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

We had to change our whole approach according to five principal aims:

1. The elimination of all the damaging distinctions between the military and the civilians. We were now united together under a single category: Resistance fighters.

2. A structure of command which was as simple and direct as possible.

3. The elimination of all embedded prejudices, especially where the lifestyles of the Maquis groups could have the effect of damaging relations with the local villages.

4. A dual role for those who remained in their own communities waiting for the call to action:* providing intelligence, early warning, food and supplies to the Maquis, putting together teams, quickly and on demand, for specific assignments.

5. The strengthening of the professional and leadership elements in each of the Maquis groups.

It was in pursuit of the fourth of these, ‘A dual role for those who remained in their own communities’, that a decision was taken which was to have a profound effect on all those who lived around the Vercors during the struggle ahead. Conscious that there would be a general mobilization of forces when the Allies landed, Le Ray proposed that a reserve force made up of four secret Maquisard companies should be raised from the young men of the communities lying outside the mountainous perimeter of the Vercors. Each of these would be led by a professional military officer who would provide them with training at the weekends. No doubt one of Le Ray’s motives in proposing this reserve force was to help deepen the connection between the military and the local civil society. But it had strong military advantages too for it provided, not just reinforcement which could be called to the plateau when required, but also a kind of informal militarized cordon around its outside edge which would act both as a warning system and as a line of defence in case of attack.

One of these companies was founded by a Socialist professor of mathematics at the Romans Technical College, André Vincent-Beaume, and was constituted from young volunteers from the towns of Romans, Bourg-de-Péage and Saint-Donat-sur-l’Herbasse off the western edge of the plateau. A secret programme of recruitment to what was eventually to become Abel Company began in the three towns in June 1943, with recruits being drawn from factories, warehouses, offices, local clubs (especially the rugby club) and even the patient lists of a doctor and a dentist in the area. Provisioning and money for the clandestine unit was provided from local sources, chiefly by collections in factories, churches and clubs. A hundred pairs of boots were donated by a local factory owner (this area is famous in France as the centre of the shoe industry) and funds were banked in the Romans branch of the Banque Populaire.

Serious training, conducted mostly by military professionals and consisting of long forced marches, military manoeuvres and occasional firing of weapons, began in July. At weekends the young men of Abel Company would quietly melt away from their communities and reassemble in forest clearings or at mountain refuges on the high pastures of the plateau, returning on Sunday evening ready for work next day. In August, Abel Company, now numbering some 235 Maquisards and divided into four sections, was formally given its proposed area of operation when full mobilization on ‘Jour J’ occurred – they were to help defend the whole of the south-west quadrant of the plateau.

The D-Day mobilization process itself was carefully planned. Special signs were prepared which would be nailed to trees and barn doors indicating where to find assembly points, there was a mass purchase of Michelin maps of the area, camping gear was requisitioned from local sporting and hardware shops and each Maquisard was required to have a rucksack ready packed for quick departure containing a candle, spare shoes, a blanket, a waterproof sheet, a set of mess-tins, eating utensils and a water bottle.

On the other side of the Vercors massif, in the little market town of Mens in the Trièves region, under the plateau’s south-eastern corner, the same thing was happening.

‘You free this evening after 8 p.m.?’ asked Jacques, who owned a saw-mill at the entry to Mens. It was six o’clock in the evening and almost dark when he had knocked on the door of the Darier house. The evening light caught the last streaks of unmelted snow on the slopes of the Bonnet de Calvin, high above the little town.

‘Sure. I can easily be free,’ Albert Darier replied.

‘Good.’ Jacques continued, ‘I know you believe in the Resistance. But we have nothing organized here. One of the key men in the Secret Army is coming tonight to see if we can set up a unit in the Trièves. If you would like, why not come along and meet him – and bring anyone else you think might be interested.’

When Albert Darier, who turned twenty-one that year, and six of his closest companions arrived at 20.00 precisely in the first-floor private room set aside in the Café de Paris, he found a brightly lit space with several chairs set around a table on which stood a small vase of spring flowers. His friend Jacques and a young stranger, who was introduced as ‘Emmanuel, one of the local chiefs of the Secret Army’, were already there. Otherwise the room was empty.

At first the stranger seemed a little disappointed that there were so few of them. But Albert Darier explained that he had known of the meeting only a couple of hours previously and had not had time for discreet contact with more of his friends. Reassured, the stranger spoke of the need to resist the enemy in organized groups and to play a part in the liberation and future of France. He continued, ‘I warn you. It will be hard. Some of us will not return … There will be few to help us. We will not be protected by the laws of war, because we will be “terrorists”. And we will be fighting more than just men. We will be fighting the beast of the Nazi regime … This beast will defend itself with blood and terrible savagery. And it will become even more terrible as its final agonies draw near.’ The six young men sitting round the table hung on every consonant and syllable the mysterious stranger spoke. ‘We will have not just to defend, but also to attack. We will certainly have to kill … But to fight we shall need arms. And at present I have none … I don’t know when exactly the arms will come. But I do know they will come. They have been promised. Maybe not tomorrow, but in due course.’

By now it was late and the Café de Paris had already closed. One by one the new recruits slipped down the back stairs and out into the darkness to their homes, their warm beds and the comfort of their families. The Mens platoon of the Compagnie de Trièves had been formed. In due course they would be given the crucial task of defending the high passes on the south-east corner of the Vercors’ eastern ramparts. Slowly but surely Alain Le Ray was creating a ragged but surprisingly capable guerrilla force – except of course for arms, of which they had none, apart from an occasional old hunting rifle and what little was left of the arms smuggled out of Grenoble that the Italians hadn’t found.

On 10 and 11 August 1943 the leadership of the Organisation Vercors arranged a mass convocation of all the Vercors Maquis and those from the neighbouring areas, on the high pasture of Darbonouse, overlooked by the Grand Veymont which towers above the eastern plateau. Maquis groups and their leaders from across the plateau and beyond made their way up the mountain to a meeting point in a small natural amphitheatre in front of a shepherd’s hut, located in a hidden dip in the middle of the Darbonouse pasture. Sentries were posted at strategic points around the area and each group were required to provide their names and give the password – ‘Great Day’. The Maquis chiefs were accommodated in the shepherd’s hut. Tents stolen from the valley were erected for the rest. Formal proceedings were opened on 10 August with a singing of the ‘Marseillaise’ and the raising of the national flag. Le Ray’s original plan seems to have been to have two days of open-air discussions and then take the Organisation’s leaders on a tour of inspection of key sites on the plateau. But the clouds swept in and it started to rain, so this was abandoned.

There is no reliable record of how many attended this gathering, which some have compared, rather grandly, with the great feast at the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790, a key event in Revolutionary France. We do know, however, that all the main Vercors leaders were there, including Le Ray, Chavant, Samuel and Prévost, as well as many of the heads of the newly formed Maquisard companies and others among the second echelon of Vercors leaders, including a doctor from Romans, Dr Fernand Ganimède, who will feature later in our story.

Le Ray opened proceedings with a statement of intent: ‘We have to eliminate all passive attitudes among our people. Our Maquis companies must be divided into highly mobile groups of thirty with the majority coming from those who have been in the camps already established. The danger lies in us becoming too settled in one place – too fixed. Mobility, speed and prudence – these are our best defences.’

He then outlined three possible future strategies. The first was a fortress strategy in which the Vercors would be held against all comers. The second, which he called the ‘hedgehog’ strategy, was to use the plateau as a base from which raids could be mounted on the Germans in the valley, with the raiders disappearing into the forests if they themselves were attacked. The third strategy was effectively Plan Montagnards – a proposal to turn the Vercors into an airbase to be held as an advanced bastion for a few days only, so as to enable airborne troops to fly in, consolidate and then begin attacking German lines of communications in the valley, while at the same time widening the secure base to other areas. It was this latter view which won the day, though some were worried it gave the starring role to the incoming paras, leaving the Maquisards as bystanders to the main action.

Despite the incessant rain, which caused the convocation to break up on 11 August, everyone realized that a watershed had passed. They had a united organization and a clear strategy to follow: ‘Never had the Vercors been more confident. Never had it been more sure of itself. Never had it been so united.’

Some time in August 1943 a tall Englishman with unusually large feet came to the Vercors for a meeting with Eugène Chavant. The twenty-seven-year-old Francis Cammaerts, alias ‘Roger’, was arguably one of the most successful of all SOE agents in wartime France. He had been landed by Lysander on 21 March 1943, two days after Moulin and Delestraint had landed at Melay. Equipped with a false identity in the name of Charles Robert Laurent, he had orders to assess the work of an SOE ‘circuit’ run by Peter Churchill and his courier Odette Sansom near Annecy in the Savoie. But he soon realized that Churchill’s security was so bad that it was only a matter of time before his organization was penetrated by the Gestapo. In fact Cammaerts only just managed to avoid the catastrophe when Churchill and many of his colleagues were arrested. Cammaerts duly set about constructing his own network under his SOE codename Jockey, which extended across the whole of the south and east of France. By the time ‘Grands Pieds’ (as he was quickly christened by Chavant) came to the Vercors he was, despite his youth, already respected even by hardened Maquis leaders twice his age and had become a marked man, much sought after by the Germans. One of the reasons for Cammaerts’ success was the scrupulous attention he paid to security and to the welfare of his agents and the fact that he ran his network through a series of isolated and unconnected cells so as to limit the danger of total collapse if one was penetrated.

‘I met … Eugène Chavant … and we walked up [the mountain] together and met a couple of the military chaps,’* Cammaerts said later of this visit. ‘It was obvious that Plan Montagnards had an enormous amount to commend it and I backed it as much as I could … The supposition was that after Normandy there would be either a sea landing in the south of France very shortly or an airborne landing where the troops, backed by the Resistance … [would land in mountainous areas such as the Vercors] which we could have held … against anything the Germans could put up … for the forty-eight hours it would take them [the parachutists] to gather their material together and be in combat trim.’

What is striking about these events of July and August is that the Italians, who had caused so many problems for the Vercors Maquisards earlier in the year, seem effectively to have vanished from the scene, more concerned perhaps with events at home in Italy than with what happened in the country they were occupying. On 17 August, a week after the Darbonouse gathering broke up, the Allies declared Sicily (which had been invaded once North Africa had been secured) free of Axis troops. Allied forces were now poised only a stone’s throw from the Italian mainland with an invasion expected any day.

Despite the easing of Italian pressure, the task facing leaders of the Organisation Vercors as they attempted to coordinate action on the plateau remained challenging. The temporary vacuum of local leadership caused by the May and June arrests had resulted in a climate of free-for-all when it came to forming new Resistance organizations. Now anyone could start their own Maquis – and they did. These newly formed Resistance groups varied greatly in quality – some good, many bad and a few deeply corrupt.

Among the latter category was a Maquis group led by an ex-policeman from Lyon called Marcel Roudet. A close collaborator of the equally dubious Chief of Police in Lyon, Roudet bought a café in La Chapelle some time in 1943 and started his own Maquis, which he used to ‘legitimize’ what was essentially a criminal gang specializing in theft, the black market and extortion. In due course Roudet, himself a heroin addict, became so powerful that he was even capable of terrorizing Eugène Samuel and was said by many to have ‘the whole of the south in his pocket’. As Albert Darier recalled, ‘He was big, strong and had the look of a real gangster chief about him. Roudet was impressive, even menacing, to look at. Always explosive, always on the edge, always prone to pulling out his revolver at the slightest provocation, he was at his most terrifying when he needed a “fix”. Then he would go into the nearest chemist and demand an ampoule of morphine with menaces. As soon as he had left the shop, one of his men, whose job it was, would take out the syringe which he always carried, and inject Roudet’s arm then and there on the street.’

Another ‘freelance’ Maquis, but one of a very different nature, was the Groupe Vallier, founded by the twenty-four-year-old Paul Gariboldy, a one-time draughtsman at the Merlin-Gerin engineering works in Grenoble. This group of audacious young desperadoes quickly became famous for their flamboyant dress, insouciance in the face of danger and expertise at assassinating collaborators even in broad daylight on the streets of Grenoble. Gariboldy himself was described by a Resistance comrade as ‘An extraordinary man. Full of passion. He was afraid of nothing. He was maybe brave to the point of foolhardiness. He just didn’t know where or how to stop.’

But when it came to assassination, no one was more feared on the plateau than ‘Petit René’ (his real name was René Lefèvre), who had been forced to watch when his mother and father had been summarily executed by the Germans. He had sworn implacable vengeance against the occupiers and all who collaborated with them. Small of stature, with finely drawn lips, a nervous rictus smile and a facial tattoo illustrating the four aces, he killed without pity – always, according to Vercors legend, downing a glass of undiluted anisette in one gulp to steady his nerves before each execution. René was rumoured, by mid-1944, to have executed more than fifty targets, chiefly collaborators of one sort or another, though this figure is certainly a gross exaggeration.

During the winter of 1943/4, Le Ray and Chavant did their best, with varying degrees of success, to bring these independent groups under central control. Chavant in particular was strongly opposed to summary executions and insisted, especially latterly, that the death penalty for traitors should be carried out only after due process – even though this was, initially at least, of a fairly rudimentary sort.

By this time, the social base of the local Resistance movement had widened. The Vercors women, involved right from the start in the first Resistance structures, were now playing a more important role. Alongside the domestic burdens of keeping families together while husbands and sons were in the forests and delivering bread, pails of milk or bags of pâté and cheeses to groups of desperate, hungry young men, the women of the Vercors also carried heavy loads when it came to more direct engagement in the active work of the Resistance. Some like Paulette Jacquier led a Maquis group in their own right. Others such as Charlotte Mayaud and Geneviève Blum-Gayet were closely involved from the start in the second Combat Committee which had been established in June. Gaby Lacarrière and Jacqueline Gröll from Sassenage, still in their teens, acted as spies and couriers, carrying out numerous sorties by bicycle through the checkpoints and into Grenoble on missions to gather information or carry vital packages and messages both to and from the plateau. Léa Blain, a young girl from the village of Chatte west of the Vercors Massif, came to the plateau to help with the coding and decoding of secret telegrams for London and subsequently paid for it with her life. As did Rose Jarrand, the schoolmistress at the little village of Les Chabottes close to Saint-Agnan on the plateau, whose classrooms were used for a period as an arms depot.

Pierrette Fave later wrote to her new husband Robert, who was already in the Resistance, explaining why she wanted to join him: ‘The circumstances demanded that we young should be active, not passive … For some, I was just a young girl who ran off. But I was utterly committed – I wanted to join the Resistance as you had done. At 20 you want to change the world. Or at least you want to try. I regret none of it, but it was hard.’ Pierrette Fave was not alone in rejecting passivity in favour of action.

Many local priests felt the same. The Catholic Church within France had initially responded to the Franco-German Armistice by recognizing the legitimacy of the Vichy government and declaring that armed resistance was a mortal sin. At the introduction of the STO the Church hierarchy, fearing civil war, ordered obedience to Laval’s order and advised those called up to follow instructions and leave for Germany. The long-serving Bishop of Grenoble, Alexandre Caillot, known as the ‘most Pétainist Bishop in France’, retained this view till the end of the war. There was also at least one churchman suspected of passing information to the Germans.

But these ‘collaborators’ were the exception. By early 1944, the majority of ordinary priests adopted an increasingly militant, pro-Resistance stance. Some were leaders of Maquis groups – Abbé Pierre led one in the Vercors on the Sornin plateau – while many others served as ordinary footsoldiers. The beautiful twelfth-century abbey and convent at Léoncel, below the south-western edge of the plateau, was used by the wireless operators of at least two clandestine radios in direct communication with London. As one Vercors combatant, no lover of the Church and its ways, put it: ‘The Vercors priests were a rugged breed, and not at all like the soft idiots in the Bishop’s palace. They were deeply integrated into their villages and communities, where the leadership of the priest was much respected. Throughout the long period of suffering and pain of the occupation they never hesitated to show their commitment by publicly castigating from their pulpits, both the Nazis and the French who served them.’ A British officer in the Vercors described one of the local priests bending down to pray over the body of a dead Maquisard, causing his surplice to lift up at the back, revealing ‘the leather belt around his cassock, fixed onto which was a Colt 45 automatic pistol and about half a dozen [hand] grenades’.

Resistance sympathizers also included some who were supposed to be active servants of the Vichy state. Many town Gendarmeries were especially prone to turning a blind eye to Resistance activity – in some cases even participating themselves. By the end of the summer of 1943 most ordinary members of local communities were at least passively sympathetic to the Resistance, though, as we shall see, this may have had less to do with genuine commitment and more to do with the fact that there were almost no penalties attached to supporting or even assisting the Resistance. The Italian occupying forces did not, in the main, indulge in sanctions or reprisals against the civilian population. This was, however, about to change.

* They were called sédentaires – that is, Resistants who stayed in the farms and communities in which they lived and continued their work as normal during the day, but trained secretly as Maquisards at the weekends.

* Probably Le Ray and de Beauregard.

9

PRESSURE AND PARACHUTES

The Allies invaded Italy proper on 3 September 1943. Corsica rose the following day, thanks largely to the Communists but aided by the British. Peeved at being bypassed in the first French liberation victory, de Gaulle later commented sourly, ‘British intelligence, which ordinarily did not go out of their way to be generous without ulterior motive, procured ten thousand machine guns [for the Communists].’ Five days later, on 8 September, Marshal Badoglio (Mussolini had already been deposed on 25 July) signed an armistice between the Italian government and the Allies in Cassibile in Sicily.

The German response to the Italian surrender was pre-planned, swift and bloody. Since 15 July, ten days before the fall of Mussolini, French agents in the Savoie had reported to London that heavy German troop concentrations were seen moving south towards Grenoble. On 6 August, a German infantry division, redeployed from Brittany, was reported transiting the city, heading for the Italian border. On 30 August, the German 157th Reserve Division under the command of the fifty-two-year-old Generalleutnant Karl Ludwig Pflaum established its headquarters in the city.

Within hours of the Italian surrender, German troops occupied Grenoble, forcibly ejecting the Italians from their barracks. There were running battles between Italian and German troops on the streets of the city and a ‘massacre’ of Italian officers at the Hôtel les Trois Dauphins in Place Grenette. Some Italian soldiers immediately joined the Resistance, but most fled for home. Desperate Italian troops were seen passing through the Trièves area heading for the Italian border 70 kilometres away.

With Grenoble under German control, it was not long before the Gestapo arrived in the city. Their headquarters were established in the Hôtel Moderne, while another building, 28 Cours Berriat, was converted into an interrogation centre. This address was soon to become infamous in the city as a place of torture. The Gestapo rapidly found their hands full, not because of the Vercors, but because of what was happening outside their own front door. On a bright afternoon in October Paul Gariboldy emptied a whole magazine from the window of a speeding car at the Milice headquarters in the Hôtel de l’Angleterre less than a kilometre from Gestapo headquarters, shouting, ‘Get out. France is free,’ as his vehicle sped away to the sound of tinkling glass and the echoes of gunfire reverberating from the nearby buildings. On 6 October, a jumpy German sentry shot dead a local engineer who was fumbling in his pocket for his house key. By now, tension was rising dangerously in the city. On 11 November, the anniversary of the signing of the 1918 Armistice, the call went out from Resistance circles for a strong show of defiance to ‘raise our voices once more against the [German] oppression’.

At 10.00 on 11 November, more than 1,500 people turned out ‘as if from a signal’ and marched towards the Diables Bleus monument to the French Chasseurs Alpins to celebrate France’s First World War victory over the Germans. The demonstrators were stopped by a massive show of force by the Vichy police, who herded them back to the city centre where they found themselves blocked by a troop of Germans with machine guns. Caught in a sandwich between the police behind and the machine guns in front, they were embroiled in a tense stand-off. The German officer’s orders in these circumstances were to open fire, but the police intervened and, arresting many, dispersed the crowd. More than 600 protesters were subsequently tried and deported; 120 of them were never seen again.