Das Reich (19 page)

The first hours gave the
maquisards
a terrible lesson in war. Among the Germans and the
miliciens
, even the reservists were trained soldiers with plentiful ammunition, firing from solidly constructed buildings. The
maquisards
had been led to suppose that when the enemy saw the forces deployed against them, they would quickly surrender or flee. But when a young man named Marcel Chrétien leaped upon the
Monument aux Morts
and called to the
miliciens
in the billets opposite to surrender, he received only a fierce burst of fire. Few of the attackers had any experience of using firearms in action, far less of accurate marksmanship. From their street corners and doorways they blazed at the German
positions 100, perhaps 200 yards distant. They lacked the cohesion to get to close quarters and mount a determined assault. After some painful early casualties, most preferred to hold their positions and exchange fire. In the first hours, ammunition began to run short in many companies. Many wounded men lay where they had fallen. From their first, dashing descent on Tulle, the
maquisards
found themselves pinned down in a deadly street fight. One of them, Roger Simonot, described an experience that morning.

Jean-Jacques Chapou and Louis Godefroy had moved swiftly to the town hall when the attack began and established their headquarters in the council chamber. It was there that Constant Magnac, a twenty-nine-year-old teacher among the attackers, came to report:

‘Towards 8 am,’ wrote Chapou himself, ‘after two hours of heavy fighting, none of the runners whom I had sent to the battalion commanders had returned . . . The enemy maintained a heavy fire.’ Francesco Molinari, a young Italian communist who had won a Croix de Guerre fighting with the French Army in 1940 and was now an STO evader, shot his way into the Hôtel Moderne in the midst of the quays at the head of a group of
maquisards
, to be met by fierce resistance from the opposite end of the bar and the stairs. The attackers hurled themselves behind overturned marble tables to return the fire. Table by table they worked across the bar, one man crawling behind them, feverishly refilling Sten magazines from loose rounds in his haversack. At last the Germans retreated up the stairs. Molinari seized a bottle from the bar and raised it to his throat, only to have a bullet smash it from his grasp. Furiously he dashed for the stairs, firing as he ran. The Germans had escaped through the back door. He caught a glimpse of himself and his men reflected in a huge mirror on the landing, and they laughed at the image: filthy, exhausted, bearded, their clothes torn and their arms scratched and bleeding. They moved warily out of the hotel, and on down the street.

At about 11 am, a civilian approached a
maquisard
company commander in the street. He brought a message from the GMR and the gendarmes beleaguered in the Champs de Mars barracks. They had had enough. Could they withdraw up the road to Limoges under a flag of truce? Grudgingly the
maquisard
assented. Not long after, one by one a cautious procession of trucks emerged from the barracks yard, each one bearing a white flag. They were not fired upon. In haste and intense relief, the Vichyites retreated northwards towards the hills and Limoges. Some of the
maquisards
who saw them depart were infuriated, above all that the enemy had been allowed to take their weapons. But by now the FTP’s leaders were under no illusions. The GMR would never have handed over their arms, given the
maquis
’s disposition to ‘
bouziller les gars
’ – eliminate Vichy’s agents out of hand. Chapou’s difficulties were more than great enough that day. Any
diminution of the number of defenders must be welcomed on any terms.

When the first euphoria of the battle had receded, fatigue came quickly to the
maquisards
. Many had marched on foot for hours to reach the rendezvous, before they began to fight. They lacked the mutual confidence that supports trained units. Their clumsiness with their weapons caused repeated accidents. ‘Fanny’, a boy loading one of the bazookas, was horribly burned on the face as he lay carelessly in the path of its back blast when the gunner fired. A few moments later, a well-timed stick grenade from a window above a florist’s caught the injured boy again, agonizingly, together with two other men beside him. A few hundred yards away, another group was attempting to drive the Germans off the roof of the Ecole Supérieure with smoke and shrapnel rifle grenades. Two men were terribly wounded by premature explosions as they pressed their triggers. The others abandoned using rifle grenades.

The only German sally of the day took place at the bottom of the town at about 1.30 pm, when a party broke out of the buildings they were holding opposite the station, and took up positions on the platforms. In a waiting-room they burst in on eighteen nervous young French line guards who had taken refuge out of the line of fire. The Germans shot three immediately. When they withdrew to the hotel, they herded the other Frenchmen with them. One managed to break away and escape. The other fourteen were killed at once.

The afternoon wore on without decision. The
maquisards
now occupied most of the town, but the Germans were still holding out in the Ecole Normale, the arms factory and a school just in front of it. Two reconnaissance aircraft droned overhead, inspecting the town and raking the
maquisards
with desultory machine gun fire as they scuttled beneath. As evening approached, it was still impossible to move freely along the quays, because of
the Germans’ commanding positions on the heights above. The attackers were tired, hungry, and depressed by their losses. Kléber and the others in the council chamber weighed the events of the day: ‘Positive – the Germans are reduced to a cautious defensive (if one excludes their determined counter-attack on the station); negative – disastrous communications. Obvious lack of training among the men. Insufficient caution, lack of heavy weapons and shortage of ammunition . . .’ The
maquisards
’ best chance against the arms factory would probably have been a forceful night attack, but as darkness fell they had no spirit for such adventures. Most men slept where they stood, or slipped into the bedrooms of houses from which they had been firing, in some of which the terrified inhabitants still lingered amidst their possessions.

That evening, a car bearing couriers from Godefroy slipped out of Tulle and raced north to the château in the forests south-east of Limoges where Georges Guingouin had his headquarters. Like so many Resistance leaders, he had awarded himself colonel’s rank and shoulder pips on his uniform, and hugely enjoyed playing the part of military commander. The FTP visitors from Tulle were exasperated by the patronizing, bombastic reception they received from ‘this great devil of a man, brandishing his pistol at intervals to emphasize his remarks’. They heard a lecture on the folly of their action, and the flat rejection of their request for arms, ammunition or men.

At first light on the morning of 8 June, the firing resumed in Tulle – sporadically at first, then with more purpose as each side reawakened to its role in the drama. It continued hour after hour, with occasional casualties among attackers and defenders. The
maquis
had learned more caution, and showed no urge to storm the remaining enemy positions. The Germans appeared content to stand the siege until help came. But by early afternoon the
maquisards
had worked close enough to the Ecole Normale to use
smoke grenades and incendiaries. After repeated efforts they succeeded in setting fire to one corner of the building, and soon the blaze was out of control. Smoke was pouring from the windows, and the
maquisards
perceived the enemy’s fire slackening.

At 4 pm, to the delight of the exultant besiegers, a white flag appeared at the door. It was carried by Louise Boucheteil, a girl courier for the FTP who had been captured ten days earlier and held prisoner in the cellars of the building with some twenty other
maquisard
captives, expecting death at any time. Now, behind her from the school, unarmed and with their hands on their heads, came some forty Germans in uniform and civilian clothes. They had had enough. The jubilant
maquisards
seized their weapons and equipment and herded away the prisoners. One of those in civilian clothes was spotted by a
maquisard
who shouted, ‘I’ve seen you before – in the Hôtel St Martin!’ It was a Gestapo agent, who instantly broke from the column and ran for his life. A hail of fire belatedly pursued him. A
maquisard
ran down the hill in his wake, at last overtook the agent and shot him.

Now the only German garrison left in Tulle was pinned in the arms factory and the school in front of it. The Germans’ fire effectively covered only a few streets, and they showed no desire to assert themselves. Through the rest of Tulle, as silence overtook the town, one by one frightened and exhausted families began to emerge from their homes, nervously to congratulate the victors, bring out what little food and drink they had, tend the wounded and carry away the dead. One of the
maquis
leaders, a twenty-one-year-old farmworker named Elie Dupuy, told Prefect Trouillé defiantly: ‘If the Germans counter-attack, we shall ambush and beat them just as we have done in the past two days. In any case, we are perfectly certain that the armed struggle will bring about the liberation of our department – and of France!’

The cost had been high, but the great objective was all but gained. Excepting only the impotent huddle of Germans in the arms factory, the communist
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans
had by their
own efforts liberated the town of Tulle and brought its Occupiers to naught. Kléber, Godefroy, Dupuy and their men exulted in their triumph as they counted the dead and began to clear the wreckage, discussing how best to quell the fires that were still burning around the Ecole Normale. André Odru drove a few miles out of town on the road eastwards to visit his outlying pickets, puttering triumphantly up the hill in a borrowed
gazogène
.

He returned shortly after 9 pm. As his car approached the station, a knot of frightened townspeople flagged him down in the street. ‘The Germans are there!’ they shouted, gesturing towards the town centre. ‘Run for it!’ Odru hastily reversed the car. A few moments later the first flares began to burst over Tulle. Once again, the hammer of machine gun fire and the crump of heavier shells and mortars began to echo through the town. The Das Reich Division had entered the reckoning.

When Major Heinrich Wulf’s reconnaissance battalion – some hundred half-tracks and trucks bearing more than 500 men, even without their armoured car squadron – clattered out of Brive-la-Gaillarde at around 7 pm on the evening of 8 June, its officers were not in the best of tempers. They were irritated, almost affronted by the division’s losses during the afternoon, doubly so because some of them had heard General Eisenhower’s broadcast demanding full combatant status for
résistants
in arms. They were irked by the panic-stricken behaviour of the local garrison in Brive. So feeble was the German Empire’s grasp on the Corrèze, it seemed, that an SS Panzer
Aufklärungsabteilung
had now to be deployed to rescue the Tulle garrison from a band of half-armed communist terrorists. Neither they nor their men had much hint of what to expect when they reached the town.

The road from Brive to Tulle winds steeply upwards, overlooked by cliffs and woods for much of its course. Had the FTP possessed the smallest sense of self-preservation or tactical judgment a small force of
maquisards
posted to cover it could have felled trees across the road and delayed the advance of any German force for hours with Brens and gammon grenades. Yet the watchful Germans in the leading half-tracks observed nothing for mile after mile except a hint of smoke from the hills masking Tulle. When Wulf saw from his map that they were within two or three miles of the town, he raised his arm to signal the convoy to halt. With unknown assailants ahead, it was time to close up, and take the opportunity to refuel the vehicles from their jerrycans. They could still hear no sound of firing, but it seemed possible
that the noise of battle was being muffled by the hills which encircled the town.

The evening light was softening now, as they mounted the half-tracks again, and swept round the last bends and past the first houses of Tulle. Every man crouched with his weapon raised and cocked, mutely cursing the clatter of the tracks that made it impossible to hear shooting. They reached the approaches to the station, and still they did not see a soul. Every door and shutter was closed. The column swerved contemptuously around a single felled tree trunk in the road. There was a brief burst of fire in their direction which died within seconds. Wulf motioned his driver to halt. He jumped down from the half-track. Seeing nothing, he ordered the man to switch off the engine. There was still silence. Cautiously, with an NCO and his runner behind him, he moved on foot down the street, searching for signs of life and seeing none. He walked perhaps a hundred yards, then turned back to order his adjutant to deploy the companies around the town. He was still a street’s width from the column, when, as if at a signal, a barrage of gunfire burst around them. Brens, Stens and the crash of grenades echoed through the houses. The Germans in the half-tracks began to pour back fire. Wulf and his two men crouched for a moment against a bus shelter, then dashed back to cover behind their own armour. He was rapidly briefing his company commanders for the advance through the town when a single elderly, obviously terrified German NCO scuttled across the street towards him. He had been sent from the beleaguered garrison in the school in front of the arms factory 200 yards away. When they heard the approaching vehicles, they had guessed that it must be a relief column. With three of his own men behind him, Wulf and the NCO zigzagged from cover to cover down the street and into the shelter of the school.