Читать книгу The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 13

It is only the French themselves who understand fully the depth of the wounds inflicted by the fall of France in 1940. They had invested more in their Army than any other European nation with the exception of Germany. With around 500,000 regular soldiers, backed by 5 million trained reservists and supported by a fleet of modern tanks which some believed better than the German Panzers, the French Army was regarded – and not just by the French – as the best in the world.

It took the Germans just six weeks to shatter this illusion and force a surrender whose humiliation was the more excruciating because Hitler insisted that it took place in the very railway carriage where Germany had been brought to her knees in 1918. It is not the purpose of this book to delve in detail into how France fell. But one important element of those six weeks in the summer of 1940 is often overlooked. Not all of France’s armies were defeated.

The French Army of the Alps – the Armée des Alpes – never lost a battle. They held the high Alpine passes against a numerically superior Italian assault. And they stopped the German Army too, at the Battle of Voreppe, named for the little town just outside Grenoble which guards the narrows between the Vercors and the Chartreuse massifs. Indeed the Battle of Voreppe ended only when the French artillery, wreaking havoc on German tanks from positions on the northern tip of the Vercors plateau, were ordered to return to barracks because the ceasefire was about to come into force. Thanks to this action, Grenoble and the Vercors remained in French hands when the guns fell silent. But this was small comfort to the victorious French Alpine troops who now found that they were part of a humiliated army. They regarded themselves as undefeated by the Germans but betrayed by the Armistice and ached to recover their lost honour.

The French rout and the German columns pushing deeper and deeper into France set in train a flood of internal refugees who fled south in search of safety. It was estimated that some 8 to 9 million civilians – about a quarter of the French population – threw themselves on to the roads, seeking to escape the occupation. They were later referred to as les exodiens. Among them were 2 million Parisians, French families driven out of Alsace-Lorraine and many Belgians, Dutch and Poles who had made their homes in France.

The ceasefire between German and French troops came into force at 09.00 on 24 June 1940 and was followed by the Armistice a day later. Under the terms of this peace, France was divided in two. The northern half, known as the Zone Occupée or ZO, was placed under General Otto von Stülpnagel, named by Hitler as the German Military Governor of France. The southern half, the Zone Non-Occupée or ZNO, comprising about two-fifths of the original territory of metropolitan France, was to be governed by Marshal Pétain, who set up his administration in the central French town of Vichy. The two were separated by a Demarcation Line, virtually an internal frontier, which ran from the border with Switzerland close to Geneva to a point on the Spanish border close to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.

Map 2

There was another France created by the nation’s defeat and humiliation, but very few knew about it at the time. It had left with General Charles de Gaulle in a British plane from Mérignac airport outside Bordeaux not long before the Armistice was signed. On 18 June 1940, just two days after he arrived in London, de Gaulle made the first of his famous broadcasts to the French people: ‘has the last word been said? … Is defeat final? No! Believe me, I who am speaking to you from experience … and who tell you that nothing is lost for France … For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone! … This war is a world war. Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ The sentences were stirring enough. The problem was, almost no one in France heard them. In the early 1940s there were only 6 million radios in France and, since a quarter of France’s population were in captivity, or fighting, or on the roads fleeing the invader, there were not many who had the time to sit at home with their ears glued to the radio, even if they had one.

With almost 70,000 casualties, 1.8 million of her young men in German prisoner-of-war camps and la gloire française ground into the dust alongside the ancient standards of her army, France’s first reaction to her new conqueror was stunned acquiescence. Early reports arriving in London from French and British agents all speak of the feeble spirit of resistance in the country. In these first days, many, if not most, of the French men and women who had heard of de Gaulle saw him as a rebel against the legitimate and constitutional government in Vichy. They trusted Pétain to embody the true spirit of France and prepare for the day when they could again reclaim their country. After all, was he not the hero of Verdun, the great battle of 1916? Some believed fervently that the old warrior’s Vichy government would become, not just the instrument for the rebuilding of national pride, but also the base for the fight back against the German occupier and that he, Pétain, the first hero of France, would become also the ‘premier résistant de la France’.

There were, of course, some who wanted France to follow Germany and become a fascist state. In due course they would be mobilized and turn their weapons on their fellow countrymen. But these were a minority. For the most part, after the turbulence and the humiliation, the majority just wanted to return to a quiet life, albeit one underpinned by a kind of muscular apathy. The writer Jean Bruller, who was himself a Resistance fighter and used ‘Vercors’ as his nom de plume, clandestinely published his novel Le Silence de la Mer in 1942. In this he has one of his characters say of France’s new German masters: ‘These men are going to disappear under the weight of our disdain and we will not even trouble ourselves to rejoice when they are dead.’

There were many reasons why, in due course and slowly, the men and women of occupied France broke free of this torpor and began to rise again. But two were pre-eminent: the burning desire to drive out the hated invader, and the almost equally strong need to expiate the shame of 1940 and ensure that the France of the future would be different from the one that had fallen.

The formation of the earliest Resistance groups came organically – and spontaneously – from French civil society. Some were little more than clubs of friends who came together to express their patriotism and opposition to the occupier. Others were political – with the Communists being especially active after Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. Almost all were strenuously republican in their beliefs. There were even Resistance organizations supporting the regime in Vichy, preparing for the day when they would help to recapture the Zone Occupée. Although the early Resistance groups concentrated mainly on propaganda through the distribution of underground newspapers, over time they evolved into clandestine action-based organizations capable of gathering intelligence, conducting sabotage raids and carrying out attacks on German units and installations.

In London, too, France’s fall changed the nature of the war that Britain now had to fight. Now she was utterly alone in Europe. Churchill knew that, with the British Army recovering after the ‘great deliverance’ of Dunkirk, the RAF not yet strong enough for meaningful offensives against German cities and the Royal Navy struggling to keep the Atlantic lifeline open, the only way he could carry the war to the enemy was by clandestine rather than conventional means.

On 22 July 1940, he created the Special Operations Executive (SOE), instructing it to ‘set Europe ablaze’. SOE, headed by Brigadier Colin Gubbins and headquartered in Baker Street near Marylebone station, was organized into ‘country sections’ which were responsible for intelligence, subversion and sabotage in each of Europe’s occupied nations. France, however, had two country sections: F (for France) Section and RF (for République Française) Section. The former, led by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, was predominantly British run and was staffed mostly by British officers and agents. The latter, which acted as a logistical organization for Free French agents sent into France, was made up almost exclusively of French citizens. Although members of the same overall body, SOE’s F and RF sections adopted totally different ways of doing business. The ‘British’ F Section operated through small autonomous cells, which were in most cases kept carefully separate from each other in order to limit the damage of penetration and betrayal. RF Section, on the other hand, tended to run much larger, centrally controlled agent networks.

But the organizational complexity and rivalry in London – which often seemed to mirror that on the ground in France – did not end there. De Gaulle, whose headquarters were at 4 Carlton Terrace overlooking the Mall, had his own clandestine organization too, headed by the thirty-one-year-old, French career soldier Colonel André Dewavrin. This acted as the central directing authority for all those clandestine organizations in France which accepted the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. However, as one respected French commentator put it after the war, ‘General de Gaulle and most of those who controlled military affairs in Free France in the early days were ill-prepared to understand the specificities of clandestine warfare … [there was a certain] refusal of career military officers to accept the methods of [what they regarded as] a “dirty war”. It was a long and difficult process to get [the French in] London to understand the necessities of the “revolutionary war”.’

For Churchill, who knew that a frontal assault on Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) was still years away, the strategic opportunities offered by the French Resistance, fractured and diffuse as it was, were much less appealing than those in the Balkan countries. The French Resistance may have been a low priority for Winston Churchill in these early years, but for General de Gaulle, who created the Forces Françaises Libres on 1 July 1940, it was the only means of establishing himself as the legitimate leader of occupied France. For him it was imperative to weld all this disparate activity into a unified force under his leadership, capable not only of effective opposition to the Germans, but also of becoming a base for political power in the future.

De Gaulle’s opportunity to achieve this came in October 1941 when the charismatic forty-one-year-old Jean Moulin escaped from France over the Pyrenees and arrived in Lisbon. Here Moulin, who, as the Préfet of the Department of Eure-et-Loire had been an early resister against the Germans, wrote a report for London: ‘It would be mad and criminal not to use, in the event of allied action on the mainland, those troops prepared for the greatest sacrifice who are today scattered and anarchic, but tomorrow could be able to constitute a coherent army … [troops] already in place, who know the terrain, have chosen their enemy and determined their objectives.’

Moulin met de Gaulle in London on 25 October 1941. The French General could be prickly and difficult, but on this occasion the two men instantly took to each other. On the night of 1/2 January 1942, Jean Moulin, now equipped with the multiple aliases of Max, Rex and Régis, parachuted back into France as de Gaulle’s personal representative. His task was to unify the disparate organizations of the Resistance under de Gaulle’s leadership. Thanks to Moulin’s formidable energy, organizational ability and political skill, he managed to unify the three key civilian Resistance movements of the southern zone into a single body whose paramilitary branch would become the Secret Army, or Armée Secrète, the military arm of the Gaullist organization in France.

Among those with whom Moulin made contact on this visit was the sixty-one-year-old French General, Charles Delestraint, who de Gaulle hoped would lead the Secret Army. On the night of 13/14 February 1943, a Lysander light aircraft of the RAF’s 161 Special Duties Squadron, which throughout the war ran a regular clandestine service getting agents into and out of France, flew from Tempsford airport north of London to pick up Moulin and Delestraint and fly them back to Britain.

Here, the old General, who had been de Gaulle’s senior officer during the fall of France, met his erstwhile junior commander and accepted from him the post of head of the Secret Army in France under de Gaulle’s leadership. His task was to fuse together all troops and paramilitary organizations, set up a General Staff and create six autonomous regional military organizations, each of which should, over time, be able ‘to play a role in the [eventual] liberation of the territory of France’. Delestraint’s first act was to write a letter under his new alias, ‘Vidal’, to ‘The officers and men of all Resistance paramilitary units’:

By order of General de Gaulle, I have taken command of the Underground Army from 11 November 1942.

To all I send greetings. In present circumstances, with the enemy entrenched everywhere in France, it is imperative to join up our military formations now in order to form the nucleus of the Underground Army, of which I hold the command. The moment is drawing near when we will be able to strike. The time is past for hesitation. I ask all to observe strict discipline in true military fashion. We shall fight together against the invader, under General de Gaulle and by the side of our Allies, until complete victory.

The Commanding General of the Secret Army

Vidal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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