Читать книгу The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 18

Flight Lieutenant John Bridger, DFC, throttled down and watched the needle on his Lysander’s air-speed indicator drop back. Almost immediately the little aircraft’s nose dipped towards the three dots of light laid out ahead like an elongated ‘L’, the long stroke pointing towards him and the short one at the far end pointing to the right.

Bridger was one of the most experienced pilots in RAF’s 161 Lysander Squadron. On a previous occasion he had burst a tyre while landing Resistance agents at a clandestine strip deep in France. Worried that, with one tyre out, his Lysander (they were known affectionately as ‘Lizzies’) would be unbalanced for take-off, he pulled out his Colt automatic, shot five holes in the remaining good tyre, loaded up his return passengers for the UK and took off on his wheel rims.

Maybe it was because of his experience that he had been chosen for Operation Sirène II. Tonight, 19 March 1943, he was carrying passengers of special importance – Charles de Gaulle’s personal representative in France, Jean Moulin, the Secret Army’s commander General Charles Delestraint and one other Resistance agent. In truth, with three passengers on board, the little plane was overloaded for it was designed to take only two. But 161 Squadron pilots were used to pushing the limits.

Bridger’s destination this night was a flat field close to a canal a kilometre east of the village of Melay, which lies in the Saône-et-Loire valley 310 kilometres south-east of Paris and 700 from 161 Squadron’s base at Tangmere on the English south coast. This meant a round trip in his unarmed Lysander of some 1,500 kilometres, most of which would be flying alone over enemy-occupied territory. With a cruising speed of 275 kilometres per hour and allowing for headwinds and turn-around time on the ground, Bridger would be flying single handed for the best part of seven unbroken hours.

Like all of the RAF’s clandestine landings and parachute drops into France, tonight’s operation was taking place in the ‘moon period’ – roughly speaking the ten nights either side of the full moon (sometimes known by the codeword Charlotte). The remaining ten nights of the month were known as the ‘no moon period’ when conditions were too dark for accurate parachuting or safe landings. The March 1943 full moon occurred two days after Bridger’s flight, which meant that the moon’s luminosity this night was 91 per cent of that of the full moon, enabling Bridger to see many of the main topographical features such as woods and towns of the area he would be flying over. Most visible of all would have been the great rivers of France, which were 161 Squadron’s favourite navigational aids.

According to his logbook Bridger took off from 161 Squadron’s base at RAF Tangmere at 22.44 hours, two and a half hours after sunset that day. His post-operational report of his route is laconic and sparse on detail: ‘went via St Aubin-sur-Mer, Bourges, Moulins and direct to target. Apart from meeting a medium sized [enemy] aircraft 4 miles north of Moulin … the journey was uneventful.’

At Moulins, Bridger would have turned due east to pick up the River Loire, now turned by the gibbous moon into a great ribbon of silver, its little lakes and tributaries appearing as sprinkles of tinsel scattered across the darkened countryside. Here he swung south on the last leg of his journey – a lonely dot hidden in the vast expanse of the night sky. It is not difficult to imagine Jean Moulin and Charles Delestraint looking down on the moon-soaked fields and villages of occupied France and wondering about the task ahead and what it would take to free their country from the merciless grip of its occupiers.

The reception team waiting for Bridger at Melay that night was commanded by forty-year-old Pierre Delay, an experienced operator who had already received the Croix de Guerre from de Gaulle for his conduct of a previous SOE landing. He had been alerted that there was to be a landing on this site by a special code phrase broadcast during the six-minute ‘Messages personnels’ section of the BBC’s Les Français parlent aux Français. Delay had chosen Melay for tonight’s operation because he had a cousin who had a safe house 2 kilometres north of the landing site where the new arrivals could be put up, and a sympathetic local garage owner, whose Citroën was always available on these occasions.

According to Bridger’s operational report he ‘Reached target at 0140, signals given clearly & flare path good’. Delay’s men, who had waited in the deepening cold for two hours before Bridger arrived, now watched as the plane – it seemed big to them now – glided in almost noiselessly to touch down on the dewy grass. Moulin and Delestraint were bundled into the waiting Citroën and spent the night in the safe house, leaving the following day for Macon. They had arrived back in France to take command of a Resistance movement which was in a high state of expectation that the Allied landings would take place some time during the summer of 1943.

An SOE paper marked ‘MOST SECRET’ and dated 13 March 1943, just a week before the return of Moulin and Delestraint, discussed the possible uses of the Resistance in the event of an Allied landing, but warned that ‘the state of feeling in France has, after a gradual rise in temperature, suddenly reached fever pitch … there is a real danger that, if this … is allowed to pass unregarded, the French population … will subside into apathy and despair’. On 18 March, the night before Moulin and Delestraint landed, Maurice Schumann – who was for many the voice of Free France broadcasting on the BBC – was so inspired by news of the flood of réfractaires to the Haute-Savoie that he invoked the famous French Revolutionary force, the Légion des Montagnes, in one of his famous broadcasts, implying a Savoyard uprising. He was immediately rebuked by his London superiors for being premature – but he had accurately caught the feverish mood of excitement and expectation.

On 23 March, just three days after he arrived, Jean Moulin sent a coded telegram to London saying that the mood was so ‘keyed up’ that he had been ‘obliged to calm down the [Resistance] leaders who believe that Allied action was imminent’. One local Resistance leader, however, was sure that the state of over-excitement was generated not in France, but in London: ‘not a single one of us at the time was expecting an imminent landing. The truth was that the “over-excitement” of the [local] leaders reflected our intense preoccupation with the drama that was unfolding as a result of having Maquis organizations [in the field] without any support and our irritation over the attitude of de Gaulle and [the French] clandestine services.’

De Gaulle’s personal instructions to Delestraint before his departure, a copy of which can still be found in the French military archives in the Château de Vincennes in Paris, also give the impression that D-Day is fast approaching. Under the heading of ‘immediate actions’ to be taken ‘In the present period, before the Allied landings’, he instructed Delestraint to ‘prepare the Secret Army for the role it is to play in the liberation of territory’, including the ‘delicate measures necessary to permit a general rising of volunteers after D-Day [referred to by the French as ‘Jour J’] in the zones where this can be sustained because of the difficulty the Germans have in dominating the area’ – a clear reference, it would seem, to Plan Montagnards and the Vercors.

Whatever the true cause of all this premature excitement, the Vercors was not immune from its effects. Aimé Pupin commented that in the camps on the plateau the Allied landings were expected daily and ‘They were all burning for action …’ Unfortunately it was not just the Resistance who were ‘burning for action’ in anticipation of an Allied landing soon. France’s German and Italian occupiers were too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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