Читать книгу The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 23

One thing was clear from the string of setbacks suffered by the Organisation Vercors in January 1944. German knowledge of what was happening on the plateau was detailed and accurate. By late 1943 both the Germans and the Resistance had developed extensive networks for gathering intelligence on each other.

Right from the start the Vichy intelligence services, including the Milice, had managed to infiltrate many of the réfractaires’ camps and build up a network of informers among the local French population. During the summer of 1943, the able young Resistance commander of Camp C2 near Villard-de-Lans, Pierre Faillant de Villemarest, was so concerned about infiltration that he suggested to the Vercors’ civil and military leaders that a proper intelligence and security service be established on the plateau. It was agreed that he and a girl called Charlotte Mayaud from Villard should undertake the task. The two quickly established an intelligence network among local doctors and set up a rudimentary surveillance service and a warning system to sound the alert in the event of an approaching threat. Villemarest very soon realized that the problem was much worse than he had thought, and concluded that the whole of the Organisation Vercors was deeply penetrated.

In September 1943, a man called Henri Weiss suddenly appeared and took over the running of a café in Villard. Surveillance quickly revealed that he was in contact with a Belgian named Lecuy who appeared to have no visible means of support but was staying in Villard’s most luxurious hotel, the Splendide. Further investigation uncovered a ‘spy ring’ which included two hotel owners and a groom called ‘Mistigri’, who was himself a member of one of the réfractaires’ camps. It was obvious to Villemarest that, between them, they had perfect oversight of everyone who arrived and left the town. Further surveillance established that the Belgian, Lecuy, held regular clandestine meetings with a German official in Grenoble who turned out to be none other than the infamous Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. Villemarest gave a full report with supporting evidence to Chavant, but le Patron dismissed it all as ‘too imaginative’. Not long afterwards, the body of the Belgian, Lecuy, was found in a wood outside Villard. Local rumour said that he had been tempted to the spot by a Villard lady of relaxed virtue and that Villemarest had had something to do with the death.

Disgusted by Chavant’s naivety, Villemarest relinquished his job and left the plateau in February 1944. In the first half of 1944, however, Villemarest’s worst suspicions were confirmed when several Maquisards deserted from the camps. Some of these were suspected of being Milice infiltrators. One, Cémoi (we know only his alias), who had joined one of the camps in February, deserted to the Milice on 24 April. He was later captured and executed. It was not until June 1944 that a proper system of security was finally established on the plateau.

Although the plateau itself was riddled with insecurity, there were active and successful Resistance intelligence networks operating in the Grenoble area which were able to provide the Vercors leaders with reliable information on German intentions. These included many in the Vichy civil administration and the local police as well as the Gendarmerie. Post offices were also a fruitful source of information, as were local telephone-exchange operators who turned their well-known habit of listening to conversations into a patriotic duty. Others on whom the Organisation Vercors could normally rely included especially the local restaurateurs, who formed an extensive intelligence network of their own. This included establishing an organization for stealing side-arms from Germans dining at local restaurants and smuggling these to the Resistance in the forests.

Alongside the local intelligence organizations operating in the Vercors during this period there were also a number of French and Allied secret services doing the same thing. These included the French intelligence services based in London, SOE, SIS (also known as MI6), MI9 (Britain’s secret service dedicated to helping escaped PoWs and airmen), the intelligence service of the Polish government-in-exile and the American Office of Strategic Services, which ran, among other agents, Gaston Vincent, who was based in Saint-Agnan-en-Vercors until his death in June 1944.

On the other side, the German and Milice networks often made use of those involved in the black market and, it was said, brothel keepers, barbers and barmen. In his Union report, Thackthwaite added to this list waitresses in small-town and village restaurants, who were used as agents provocateurs. Apart from human sources, the Germans also put considerable effort into gathering signals intelligence and closing down secret radio stations. In one case a Milice agent who had been successfully infiltrated into one of the Vercors’ clandestine radio teams had to be got rid of because, ‘although he was assigned as a trustworthy person’, further enquiries were made and ‘It was discovered that his brother was a Milicien and his sister-in-law worked for the Gestapo.’

German intelligence even successfully took over some Resistance radio networks in their entirety. For example, a Greek called Guy Alexander Kyriazis was sent by the German secret service to work in a British-run SIS network called Alliance. Posted to Grenoble, he was paid 7,000 francs a month and appears to have operated until the end of the war, planting false messages and passing back codebooks to his masters. When subsequently interrogated by the Allies, he claimed that ‘the Germans … knew the details of the wireless procedure which was being used at Grenoble [and] were intercepting messages’.

The job of German intelligence was made much easier by that fact that the radio security of both the Resistance in the field and their Free French controllers in London was very lax and their codes extremely insecure. The British government became very concerned about this, especially now that planning had started on the greatest secret of the war, the date and location of D-Day. On 13 January 1944, the British War Cabinet took the decision that, because of the insecurity of the French codes, all signals or messages sent by the French in London and Algiers had to be transmitted through the British communication systems or use British or US codes. De Gaulle was predictably furious, calling it ‘an outrage and an insult’.

An SOE report on French radio security dated 29 January 1944, just a few days before the Malleval disaster, gives some indication of the scale of the problem: ‘[French] Security … is lamentable … Continual losses of [Resistance] chiefs, money, codes, archives, couriers, list of names which [were] unparalleled … we have continually pointed out over a year that [their] codes are fundamentally insecure and badly coded … We have finally been reduced to breaking them [the French codes] ourselves to prove [to the French] their insecurity … It must be assumed that every [French] message code can be read by the Germans as easily as by ourselves [emphasis in original].’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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