounted on a turntable which began to rotate towards us, its guns firing … Since it was clearly impossible to get back to the monastery where we could hear a fierce firefight already in progress … we went back to the viaduct through the woods. As we got there, a train arrived pulling cattle wagons. The doors were open and we could see that carriage after carriage was filled with Germans … After the train had passed, we saw, below the viaduct, some vehicles, one of which had a fat German leaning against his cab, chatting while he lit a cigarette. He took several deep pulls on his fag, stuck one hand in his pocket and began to admire the countryside. “It’s all over for you my friend,” I said to myself and, taking aim at some kind of badge he had on his chest, I fired. He dropped dead without even letting go of his cigarette … after a forced march over rocks and across mountain torrents we finally arrived at a station, where we knew a train would pass in an hour or so … The station master gave us each a blue denim working shirt and an old hat as disguise and let us board the train without tickets, our stripped-down Stens hidden in our haversacks.’

Back at the monastery, Jean Sadin was getting up when the German attack started: ‘It was just getting light … I was doing up my laces when suddenly I saw a signal maroon hanging in the sky … then a second and a third … We quickly woke everyone up. Suddenly a rattle of machine-gun fire hit the area round my window. I leapt to one side and took up a position where I was able to see some Germans enter a building not 30 metres away. After a brief attempt at resistance, our commander gave the order to disperse – every man for himself. My friend, not hearing my cries … dashed out and was immediately cut down … We managed to flee by a back door, taking refuge among the bushes and rocks near by. As we ran, a huge explosion rocked the monastery building behind us.’

Amazingly, only two of the Esparron Maquis were killed. If the German attack had been more efficiently prosecuted, if they had followed their normal practice and surrounded the monastery, many more would have died.

The unusually heavy February 1944 fall of snow also affected another gathering of Maquisards 60 kilometres to the north, on the ‘impregnable fortress’ of the Glières plateau, which dominates the main Geneva–Chamonix road and railway, some 15 kilometres north-east of Annecy. Many regarded this high plateau, which was an ideal site for the parachuting of arms, as more impregnable and easier to defend than the Vercors. On 7 February, Churchill was shown an urgent telegram from one of London’s agents describing the situation on the plateau: ‘VERY urgent. We have given the order to take strong action in the Savoie. We ask for instant despatch of parachute troops and arms, above all machine guns – and also air support. We are ready for action but we urgently need aid and assistance.’ The British Prime Minister was asked to give special priority to the plateau, whose fall would have ‘severe repercussions for the whole of the Resistance’.

Over the previous weeks, encouraged by calls by the French service of the BBC, Maquisards had flooded on to the Glières plateau, including some fifty Spanish republicans and numerous retired soldiers from the area. By the end of February, it was reported that there were now ‘350 trained and experienced men [who are] occupying an exceptionally strong position on the … plateau’. This was followed by a string of optimistic messages, which spoke of the ‘citadel of the Glières’ and ‘The high morale of our Maquis who take on … day by day, the semblance of regular troops who are disciplined and well led. If we can adequately supply them from the air, we will have here a body of men who can be used when D-Day comes.’ On 19 February material was sent from the plateau for use in a BBC broadcast: ‘We shall remain on this impregnable plateau with the banner: “Live in Freedom or Die”.’

In the second half of February a clandestine meeting, attended by senior Resistance leaders in the region, was held in Lyon to discuss overall strategy. The concept of establishing ‘redoubts of Resistance’, as proposed by Ferdinand Miksche in his report of 20 January, was discussed. Henry Thackthwaite, the SOE agent leading the Union Mission, was there and strongly opposed the idea of fixed defence, preferring a mobile defence in which the Maquisards would retire before a German advance, while keeping them under fire during the day and then attacking them on the flanks and from behind at night. He was supported by the then head of the Secret Army in the area, Albert Chambonnet. When it came to guerrilla warfare, Chambonnet, who was not of the French Army but an ex-Air Force officer, held the same opinion as Romans-Petit and Alain Le Ray. On 9 February he had issued instructions to the Maquis in his area, ‘Never accept frontal combat with the enemy. Pull back and attack his flanks without mercy.’ A few days after the Lyon meeting Chambonnet wrote a prophetic letter expanding on his views: ‘If we concentrate our forces in the most defendable mountainous areas, two possibilities will ensue; either the enemy will attack and destroy them, or they will be content to block them and our best forces will be locked up and neutralized.’ Later still, in April, Chambonnet wrote a note on the specific subject of the Vercors: ‘A vast apparatus [is being assembled] on the Vercors in order to strike a decisive and “brilliant” blow against key enemy positions along the main Alpine routes … I am firmly opposed.’ Tragically, Chambonnet’s warnings went unheeded.*