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

Then the feasting began: ‘The menu would have dignified a prince … the food seemed to have come from every corner of the land. The baker at Cognin brought breads and cakes. A veal calf had been carried down from Rencurel and all the fish and fowl of the area seemed to have been gathered together in our church, especially to grace our Christmas. There were even two cases of champagne freshly arrived from Reims. The feasting went on all the night. Songs were sung; an accordion was brought out – then more songs and more songs until finally the dawn burst in among us. On this night, for us, the men of the Maquis, life was wonderful.’

Surely, next year – 1944 – the Allies would land and France would be free again. And then life would be wonderful every year.

* The phrase is a Russian one which is used to account for the fact that so many winter invasions of the country have failed. Russians also refer to ‘General Snow’ and ‘General Mud’.

* Festivities at Christmas.

10

THE LABOURS OF HERCULES

As the men of the Malleval Maquis were celebrating the Christmas season waist deep in snow, Winston Churchill, dressed in his famous silk dressing gown emblazoned with a red dragon, was lying in bed in an airy room in General Eisenhower’s villa in Carthage (prophetically called La Maison Blanche), recovering from pneumonia and a heart attack. Denied his customary cigar and restrained in his consumption of alcohol, he was tetchy and fulminating against ‘the scandalous … stagnation’ of the Italian campaign.

It is tempting to believe that his complaints about the slow progress in Italy might have been a displacement activity for the much bigger personal setback he had just suffered at the hands of his ‘friend’ President Roosevelt at the Tehran Tripartite Conference which had just ended. At Tehran, the American President had blindsided Churchill by teaming up with Stalin to defeat one of the Prime Minister’s most ardent and long-favoured schemes, the invasion of what he called the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ on a line which began on the Pisa–Rimini axis in Italy and ran through the Balkans to the oilfields of Rumania. Churchill had invested hugely in arms, supplies and support for Tito’s Yugoslav guerrillas as a preparation for this assault, which was now, thanks to the US/Russian alliance, to be abandoned in favour of a simultaneous double invasion of France, one from the north across the Channel (Overlord) and the second from the south across the Mediterranean from Algiers (Anvil). It was easy to see why the Soviets were opposed to Churchill’s Balkan plans – they saw this area as their sphere of post-war influence and did not want the British anywhere near it. Roosevelt’s reasons were less understandable. He mistakenly believed he could establish a post-war strategic alliance with Stalin and needed Soviet support for what he saw as the cornerstone of this new relationship, the establishment of the United Nations. Churchill was left hurt and fuming at this first stark evidence of Britain’s coming weakness between the two superpowers in the post-war world. ‘There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo and, between the two, the poor little English donkey who was the only one … who knew the right way home.’

The decisions of Tehran had now shifted the entire axis of the Allied European war effort from the south and the east (Italy and the Balkans), where Churchill had made his greatest investment, to the north and the west (the Russian front and Overlord). Despite these crushing disappointments, the British Prime Minister was not a man to mope for long. If the overall strategy had changed, his must too. Now France, a country he knew well and loved deeply, was to be the main stage, not the Balkans. Within days of leaving his sickbed he was meeting members of the French Resistance in North Africa and planning how Britain, which had so far largely ignored French partisans in favour of those of Yugoslavia and Italy when supplying arms, could help foster the growth of the Resistance movement.

It is often said that Churchill was a dewy-eyed romantic when it came to partisans. He was. But his attachment to the fostering of internal resistance had a hard-edged military rationale, too; it was a way to keep occupied countries in a ferment of opposition against the Germans and to prevent them from relapsing into apathetic torpor, as France had done after the Armistice; it was also a means by which the ‘skill, dash and courage’ of British agents behind enemy lines could influence the outcome of events in ways which compensated for the relatively meagre matériel resources the country was able to commit at this stage of the war, compared with those of the US and Russian colossi. There were also those in Whitehall (perhaps even including Churchill himself) who thought that, in terms of blood and loss, France’s sacrifice during the war had so far been small. So it was no great thing to ask her now to risk a greater price for her own liberation.

Churchill had always admired de Gaulle, even if he did not like him. But up to now the French General had been just another leader-in-exile of a conquered European country and these were two to the penny in the London of 1941–3 – though, as Foreign SecretaryAnthony Eden ruefully admitted, de Gaulle stood out from the crowd because he caused ‘us [the British government] more difficulties than all our other European allies put together’. Now, however, with France the main stage for the next phase of the war in the West, de Gaulle, the territory of France and the capabilities of the French Resistance took on new strategic importance.

De Gaulle himself had started 1943 with few assets and even fewer friends. Disliked by Roosevelt, disregarded by the British war leadership and personally irksome to Churchill, he had almost nothing going for him – and very little he could call his own in France or among the Free French either. Like the Pope, of whom Stalin famously asked ‘How many Divisions does he have?’, de Gaulle may have been the spiritual embodiment of the French Resistance, but of actual ‘Divisions’ he had few.

De Gaulle might have expected that Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa and the liberation of the French colony of Algeria (where Eisenhower had now set up his headquarters), would have strengthened his position as the French leader with whom the Allies had to deal. In fact the opposite happened.

The Americans chose instead Henri Giraud, a French general who had been captured at the fall of France, been imprisoned in Königstein Castle, escaped under curious circumstances and made his way to Toulon where an Allied submarine had picked him up and delivered him to Gibraltar. He arrived on the Rock only a few hours before the start of Operation Torch. Eisenhower promptly asked him to assume command of all French troops in North Africa. Giraud at first refused because he was not commanding the whole Allied operation, but eventually relented. When he left Gibraltar for Algiers on 9 November 1942, Giraud remarked, ‘You may have seen something of the large De Gaullist demonstration that was held here last Sunday. Some of the demonstrators sang the Marseillaise. I entirely approve of that! Others sang the Chant du Départ [a military ballad]. Quite satisfactory! Others again shouted “Vive de Gaulle!” No objection. But some of them cried “Death to Giraud!” I don’t approve of that at all.’

Giraud knew perfectly well that de Gaulle was his deadly rival for the leadership of the free and the fighting French. But he also knew who was in the dominant position – he was, and by far. With the personal support of Roosevelt and the practical support of Eisenhower, he was in the place that mattered most – Algiers – and he commanded not only more French troops but also the only formed French units at that time fighting alongside their Allied comrades.

Giraud’s support inside France was less certain. But then so was de Gaulle’s. At the beginning of 1943, the Resistance was quarrelsome, fragmentary, diverse and riven by political rivalry. There were Gaullists to be sure. But also Giraudists. And many whose loyalties were to neither of the above, but to the Communists, the Socialists and even (still) to the Pétainists. The Secret Army was by comparison more Gaullist, but by no means uniformly so. Meanwhile, as de Gaulle understood very well, when it came to the actual government of France the relative position of the potential French leaders was going to be irrelevant, because the American President was planning to impose an Allied Military Government in Occupied Territories – known as an AMGOT. France would be governed for a period at least, as Italy had been, by foreigners. That was Roosevelt’s plan. That was what Giraud was acquiescing in. He, de Gaulle, would not.

But, at the start of 1943, de Gaulle’s chances of fulfilling his aim of being the leader who took his country back to freedom, self-government and eventually great-power status seemed ambitious to say the least. To succeed, he had to make himself the unchallenged leader of the free and fighting French inside and outside France. That meant going head to head with the most powerful man in the world, President Roosevelt, and wresting power from his favourite, Giraud. Then he had to make himself and his supporters so indispensable to the liberation of France that a French government would follow, not a government of transition drawn up in Roosevelt’s back office. And he had to achieve this with limited influence and only few assets to his name. These were the labours of Hercules indeed. But, remarkably, by the end of 1943, de Gaulle had accomplished all of them.

On 30 May 1943, de Gaulle arrived in Algiers, having finally negotiated terms for a partnership with Giraud. Five days after his arrival, on 4 June, de Gaulle took to the airwaves on Radio Algiers: ‘Everything is now in play – our army and our navy are playing a key part in a drama of indescribable importance. Our sacred duty is to show again what great things can be accomplished by the arms of France.’ Not since Lenin had been smuggled into Russia in a sealed train had such an insertion of poison been accomplished with such devastating consequences into the body politic of the ruling (in this case Giraudist) establishment. In a series of moves of cunning and ruthlessness, de Gaulle progressively sidelined and then summarily removed Giraud, leaving himself in sole charge. It would take until the D-Day landings of June 1944 for Roosevelt to come to terms with this reality, but there was little he could do. Giraud was the past. De Gaulle was now the future.

De Gaulle’s success in gaining control of the power structures in Algiers was replicated inside France. Francis Cammaerts, who had a ringside seat in the key months, saw the shift of opinion and remarked on its speed. ‘In March 1943, still, Gaullism was not necessarily the only salvation. By August 1943 it was. No one in the Resistance in France thought that there was any solution to the French future except through de Gaulle …’ This represented an astonishing success for the General for it gave him the means, not just to unseat Giraud, but to play a direct role alongside the Allies in his country’s liberation. No government in France could now be formed without de Gaulle’s consent and active participation. In short, if de Gaulle could build up the political effect of the Resistance and make it a potent military force, then Roosevelt’s plan for a transitional government in France would be a dead letter.

Such a project, however, was not without its complications. On the one hand, the Resistance gave de Gaulle legitimacy, but, as one sharp-eyed commentator put it after the war, de Gaulle ‘had to navigate between two contradictory pitfalls: on the one hand to convince the Allies of the necessity to support the armed struggle as a means of reinforcing the legitimacy of Gaullism; and on the other to control and channel the internal struggle in France in such a way as … more effectively to integrate its activities into the plans of the Allies and, above all, prevent, within the metropolitan Resistance, the emergence of “counter-forces” capable of contesting [de Gaulle’s] capacity to govern the country after the Liberation’.

De Gaulle’s second problem was that the French Resistance was held in very low regard by the British and American authorities. Churchill loved France and recognized its claims to great-power status. But he was not averse to making unflattering comparisons between the French Resistance and Tito’s Yugoslav partisans, who were tying down some twenty German divisions in bloody guerrilla warfare. Roosevelt, on the other hand, had something close to contempt for France, seeing it as a decadent imperial power which lacked the moral fibre Britain had shown in the early years of the war. On the question of the effectiveness of the 1943 French Resistance (or rather lack of it), the two leaders and their staffs were united: it could not in 1943, and would not in 1944, be able to deliver anything of weight to the coming battle on French soil. It was this opinion that de Gaulle had, by hook or by crook, to change.

Back in March 1943, the British War Cabinet had met to take the first of several decisions establishing the priorities for the supply of arms and equipment to partisan forces in Europe. It put France as third strategic priority behind the Italian-held islands, Corsica and Crete (taken as one) and Yugoslavia. These priorities were personally reconfirmed by Churchill himself in August and November of that year. A Cabinet paper at the end of March put total Resistance strength in France at 175,500. Yugoslavia, with a much smaller population, had partisans, they estimated, numbering 220,000. The paper included an annex showing Resistance strengths as a proportion of what it referred to as ‘net male population’. This showed that 30 per cent of ‘available’ men were in the Resistance in Norway, 6 per cent in Denmark and Poland, whereas in France, no doubt because of its internal divisions, it was just 3 per cent.

An SOE assessment in May and June 1943 pronounced the French Resistance ‘at its lowest ebb’ and added that its forces ‘could not be counted on to be a serious factor unless and until they were rebuilt on a smaller and sounder basis’. The paper ended by warning that this would require a ‘total reorganisation and reformation’. London’s reaction to the deficiencies in the Resistance organization was to send out tripartite ‘missions’ made up of representatives of France, Britain and the US with the task of assessing what needed to be done to mend the gaping holes left by Gestapo arrests and to create a new structure of organizational control. One of these missions in October 1943 estimated Resistance strength in the maquis of the Rhône-Alpes as 2,300 and described the Vercors camps they had visited as ‘modestly equipped and armed, adequately turned out given the very difficult conditions, good morale’.

Having elbowed Giraud out of the way, de Gaulle was now free to take further steps to reform the command and control of the Resistance by setting up Committees of Liberation in all the French departments and naming military delegates for each of the three administrative levels of the country – national, zonal and regional. The General was beginning to assemble a government for France, though it would take long tortuous months before first the British and then, finally and reluctantly, Roosevelt gave formal recognition to this. Over succeeding months this structure was progressively strengthened, in large part prompted by the fact that, by the end of November 1943, it was clear that an invasion of France was being planned and that, citing security as the reason, the British and Americans were going neither to involve, consult nor indeed even inform de Gaulle about what they had in mind.

De Gaulle was predictably furious at the snub. But it also presented him with a real practical problem. If he knew nothing of Allied plans, how could he ensure that the Resistance would be in a position to assist when the great moment came? His answer was to set up a special planning unit in December 1943 to prepare a ‘rational plan for the participation of Resistance activity in the eventuality of an Allied landing on French soil’, without having the first idea where the landings would be, what form they would take or how they would be exploited. De Gaulle made his position clear in a speech given on 8 October 1943, in liberated Corsica: ‘Victory is approaching. It will be the victory of liberty. How could such a victory not be the victory of France as well?’

One of the key staff in the planning unit de Gaulle had set up was an exceptionally able captain of Czech origin, Ferdinand Otto Miksche. On 20 January 1944, Miksche produced a study listing the options before the British and American planners, drawing conclusions about which in the end they would be most likely to choose. It was astonishingly accurate in predicting that one of the most likely landing points was Normandy – a conclusion which would have deeply worried France’s allies, who were trying desperately to keep the location of Overlord secret. This study also proposed possible military actions which could be undertaken by the Resistance to assist the invasion, wherever it occurred. These were discussed with the British, who ‘showed a great deal of interest and asked for a second … detailed study of the conditions under which French resistance would help in the landing’.

In Miksche’s second study he stressed (somewhat hopefully) that the Resistance ‘although not an ensemble of regular military units [should] be looked upon as a regular Army obeying orders from the Allied High Command’. He also identified several territorial zones of France and how the Resistance might be employed as the Allied breakout from the beachhead developed. Among these were areas where ‘redoubts of Resistance’ would be established ‘in districts geographically unsuitable for large scale military operations’, such as the Alps (including the Vercors). Miksche’s plan continued the drift towards something more ambitious and permanent than Dalloz’s original Plan Montagnards (of which at this stage he had no knowledge). ‘In these redoubts’, he wrote, ‘the Maquis would be organized and be in readiness for sabotage and guerrilla operation behind enemy lines … the creation of permanent redoubts [emphasis added] would inevitably expand, even before D-Day, through the arrival of patriots who refused to accept forced labour for the enemy.’

The idea of ‘Resistance redoubts’ (réduits in French) was not a new one. On 13 November 1943, a secret meeting in Switzerland between British SOE representatives and a gathering of Resistance and Secret Army leaders (who were also unaware of the existence of Plan Montagnards) concluded with a recommendation that the Vercors (among other possible ‘redoubt’ areas) should be held ‘as a fortress from which raids could be made’ on German lines of communication. Two weeks later, on 29 November 1943, an experienced French agent, in London at the time, wrote a paper picking up on the fortress idea and proposing the establishment of ‘geographic fortresses’ manned by ‘trained, disciplined, adequately armed and properly led forces’ in places like the Vercors. The aim was ‘to place at the disposition of the Allied High Command, forces under their direct control which could offer operational possibilities comparable with parachute troops dropped in advance. These should be kept hidden until after, or exceptionally a little before, D-Day.’ Note the key proposition here. The Maquis would not create an area for paratroopers, but would instead take on the role of paratroopers dropped in advance.

On 31 December 1943, an SOE paper followed up this thinking and proposed that ‘small controlled areas’ should be created for the delivery of weapons and paratroops after D-Day. These would be established where ‘the Maquis [could] occupy ground which can be comparatively easily defended and thus controlled’. This imprecise language left it open for some to believe that the Maquis could defend these controlled areas by themselves. In the fertile soil around this lacuna, muddled thinking, unclear orders and military folie de grandeur would take root, flourish and ultimately cost the lives of many hundreds of the young, the inexperienced and the innocent.

Pierre Dalloz arrived in Algiers on 25 November 1943 having completed a long and hazardous crossing of France under the false identity of René Brunet, an even more dangerous one over the snow-bound passes of the Pyrenees and a short stay in Gibraltar. He was horrified that no record of or interest in Plan Montagnards could be found in any quarter. He immediately sat down and reconstructed the plan from memory, dictating it to the personal secretary of one of de Gaulle’s most senior advisers (see Annex B). It was to be to no avail. When Dalloz finally arrived in London at the end of January 1944, he was to find that those who should have been aware of his plan were as ignorant of its existence in the British capital as their counterparts had been in the North African one.

The truth was that when it came to deciding the fate of the Vercors, the template now being used was not Dalloz’s carefully calibrated Plan Montagnards but something altogether more ambitious. Some among those, British and French, who were directing the Resistance from London were beginning to believe that the young men who had first taken refuge on the Vercors plateau and then been turned into a rough guerrilla fighting force might, in due course and with a little help, be able to take on a face-to-face defensive battle with the gathered might of the German Army.

Between Christmas and New Year – at about the same time that Churchill in his sickbed in Carthage was concluding he had to take the French Resistance more seriously – one of London’s ‘mission leaders’, who had now teamed up with the Maquisards on another of the planned redoubts, the Glières plateau east of Geneva, sent a message to London: ‘We consider that the Glières plateau is now an impregnable fortress.’

It would not be long before this boast, and with it the developing concept of the ‘defendable redoubt’, would be tested.

11

JANUARY 1944

Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigérie, aristocrat, adventurer, libertine, Socialist, one-time self-proclaimed Communist, eternal optimist, Resistance leader and senior member of de Gaulle’s government-in-exile in Algiers, was summoned to attend the British Prime Minister in the Villa Taylor in Marrakesh at 10.00 on 15 January 1944. De Gaulle himself had just flown back to Algiers, having been in Marrakesh for a morning parade of troops, over which he and Churchill had jointly presided as a show of unity between the two men. It may even have been that Churchill had deliberately waited for the General’s departure before calling d’Astier to see him.

D’Astier records that when he arrived at the Villa Taylor ‘Duff Cooper was there, as was Macmillan just back from Egypt … Clementine and Mary Churchill were on the terrace together with Diana Cooper, who despite her straw hat and chiffon veil looked like a Rossetti painting. Although it was winter it was as warm as a May day on the Île de France. An ADC came for me and led me through darkened rooms to a modest door which opened to reveal Churchill sitting in a large bed, a cigar clamped between his teeth. The nurse attending him stood up and left; the chamber was as small, sparse and white as a hospital room. Somewhat intimidated I stumbled into my first words in English but was soon at my ease … He was an accomplished verbal jouster – never quibbling over positions which he knew were untenable … always knowing when to feint and when to riposte, jumping from word to word, barking with anger from time to time, but chiefly for effect (though it brought the nurse scurrying back in on one occasion to relieve him of his cigar and put it out).’

At the end of two hours, Churchill, dressed in air-force-blue silk pyjamas, finally allowed de La Vigérie to turn the subject to the matter of Britain’s miserly approach to arming the French Resistance, about which d’Astier had complained publicly and vociferously. The Frenchman outlined the case for Britain to deliver something more than just warm words which, he claimed, was about all that had been given so far. Churchill appeared to listen and finally conceded, as though offering a great gift, ‘OK, we’ll give you what you need. I will give the orders myself. Come and see me in London and we will discuss it more.’ It was a piece of typical Churchillian gamesmanship, designed to get the maximum out of graciously conceding a position which had in fact been decided upon even before d’Astier entered the room.