Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (7 page)

He also described a night-time arms drop after SOE Major H.H.A. Thackthwaite, a headmaster in civilian life, had paid a visit to select suitable dropping zones where the surrounding mountainous terrain would not oblige the pilots to drop from too high an altitude. On hearing the right phrase on the BBC French Service announcing a drop for that same evening, they had to await confirmation at 1900hrs that a flight of thirteen Flying Fortresses would make the drop – but at the wrong place, higher up the mountain in deep snow. Even at the lower site there was between 1.5m and 2m of snow. Beacon fires were lit where they wanted the drop lower down the mountain, in the hope that the pilots would see them and simply adjust course. This worked well, except for one aircraft, which dropped its load several kilometres away, where it was recovered by the Germans. That served as a useful distraction, since they could hardly fail to hear the huge bombers flying overhead and the Maquis needed as long as possible to stash the arms and explosives in a nearby mine. Everything had to be back-packed to the mine by men on skis or snowshoes. Later, the men from this and other local Maquis groups came to the mine for weapons training in the galleries, transformed into firing ranges.

Although exempt from the STO because he was employed as a Paris fireman, Raymond Bredèche decided to go absent without leave while he still had the chance, despite this making him technically a deserter from the armed forces.
⁹
Prudently prepared with a compass and rucksack filled with warm clothing and food, he took a train to Grenoble and simply walked out of the town heading south-east into the wild country of what is now the Ecrins National Park until challenged by a sentinel at the approach to a Maquis camp. For him, it was as simple as that.

Whatever his dreams of glory, the reality was hard. The group had no weapons at all until an Italian army unit negotiating the 8,000ft high Col de la Muzelle in September lightened its load by dumping three crates of ammunition, handkerchiefs, socks and two rifles. Only then could Bredèche’s band of young men pretend that they were fighters. There was little aggression involved; most were more concerned that they could now defend themselves if attacked by the Milice.
¹⁰
Their diet mainly consisted of potatoes bought under threat from local peasants, who would have preferred to sell their surplus on the black market at higher prices. It was a feast when Bredèche killed a metre-long
couleuvre
grass snake and roasted it over a fire.

Maquis ‘wages’ did not run to restaurant meals: camp leaders received 20F a day; ‘NCOs’ had from 9F to 15F; the rank and file received 5F only. Even these slender funds had to be stolen in raids on railway stations, post offices or houses of suspected collaborators and black marketeers. In January 1944 – only five months before D-Day – one Maquis band in Dordogne had a total of three Sten guns with ninety-two rounds of ammunition, seven revolvers and twenty-three rifles. Another group further north had three Sten guns, six grenades, thirty-five revolvers and thirteen rifles to be shared between 100 men.

By the beginning of 1944, from a total of 670,000 French workers drafted to work in the Reich, only 400,000 remained there, the missing quarter-million having failed to return from home leave. Of them, it was estimated that about 40,000 were with one or other of the Maquis bands.
¹¹
The others took the risk of living in the towns under assumed names with false papers. One of the luckiest was singer Yves Montand, who came to Paris that spring to seek his fortune while on the run from the STO and being technically Jewish. On the night after his first engagement in a night club, he was saved from arrest by the proprietor of his hotel distracting a German military police NCO from checking Montand’s obviously false ID. Having lost his first pay packets playing poker, Montand had a second stroke of luck when Edith Piaf sacked her male singer. Supporting her on stage, Montand detested Piaf as heartily as she sneered at what she called his ‘poor singing’, but when she insisted that he dress on stage like her – all in black – he decided to make this his trademark style for the rest of his career.

Since there was no command structure linking the many Maquis bands, and even those in the same locality kept contact with each other to a minimum for security reasons, the Milice dealt with them piecemeal, usually by infiltrating informers. Each new recruit had thus to be carefully vetted. When a Belgian walked into a camp of
maquisards
near Thônes in the Rhône-Alpes region, full of plausible details of his family being massacred by the SS, a search of his belongings revealed a hidden SS identity card. Since he would not talk, there was no alternative but to kill him.

None of the group had any military training, but they all used
noms de guerre
, to protect their families if caught. The one called Blanc-Blanc was chosen to do the deed because he had already ‘killed his first German’, as the saying went. He picked up the group’s single Sten gun and begged the Belgian to pardon him. They embraced, after which Blanc-Blanc could not press the trigger. With everyone looking embarrassed, the Belgian said, ‘You can’t expect me to give you the balls to do it, so please get a move on.’

The leader took the Sten from Blanc-Blanc and fired a single shot at close range, his hands shaking so much that the Belgian was only wounded in the shoulder. Staunching the blood with his handkerchief, he begged them to send it back to his mother unwashed. The next bullet pierced his heart.
¹²

Notes

1
He held this office July to December 1940 and April 1942 to August 1944.

2
Subsequently historians have disagreed over the extent of his responsibility for the slave labour programme.

3
Amouroux,
p. 29.

4
Burrin, P.,
Living with Defeat
, London, Arnold/Hodder, 1996, p. 249.

5
Amouroux, p. 39.

6
Quoted by L. Chabrun
et al.
in
L’Express
, 10 October 2005.

7
Ibid.

8
The Unpublished Diary of Pierre Laval
, London, Falcon Press, 1948, pp. 187–98, facsimile in Appendix V.

9
Firemen in Paris and Marseille are still technically members of the armed forces.

10
Amouroux, p. 43.

11
Ibid., pp. 47–8.

12
Ibid., pp. 49–50.

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE AGENT

In late 1943, as Allied planning for the invasion of Normandy advanced day by day, SOE stepped up its operations to cause the maximum amount of disruption and distraction for the German occupation forces all over France. Part of the aim was to delude OKW into thinking that Normandy was not the only area of France at risk of invasion and therefore keep its available manpower and weaponry spread out more widely across the country than was justified by the real risk. After the invasion, SOE’s function was to be the tying down elsewhere of as many as possible of the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS and Luftwaffe units that could otherwise be moved to the Normandy bridgehead.

One way to do this was somehow to weld the thousands of
maquisards
hiding out in wild country into a number of guerrilla armies that the Germans would have to deal with far from the beaches. SOE’s French counterpart BCRA was now based near Algiers, as was an outpost of Section F code-named Massingham at Guyotville, west of Algiers. Both had the same idea, but for different reasons. In the case of BCRA, it was de Gaulle’s desire that history should show how French people had liberated their own country, albeit with Allied help, so that it should not be thought by future generations that their forebears had sat passively at home waiting for the Anglo-American forces to drive the Germans out of France.

On the night of 21 September 1943 Major Richard Heslop of SOE was flown in to a landing ground near Tournus in Burgundy with cavalry officer Captain Jean Rosenthal of BCRA, a high-class jeweller and furrier in civilian life. Operation Musc was Heslop’s second mission inside occupied France. He and Rosenthal were tasked with liaising with Maquis units in Resistance zone R1, concentrating on the valley of the River Ain north-east of Lyon and on the Glières plateau, lying to the south-east of Geneva, near the Italian frontier. The valley of the Ain had already been the scene for a sustained campaign of sabotage and guerrilla attacks on Vichy and German forces.

The purpose of Musc was to ascertain the numerical strength of the various Maquis bands, their level of training and combat readiness and need for airdrops of weapons and ammunition. Flown back to London on the night of 16 October, Heslop and Rosenthal reported conversations with Resistance leaders who had convinced them that a force of 2,350
maquisards
could be assembled on the plateau of Glières as a self-contained army needing only to be supplied with arms and ammunition by air across the Mediterranean. This, it was thought, would enable them to hold off any German attack in this wild upland area while building up their strength to the point where they could harass the Germans in the rear after the coming Allied invasion.

The Resistance zones in France.

Less than forty-eight hours later, Heslop was back in south-eastern France commanding the Marksman mission, with radio operator OSS Captain Owen D. Johnson and a wild card, American citizen Elizabeth Devereaux-Rochester, as courier. SOE had a penchant for well-educated girl agents and she certainly fulfilled this requirement, having been educated at Roedean school, lived with her British mother in Paris before the war and attended two Swiss finishing schools. However, she was untrained and undisciplined. Ordered back to Britain in the spring of 1944, she refused to comply and made her own way to Paris, where she was arrested at her mother’s house in March. She managed to convince her interrogator that she had been wandering around France for months as a homeless refugee in order to avoid being locked up with all the other American civilians in an internment camp. Imprisoned in the same camp at Vittel as her mother, she was eventually liberated in September.

Arriving with the Marksmen officers, but acting independently for BCRA, Rosenthal also returned to prepare both Maquis and Resistance groups for concerted action in conjunction with the coming Allied invasion. In January 1944 the inter-Allied mission code-named Union arrived in the area under the Gaullist Pierre Fourcaud. With him were SOE’s Colonel Thackthwaite and a US Marine Corps officer seconded to OSS, Captain Peter Ortiz. He was a flamboyant character who had served five tough years in the French Foreign Legion pre-war, enlisting under the name of his Polish girlfriend in an effort to prevent his influential French father curbing his youthful urge for adventure by buying him out. Stationed in North Africa, he rose from
engagé volontaire
to acting lieutenant in his five-year term and would have been promoted to full lieutenant if he had signed on for a further five-year term. Instead, he left the Legion in 1937, but re-enlisted in October 1939 at the beginning of the phoney war, gaining a battlefield commission in May 1940.

He was wounded in northern France in June 1940 while driving a motorcycle through the German lines to blow up a fuel dump that should have been destroyed as a routine measure during the French retreat. Mission accomplished, Ortiz was returning through the lines when shot and left paralysed with a bullet-chipped spine. He recovered in a POW camp but, after fifteen months that included several escape attempts, he made his way to Lisbon in December 1941, whence he was repatriated to the United States.

Having an American mother, he was bilingual even before his service with the Legion and also had reasonable German, Spanish and Arabic, which earned him a promise of a commission in American intelligence. Ortiz, however, grew impatient to get back into the war and enlisted in the US Marine Corps Reserve, to be recommended for an officer’s commission by the commanding officer of the training camp on Parris Island. On 1 August 1942, Ortiz was commissioned and then – in the way of the military – this ex-legionnaire who had made more than 100 jumps in North Africa was posted to Camp Lejeune for parachute training.