Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (11 page)

According to Obersturmführer Dr Knab the assault ‘had not obtained the desired result in numbers of killed and prisoners’ because it had been thwarted by Anjot’s decision to exfiltrate. A manhunt was therefore launched to track down those who had escaped, in which a significant part was played by the GMR men who had been taken prisoner and released unharmed, and were therefore able to identify many of their erstwhile captors. Knab’s role – and indeed the role of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo-SD) detachments in the anti-Maquis operations – was made clear in a telex he sent, of which a copy was found after the German withdrawal. An officer or NCO of the Sipo-SD security troops always accompanied Wehrmacht units on these operations. Prisoners were handed over by the Wehrmacht to the Sipo-SD, in this case at Annecy, for interrogation, torture and disposal. The Sipo-SD also conducted reprisals on people and property in the area of operations. Of Anjot’s force, 140-plus were killed in combat or shot after capture or died in German concentration camps. He himself was shot and killed on 27 March at Nâves while attempting to escape; it was to take seven months before he could be given a proper burial. The enemy losses were minimal: twenty of the Vichy anti-terrorist forces were killed, plus three Germans, with seven Germans wounded – and five of those were injured in an accident.

A moving tribute to Morel was composed by the Jesuit father André Ravier, who had been one of his secondary school teachers:

Let us imagine for a moment that Tom was not shamefully struck down by a French officer, that the airdrops had not been so unfortunately delayed, and that Tom had found himself on the plateau facing the German attack with 1,000 men instead of 450, with fifty or sixty officers instead of five … all would have turned out differently.
⁶

Ravier’s tribute is interesting because it places blame not only on the Allies’ failure to provide any heavy weapons but also raises one issue deliberately ignored in hagiographic accounts of the Glières campaign and the Resistance generally. Before the German attack, Morel had appealed to the officer cadets of the Charles de Foucauld
promotion
at St Cyr military academy (relocated to Aix-en-Provence), whose instructor he had been, to join his force of
maquisards.
Of all the people in France, they were least likely to have been ardent supporters of Vichy, so their failure to respond indicates that a reasoned consideration of the military possibilities decided them in advance that it was a lost cause, with which it was better not to get involved.

Since the decision to concentrate forces on the plateau had been political and not military, it was predictable that a propaganda war would be unleashed. On Radio Paris, Pétain’s Catholic supporter Philippe Henriot managed not to mention the German intervention in order to laud the achievement of Vichy forces over ‘the ragtag army of cowardly foreign and Communist terrorists, who chose to surrender rather than fight’. Over the BBC French Service de Gaulle’s spokesman Maurice Schumann hailed the pointless Battle of Glières as a repeat of the Free French forces’ heroic stand against German and Italian air and ground forces after being surrounded and cut off at Bir Hakeim in Libya during May and June 1942. Radio Algiers praised ‘the patriots who had held out for two weeks against a full Alpine division of the Wehrmacht with artillery and Luftwaffe ground-support missions’
⁷
and the BCRA exploited the heroic nature of Anjot’s struggle to create a legend of valour that attracted fresh groups of
maquisards
on to the Glières plateau.

Bolstered by a massive airdrop of arms on 1 August 1944, this second Maquis force emerged from the plateau after the Franco-American landings of Operation Dragoon
⁸
between Toulon and Cannes on 15 August. Units of the US forces driving up the Rhône valley were guided by some of the surviving
maquisards
from Glières, who also harassed some German forces before the American arrival and prevented the retreat of others. This greatly accelerated the process of liberating the
département
of Haute Savoie. The town of Grenoble was liberated on 19 August, only four days after the Franco-American landings of Operation Anvil and eighty-six days ahead of the planners’ schedule. This enabled de Gaulle to claim that it had been liberated by French force of arms. Of the sad adventure on the plateau of Glières, he said, ‘Their example will live on, I can assure you, as testimony to the whole world of the resolution shown by France in the most terrible war of her history.’
⁹

Also dropped on 1 August was the Allied mission designated Union II. Unlike earlier missions whose task had been to unite the Maquis, encourage and equip Resistance saboteurs and get involved in espionage, this was an operations group of heavily armed men in uniform with their own transport, whose function was to attack German forces, disrupt their communications after the landings in southern France and prevent destruction of German arms and fuel dumps that could be useful to the Allies.

Union II was composed of Ortiz, now promoted to major, an Army Air Corps captain, five USMC sergeants and a Free French officer. The mission’s first casualty never even made it to the ground: Sergeant Charles Perry’s static line broke and his parachute failed to open. He was buried on the field near Les Saisies, some 60 miles north-east of Grenoble. The ceremony, held where he fell, was conducted with full military honours, which impressed the reception party. Perry’s uniform and papers were then given to Free French officer Joseph Arcelin, in the hope that this would be some protection for him, if taken prisoner.

Ortiz was itching for action, but the first priority was to train the local
maquisards
in handling the arms dropped in the 864 man-size containers dropped with the mission and their jeeps. On 14 August, the small convoy of jeeps was in the village of Montgirod when it came under fire from German artillery, making the point that the enemy was well aware of their presence. On the following day, with German troops everywhere jittery following the news of the nearby Allied landings of Operation Dragoon earlier that morning, Union II bumped into a convoy of a dozen trucks transporting troops of the 15th Alpine Reserve battalion in the neighbouring village of Centron. Spotting the American jeeps, the convoy promptly disgorged several hundred troops to give battle.

The Americans split up into two parties, to facilitate exfiltration under fire. The Air Corps captain and the French officer were wounded; two others managed to escape by swimming across the ice-cold River Isère against a strong current. Ortiz ordered the two sergeants with him to make a run for it, leaving him to cover their getaway. They refused to leave him.

With the inhabitants of Centron pleading with him to surrender because Montgirod had been burned to the ground in reprisals after the mission’s confrontation there the previous day, Ortiz made a difficult decision. In his own words:

Since [our] activities were well-known to the Germans, there was no reason to hope that we would be treated as ordinary POWs. I had been involved in dangerous activities for many years and was ready for my number to turn up. Sergeant Bodnar was next to me and I explained to him what I intended to do. He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Major, we are marines. What you think is right goes for me too.’
¹⁰

Ortiz called out in German several times that he wanted to surrender and then walked towards the encircling forces with machine-gun rounds hitting the ground by his feet until he was face to face with the commanding major, who agreed to accept the surrender and not take reprisals on the villagers. When only two more marines and the wounded men appeared from cover, he could not believe that so few men had held off a battalion and ordered every house in the village to be searched from cellar to loft before finally accepting that there were no more Americans in Centron. Ortiz seized the psychological advantage as the two uninjured sergeants were being disarmed by calling them to attention and ordering them to divulge only names, ranks and serial numbers as required under the Geneva Convention. Impressed by this show of discipline at a moment that should have been demoralising for the marines, their captors showed more respect.

Locked up in Marlag/Milag Nord POW camp for officers at Westertimke near Bremen, Ortiz was ordered by the senior naval officer, a Royal Navy captain, to desist from trying to escape because of the problems his attempts caused for the other prisoners. The troublesome Marine Corps major then constituted himself the senior American POW, announcing that he would set his own rules for escape and everything else. On 10 April 1945 orders were given to evacuate the camp and move the prisoners farther away from the approaching Allied spearheads. Ortiz and three others took advantage of the confusion when the marching column of prisoners was strafed by a marauding RAF Spitfire to escape into the woods. Ortiz later reported:

We spent ten days hiding, roving at night, blundering into enemy positions, hoping to find our way into British lines. Luck was with us. Once we were discovered but managed to get away, and several other times we narrowly escaped detection … By the seventh night, we had returned near our camp. I made a reconnaissance of Marlag. There seemed to be only a token guard and prisoners of war appeared to have assumed virtual control of the compounds.
¹¹

By then, the escapers were in bad physical shape. On the tenth day after their escape, the four men decided it was better to chance their luck inside the camp, rather than starve to death outside. They walked back through the main gate, with the guards taking no notice, and were given a rousing welcome by a reception committee that included three men from the surrender at Centron. On 29 April, the British 7th Guards Division liberated the camp and Ortiz and his men immediately volunteered to take up arms again in the drive, as they thought, to Berlin. Permission was refused. The citation for his second Navy Cross,
¹²
awarded in London, read:

For extraordinary heroism … during operations behind enemy Axis lines in the Savoie Department of France from 1 August 1944 to 27 April 1945. After parachuting into a region where his activities had made him an object of intensive search by the Gestapo, Major Ortiz valiantly continued his work in coordinating and leading resistance groups. When he and his team were attacked and surrounded during a special mission designed to immobilize enemy reinforcements stationed in that area, he disregarded the possibility of escape and, in an effort to spare villagers severe reprisals by the Gestapo, surrendered to this sadistic Geheim Staats Polizei [sic]. Subsequently imprisoned and subjected to numerous interrogations, he divulged nothing, and the story of this intrepid Marine Major and his team has become a brilliant legend in that section of France where acts of bravery were considered commonplace. By his outstanding loyalty and self-sacrificing devotion to duty, Major Ortiz contributed materially to the success of operations against a relentless enemy.
¹³

Ortiz was shipped back to California, where his mother was living. There he earned a living as military advisor on several feature films directed by John Ford and acted in two that he could not bear to watch afterwards because they were typically embarrassing Hollywoodian dramatisations of his own exploits. One was
13 Rue Madeleine
with James Cagney, and the second was
Operation
Secret
with Cornell Wilde.

In the 1950s, promoted to lieutenant colonel in the USMC Reserve, Ortiz volunteered to be sent as an American ‘adviser’ to French Indo-China, where his beloved Legion was fighting the communist Viet Minh. This was refused for political reasons. Decorated many times by US, British and French governments, Ortiz died of cancer in 1988 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honours.
¹⁴

Notes

1
Quoted in Azema, J.-P.,
De Munich à la Libération (1938–1944)
, Paris, Seuil, 1980.

2
More details on http://alain.cerri.free.fr – a site developed by Roger Cerri’s son to publish his father’s wartime diaries.

3
Also spelled Montiévert and Montiévran.

4
More details at http://alain.cerri.free.fr.

5
Other records suggest earlier, at 1630hrs, but all agree that it was as the light was failing.

6
Noguères, H.,
Résistants contre SS 1943–44
, Paris, Editions Tallander, 1987, p. 1576.

7
Vistel, A.,
La Nuit sans Ombre
, Paris, Fayard, 1970, p. 362.

8
Code-named Operation Anvil during the planning phase.