Storming the Eagle's Nest (12 page)

The Pusteria Division soon realised that they had a problem on their doorstep. From the maquis established in the Vercors, the Belledonne and the Chartreuse came a steady drip of sabotage and subversion throughout the Dauphiné.
Les Allobroges
– the ancient term for the Alpine inhabitants of both the Savoie and the Dauphiné – was the resistance news-sheet started in the spring of 1941. Eighteen months later, explosives were being stolen, power lines and transformers being destroyed, and the personal details of prospective STO victims were being seized and burned. Something needed to be done. During winter, with snow on the narrow roads that accessed the plateau, the Vercors was virtually inaccessible, an island more than a plateau. With the spring thaw of 1943 came calling the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo (the Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism or OVRA). Founded in 1927, this was Mussolini’s equivalent of the Gestapo, indeed the organisation that provided a model for Heinrich Himmler’s Secret State Police.

In mid-March 1943 the OVRA seized fourteen of the
Montagnards
on the Vercors. They talked, one of them induced to do so by being forced to sit on a red-hot frying pan. A second series of raids followed in which the OVRA headed straight for the secret camps. The electricity station warning system worked, and in each case the Italians found the camps deserted. In May, disaster followed. An attempt by the Montagnards to seize a petrol tanker at Pont de Claix, at the bottom of the plateau’s eastern escarpment, was botched. A dozen men were seized, tortured, and talked. In the purge that followed the plateau’s unofficial system of administration collapsed, six tons of explosive were seized, a number of the camps were broken up, and the survivors had to retreat to the most remote parts of the Vercors.
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The Montagnards needed professional help.

This came in the form of Capitaine Alain Le Ray.

Born in 1910 in Paris, Le Ray was an ambitious young officer and an expert skier and mountaineer. Once commissioned, he was attached to the elite Chasseurs Alpins mountain light infantry, headquartered in Grenoble. Captured in northern France in June 1940, he had escaped from his first POW camp and was sent to Colditz. The legendary ‘escape-proof’ castle in Saxony held him for three weeks. Following his flight on 11 April 1941 he became the first Colditz prisoner to make it to freedom, to achieve a ‘home run’. Le Ray’s track record and his familiarity with Grenoble made him a good choice as the first military leader of the Vercors. He was also good-looking, bold and courageous, and he had the impeccable social credentials of being the son-in-law of François Mauriac. He took charge in May 1943, just as the plateau lurched into crisis. In summer 1943, as the maquis emerged once again from their refuges, Le Ray began turning them into a fighting force.

He also did something more. For Operation Montagnards, as it would soon be called, was little less than a secret plan to turn the whole course of the war in Alpine France.

At the same time, the maquis further north in the Rhône-Alpes were acting under the same stimuli in similar ways.

In the Savoie, the maquis leader was Colonel Jean Vallette d’Osia. Born in 1898, Vallette d’Osia was a professional soldier who had been decorated in the First World War, wounded three times, and ended up graduating from the elite military academy at Saint Cyr. Captured during the Battle of France in 1940, he escaped twice. He then turned to General Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin as the French military leader too late in the day to prevent the Fall of France. Weygand persuaded d’Osia to follow the call of de Gaulle and take a hand in the renaissance of the French nation. In August 1940 d’Osia became commanding officer of the 27th Mountain Infantry Battalion in Annecy. This was part of L’armée d’armistice, a force of 100,000 that Vichy retained under the armistice terms. The post was a cover that enabled the Colonel to establish links with the nascent maquis in Savoie.

After Operation Anton in 1942 and the dissolution of L’armée d’armistice that Anton entailed, d’Osia became the formal leader of the resistance in Savoie. A small, fiery man and a fierce
disciplinarian
, he conceived the idea of creating a secret Alpine army as a response to the occupation of the Zone Libre. This meant not simply assembling the maquis – as had been done in the Vercors – but properly training them in the way that his colleague Alain Le Ray would soon be doing on the Grenoble plateau. For this purpose d’Osia set up an instruction camp on the Col des Saisies, a 5,436-foot pass close to what is now the skiing resort of La Saisies. This dated from March 1943, the very beginnings of STO. It was the germ of a series of training camps in the Savoie and Haute-Savoie where maquis leaders were inculcated into the theory and practice of mountain warfare. To many of the recruits brought up in the highlands of Savoie on the flanks of Mont Blanc, the basics of climbing and skiing were second nature. They were now taught how to deal with glaciers, cut steps in ice slopes, use ice axes and crampons: to become proficient, professional mountaineers. Once again, this maquis was armed
and funded by the Allies, both by the SOE and, later, its
fresh-faced
US equivalent, the OSS – the story of which appears in the next chapter.

From March 1943 the BBC, at the behest of the SOE’s Baker Street propaganda section, began to talk of major groups of maquisards in the Haute-Savoie. Swiss radio also began to run stories of risings in the Savoie – which adjoined the republic’s Canton Valais. It was this activity – and publicity – that gave the movement in the Haute-Savoie a reputation that inspired resistance throughout France. Similarly, from the summer of 1943 onwards, such was the extent of the resistance around Grenoble that it became known by both General de Gaulle’s Free French Forces and – critically – the BBC as the ‘capital of the maquis’.

The resistance in the French Alps had arrived.

Meanwhile, only a few miles to the north-east of the Savoie, Switzerland survived. The March Alarm that had sounded on 19 March 1943 had again proved false.

Four weeks earlier, Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein had launched a fresh attack on the Eastern Front. By the end of March, the Soviet Voronezh Front was back on the east bank of the Donets river, the Red Army had abandoned nearly 6,000 square miles of the territory it had won after Stalingrad, and the cities of Belgorod and Kharkov were once again in the hands of the Wehrmacht.

In the Berchtesgaden Berghof, Hitler’s warlords celebrated; every day the sun in the deep valley rose earlier and set later; every day the snow receded and sometimes the warm föhn wind blew from the south. Now there was spring in the air and – with this news from the east – all thoughts of Fortress Europe and the invasion of Switzerland were shelved. General Guisan’s forces in Switzerland, hastily mobilised, were once again stood down.

In the place of the invasion of Switzerland, quite another plan was conceived in Berchtesgaden. This was Operation Citadel,
the Wehrmacht’s ambitious plan to destroy the Soviet Central and Voronezh Fronts 280 miles south of Moscow in the Kursk salient.

Yet if Hitler could once again look with satisfaction to the Eastern Front, he was less happy with his southern flank, with Italy. Here, Il Duce’s regime was clearly crumbling. The Italians had entered the war trailing on the coat-tails of the Nazis. They had done so without enthusiasm, hoping at best for some ill-gotten spoils. As it so turned out, the country had gained little and lost a great deal in the conflicts in the Alps, the Balkans, in the Soviet Union and in North Africa. Casualties would soon amount to over 204,000. Of these, 67,000 had been killed, 111,000 were missing and 26,000 had died of disease. Hungry workers in Milan and Turin were now demonstrating for ‘bread, peace and freedom’; Venetian women now spurned the propaganda suggestion that they looked their best in coats made of tabby cats’ fur.
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Il Duce needed support. Now firmly ensconced for three months in the Berghof, the Führer summoned Mussolini up from Rome to the Reich.

On 7 April 1943 Hitler drove down from the Berghof to meet Mussolini in Salzburg. In the city’s baroque Schloss Klessheim the Führer unfolded his plans for two operations intended – among other things – to put heart into his ally. The first was Operation Citadel in Kursk; the second Fall Schwarz. This was the Axis’s fifth offensive against the resistance in Yugoslavia, Mussolini’s north-eastern neighbour. According to Goebbels, the enthusiasm and energy with which Hitler set out these operations won over the faltering Mussolini. ‘By putting every ounce of energy into the effort, he succeeded in pushing Mussolini back on the rails … The Duce underwent a complete change … When he got out of the train on his arrival, the Fuehrer thought, he looked like a broken old man; when he left he was in high fettle, ready for any deed.’
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At the end of the meeting Mussolini exclaimed, ‘Fuehrer, the Berlin–Rome Axis will win.’
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Nevertheless, Hitler thought it wise to put in place a
contingency
plan. If Italy withdrew from the Axis, the Reich would at best have a neutral country on its southern doorstep; at worst it would have one newly contracted to the Allies. After all, as 1914 approached Italy had been the third player in the Triple Alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary; she came into the war in 1915 allied to the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia. There was little to stop her doing something similar now. Should that happen, disaster beckoned for Germany. The Alpine passes of Italy were the southern gateways to the Reich. Obviously, neither the passes nor northern Italy could be allowed to fall into enemy hands. On 21 March 1943 Hitler summoned Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, the hero of the Afrika Korps, to the Berghof.

Hitler briefed Rommel to set up a new army group to take control of northern Italy in the event of Mussolini’s collapse. The lightning seizure of the Alpine pass routes was critical to the whole operation: the Brenner, the Reschen forty miles to its west, and the Tarvis seventy miles south-east. Rommel – as experienced in mountain as desert warfare – accordingly sketched a plan to infiltrate four army divisions into Italy to hold these passes. The spearheads would be followed by sixteen more divisions ready to penetrate beyond the triangle of Italy’s industrial heartland of Turin, Milan and Genoa. The scheme was to be called Operation Achse (Axis). To his wife Rommel wrote succinctly, ‘It is better to fight the war in Italy than at home.’
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In the course of developing these plans with Hitler, Rommel would present himself at noon at the Berghof for the daily war conferences. From the picture window in the great hall that
overlooked
Berchtesgadener Land, the General enjoyed a scene that he found breathtaking every time he turned to it: a paradise of serrated peaks, green valleys, tumbling streams, gingerbread houses and bright blue skies. The red marble conference table told a very different story. The meetings brought Rommel up to date with the position on the various fronts on which the Reich’s forces were operating: the trouble in North Africa, the aftermath
of Stalingrad, the destruction of German cities by the USAAF and RAF, the U-boat losses running at thirty a month in the Battle of the Atlantic. This was the regular warfare. Now,
resistance
– irregular warfare – was showing its hand in the French and Yugoslav Alps in the hitherto subdued occupied countries. Where would it all end?

One day Rommel drew Hitler aside and volunteered an appreciation of the military situation, the
tour d’horizon
of which the Führer himself was a master. ‘Hitler listened to it all with downcast eyes,’ Rommel later told his family.
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‘Suddenly he looked up and said that he, too, was aware that there was very little chance left of winning the war. But the West would never conclude peace with him – at least not the statesmen who were at the helm now. He said that he had never wanted war with the West. But now the West would have its war – have it to the end.’
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On 1 July 1943 Hitler flew back to Rastenburg to oversee Operation Citadel. Rommel headed the ninety miles north to Munich, where, away from the prying eyes of the Italians, he completed his preparations for Operation Achse. If they were to be executed Rommel would be sent a codeword. The infiltration of the Reich’s forces into northern Italy was the first task; the second was to turn on the Italians in the event of Italy decamping to the Allies. The word was ‘Achse’.

This was timely, for it coincided with the failure of one of the two operations over which Hitler had enthused with such effect to Mussolini: Fall Schwarz, the fifth offensive against the partisans in Yugoslavia.

When the Axis forces had invaded the Balkan state in April 1941, Croatia had been hived off as a Nazi satellite under the fascist Ustaše; the remainder of the country had been divided between German, Hungarian and Italian forces. In this ragbag of provinces and statelets riven with age-old racial and religious rivalries, resistance had emerged almost at once.

Josip Broz, who went under the
nom de guerre
of Tito, had set up a resistance cell in Belgrade in June 1941. Born in 1892 in modest circumstances in Croatia, Tito had trained as a mechanic, worked briefly as a test driver for Daimler, was conscripted, and in 1915 became the youngest sergeant major in the Austro-Hungarian army. Wounded and captured by the Russians, his imagination was fired by the Bolshevik revolution. On his return to Yugoslavia after the war he joined the tiny Yugoslav Communist Party. On 27 June 1941 the Party’s Central Committee appointed him commander-in-chief of the liberation forces. He dubbed his supporters the partisans.

They were rivalled by the Chetniks, a Serbian group led by Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović. A year younger than Tito, Mihailović was a Serb with a similarly distinguished military record to Tito’s but with diametrically opposed political opinions. He supported the exiled King Peter, and his followers were mainly drawn from the Royal Army. Based in the mountains of Ravna Gora in western Serbia, Churchill called them the patriots.