Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (14 page)

On 5 May Picirella was sent down to the village of St Romans on a mission to persuade the Russian Cossack conscripts in its German garrison to desert. Narrowly missing being caught in a Milice dragnet, Picirella and a comrade stayed in the town for the best part of a week, their return to the plateau delayed by the Cossacks’ refusal to leave unless provided with motor transport for themselves and their mounts! Negotiations dragged on until 19 May, when Picirella found that the Cossacks and some of the German garrison had been ordered by train to the north. A single Cossack, who had been left behind, was persuaded to accompany them back to camp, where he was warmly welcomed.

On 12 May, during Picirella’s unsuccessful recruiting drive, the Resistance had suffered a grievous blow. Jacques Bingen was betrayed by a double agent and arrested by the Abwehr in Clermont-Ferrand. His major achievement, after volunteering to be parachuted into France to take Moulin’s place, was to weld the OAS, ORA and FTP into the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). A man of action to the end, Bingen escaped by killing one of his guards. Recaptured almost immediately, he chose the only way to be certain that he would not give away any information about his work under torture, and bit on his cyanide pill.

Through over-confidence or otherwise, men and women were being arrested all over France for Resistance activities. Given a summary trial with only one possible verdict by the Milice, by the Gestapo, by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, they were shot or deported to camps in the Reich. Executed on 23 May 1944 at the military firing range of Doua outside Lyon was 21-year-old butcher René Villaret. His last letter, written on the day before his execution, began:

My dear Mama,

This letter is to let you know that in a little while the doors of Paradise will open for me. I have made my peace with God and took Communion in the greatest calm. Yes, I have been condemned to death by the German Military Tribunal and, believe me, I heard the verdict calmly and coolly, thinking of our dear Charles and dear Papa.

My life has been the suffering of a kid who strayed from the right path. It was my destiny, although I knew the pain I was causing you. I regret nothing about my life, unless it is that I cannot give you, dear Mama, a last kiss.

In my wallet that they will send you, you will find some photos. Have reprints made and give them to my workmates, telling them that this life must end sometime and that I leave it with courage.

Dearest Mama, forgive me the pain I have caused you since I was little. You were so gentle and so good, you did not deserve it. Give a kiss from me to my brothers and sisters and all my good friends. I send you a kiss in the hope that you will be happy in the years of your life that remain. A thousand kisses from your little one.

René

P.S. I enclose a lock of my hair.
¹⁰

On 23 May, while Dalloz was still in London, Eugène Chavant, socialist mayor of a commune on the outskirts of Grenoble, and his friend Jean Veyrat rendezvoused near St Tropez with an American fast patrol boat and landed in Algiers on 23 May, hoping to agree with the Gaullist command there when and how the volunteers on the plateau would play their part in the war. They found themselves in another world – a world with no rationing, no fear, an abundance of wealth, and thousands of men in and out of uniform. Whatever vague hopes had motivated the dangerous trip across the Med, it must have seemed to them that the strength of the Free French forces which they could see for themselves must mean that a division or so could easily land on the plateau and lead the volunteers to victory.

After a frustrating beginning, Chavant managed to reach the tripartite Special Projects Operations Centre (SPOC), where his service career stood him in good stead. The French and Allied officers who listened to him for four days pored over maps – how many foreigners even knew where the Vercors was? – and nodded in apparent agreement with the idea of the redoubt becoming the setting for an ‘inland airborne invasion’ in conjunction with the seaborne invasion that was shortly to be launched. What totally escaped Chavant’s simple appreciation of the situation was that the Free French were riddled with political factions and the other Allies did not trust any of them.

Chavant returned to France by a night flight on 3 June, convinced that his plan had been approved, yet without a shred of evidence or confirmation of any kind from the officers with whom he had been talking. On 5 June in Lyon he met Lieutenant Colonel Descour, the 44-year-old No. 2 i/c of zone R1 and handed him two sealed envelopes. One letter appointed Descour overall commander of the forces on the plateau. The other was signed by Jacques Soustelle, nominally head of Gaullist intelligence. It read:

Algiers, 30 May 1944

The directives given in February 1943 by Gen Delestraint for the organisation of the Vercors remain in force. Their execution will be carried out within the framework of the regional and departmental organisations under the control of the military delegate of Zone R1 in liaison with the mission from London and the base in Algiers.
¹¹

The following day, Chavant was back in the Vercors, euphoric at the news of the Normandy invasion, but loudly complaining that no Free French officer in Algiers had told him it had been scheduled for that morning. Indeed, de Gaulle himself was seething with anger in London at that moment, having learned of it for the first time several hours after it was launched. Soustelle’s letter was nothing more than window dressing, but everyone who met Chavant beaming with pleasure that day at the thought that he had at last clarified the role of the Maquis on the plateau assumed that there were detailed plans somewhere for the integration of the Maquis with incoming Free French or other Allied airborne troops.

Descour tasked Major François Huet, a 39-year-old career cavalry officer who joined the Organisation Résistance Armée (ORA) when the Armée de l’Armistice was disbanded, with the impossible job of turning the untrained and undisciplined
maquisards
on the Vercors plateau into a unified fighting force that could fortify and hold the plateau against an all-out German attack. As the
maquisards
included members of FTP – whose previous activities had been intelligence gathering and assassination of German soldiers in the cities – the authoritarian, Catholic and deeply patriotic Huet found himself, probably for the only time in his life, unable to disagree with a communist – FTP national military commander Charles Tillon warned that Operation Montagnards
entirely ignored the two basic rules of irregular warfare: never concentrate your forces or risk a pitched battle. Better, Tillon argued, to keep the bands of
maquisards
dispersed throughout the countryside so that they could vanish into the population after each action, instead of being caught in a trap.

Although it is possible that no one could have been the ‘right man for the job’ to unite the politically divergent leaders of the different bands including the ideologically intransigent communists, it certainly was not Huet. Ending every written order to the Maquis bands on the plateau with ‘
Vive l’Armée!
’ his main concern appeared to be that his subordinates learn to march smartly, perform arms drill like regular soldiers and salute their officers at all times.

Huet based his HQ in St-Martin-en-Vercors with Major Costa de Beauregard commanding the northern plateau and Geyer la Thivollet – now a captain – commanding the southern half. Tragically, however good their previous records may have been, few of the officers and NCOs had any experience in guerrilla warfare, except in repressing it during France’s colonial wars. Nor did Huet’s decision to name the various Maquis bands after disbanded regiments of the pre-war French army endear him to the majority of the young volunteers, who despised the army that had been so easily beaten by the German invasion. They were equally unimpressed by the way Huet staffed his headquarters with fifty officers, NCOs, plus dozens of
maquisards
compelled to act as servants and orderlies on rigid military lines. There were also two political leaders on the plateau – in the north Dalloz’s friend Jean Prévost and in the south Dr Samuel Clément.

The stage was now set for tragedy.

Notes

1
Joseph, G.,
Un Combattant du Vercors
, Paris, Fayard, 1972, pp. 24–7.

2
Ibid., p. 36.

3
Rosencher, H.,
Le sel, le cendre et la flame
, Paris, Félin, 2000, pp. 269–301.

4
Picirella, J.,
Mon journal du Vercors
, Lyon, Rivet, 1982, pp. 13–8.

5
Ibid., pp. 18–9.

6
Rosencher, pp. 269–301.

7
Picirella, pp. 22–5.

8
Rosencher, pp. 269–301.

9
Joseph, pp. 208–9.

10
Krivopissko, pp. 325–6 (abridged).

11
Joseph, p. 125.

DREAM OF VICTORY, REALITY OF DEATH

At the BCRA offices in London, Pierre Dalloz discovered that his report from the Vercors had never been forwarded to the right office. The missing file duly located, he repeated his warnings that the Maquis on the plateau could only emerge and take the initiative in conjunction with Allied regular troops. Yet, on 1 June the BBC had transmitted among the nightly Resistance messages, ‘
Il y a de l’eau dans le gaz
’ – ‘there is water in the gas’
.
Like all the action messages, it was nonsense except to those with the key. As far as Resistance activity in the south of France was concerned, a SHAEF directive dated 21 May restricted this to cutting north–south rail and road communications with Normandy. In this vacuum, it was not surprising that local Resistance commanders made their own uncoordinated decisions, some of which were to cause great tragedy. In addition, far from rushing to reinforce Maquis units in remote countryside, many communist groups decided to remain in the towns and cities, with a view to taking political control in the power vacuum after the collapse of the Vichy administration.

In the nationwide confusion caused by the plethora of conflicting rumours, Colonel Henri Zeller, the Gaullist officer commanding Resistance zone R1, declared the valley of the Ubaye River liberated on 5 June. When Cammaerts hurried there, he was dismayed to find a large tricolor bearing the Cross of Lorraine hanging in front of the town hall of Barcelonnette, the main town in the valley. In justification of his jumping the gun like this, Zeller told Cammaerts that Algiers had promised him ‘boots on the ground’ in his sector within ten days after the Normandy invasion. Knowing this to be impossible, Cammaerts was horrified. Zeller expected him to conjure arms from thin air and seemed oblivious that a public celebration was not only premature, but also invited severe German reprisals as soon as their informers told them what was happening.

A further BBC message came on 5 June: ‘
Le chamois des Alpes bondit
’ – ‘the alpine chamois is leaping’. The confusion on the plateau was compounded by the personal messages from the BBC in London mobilising all FFI units in France. This was largely to delude OKW’s monitoring stations and keep Hitler guessing whether Normandy was the main invasion or simply a feint to disguise the true invasion shortly to be launched elsewhere. In the reigning uncertainty, after Colonel Descour ordered the sealing off of the Vercors plateau, to make it into the fortress where the inexistent airborne forces could safely land, access by the nine principal routes up from the plain was blocked by small groups of
maquisards
, whose total numbers did not exceed 300 at the time. One of them was Gilbert Joseph. Watching preparations to mine the access roads, he realised that the Germans could do the same thing and bottle up any Allied forces landing on the plateau.

By 9 June 400 other men, known as
sédentaires
because they had sat at home pursuing apparently normal lives until this moment, had arrived on the plateau. There were weapons for less than half of them. Some 3,500 other
sédentaires
followed them by car, by bicycle, on foot and in coaches. They came in the belief that 4,000 Allied paras would be dropped on the plateau a few days later. If that was Descours’ and Huet’s understanding, it was not Eisenhower’s. In his view, Resistance activities should be confined to sabotage and other actions impeding German reinforcements moving towards Normandy by road or rail.

The new recruits arrived in a mood of premature euphoria induced by the feeling that they were doing something at last and that the end of the occupation was in sight. Huet transmitted frantic pleas to Algiers for airdrops of desperately needed supplies and arms, unaware that Allied HQ had decided not to send in any heavy weapons.