The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis - A Good Place to Hide (30 page)

The message was clear. Keep those weapons of the spirit sharp, but leave it at that—stay away from guns, and revenge. It was entirely consistent with everything Trocmé had said and done in the past. But it was far removed from the spirit of the times.

Édouard Theis returned to the Plateau at about the same time as Trocmé, so there were once again two voices preaching pacifism. But by now nobody was listening.

• • •

In the days immediately following D-Day, the Allies’ luck held. Hitler remained convinced that the D-Day landings were some kind of diversion, and that the ‘real’ invasion would still come via the Pas-de-Calais. So he kept his crack Panzer tank divisions well to the rear, ready to reinforce the Calais area when they were needed. The Atlantic Wall had not done its job of confining the Allies to the Normandy beaches. Now the German reinforcements were not forthcoming, and the Allies were able to consolidate. By 12 June, six days after D-Day, the Allied forces had managed to link up along a huge, solid front across Normandy. Men and arms continued to pour ashore. Allied casualties during the landings were heavy: by 21 June they had lost 5287 killed, 23,079 wounded and 12,183 missing. But there was clearly no stopping them.

In the midst of this, Hitler unleashed his much-vaunted ‘secret weapon’, the V-1 flying bomb. This was a pilotless jet-propelled aircraft, known in Germany as the
Vergeltungswaffe
, the ‘reprisal weapon’. On
14 June, the first of a swarm of V-1 ‘doodlebugs’ crossed the English Channel from a launch site near Calais, and exploded on English soil. The doodlebugs were rightly feared, but they were never going to win a war, or even disrupt the invasion. The Allies continued their advance into France. And the BBC made sure everybody in France knew it.

By the end of June 1944, the situation in Occupied France was pretty close to anarchy. Who was the government? Was it the Pétain administration, still issuing proclamations from Vichy? Or was it the London-based government-in-exile of Charles de Gaulle, now in command of the Secret Army? De Gaulle’s forces already controlled large swathes of the French countryside and were allied to the advancing British, American and Canadian forces. Who should a gendarme listen to?

On 8 June, two days after the Allied landing, the various brigades of gendarmes in the Haute-Loire had been ordered to go to the departmental capital, Le Puy, and join their comrades there. This had the effect of splitting the various gendarmeries, as some obeyed orders and moved to Le Puy, while others simply joined the maquis. On 11 June the earlier order was countermanded: the gendarmes were to return to their posts. But when the depleted numbers of gendarmes returned, they found the situation had changed. A report on Resistance activity held in the departmental archives in Le Puy spelled out the new situation.

Cars and motorcycles carrying armed maquisards are moving about in large numbers in the sector around Montfaucon. Moreover, the town of Dunières has been held by maquis forces since the evening of 11 June. They occupy the town hall, the post office, the gendarmerie, and the railway station, and they control the railway line and the roads. These Resistance forces come from the Ardèche, particularly from Saint-Agrève. They issue travel permits and they have detained the mayor, Monsieur Malartre.

The gendarmes’ dilemma was well exposed on the night of 27 June. At around 9 pm, eight armed men set about robbing the Guilhot petrol station in Yssingeaux. The local sub-prefect tried to intervene but was brushed aside. The remaining gendarmes arrived and proceeded to open fire, seriously wounding one of the maquisards. The next day a handwritten proclamation was delivered to the police station.

Gendarmes,

I give you until tomorrow 29 June at 6 pm to hand yourselves in, together with your arms and belongings, at Saint-Agrève. If you don’t carry out this order, you will all be shot. We will keep some of your families as hostages, and the family of the sub-prefect.

(Signed) The commander, French Armed Partisans 73201, French Forces of the Interior.

The following day at 9 pm, three hours past the deadline, 120 armed men stormed into Yssingeaux from Saint-Agrève. They cut the telephone lines, then descended on the gendarmerie, with the captured sub-prefect at the head of the party. They grabbed no fewer than 40  gendarmes, including the most senior officer, Lieutenant Morel, and a young woman, the daughter of a French government technical adviser. The maquisards announced that they were seeking vengeance for the death of one of their members—the man wounded two evenings earlier had subsequently died.

Somehow, calm prevailed. It was agreed that the dead maquisard should be buried in Yssingeaux, and that all the senior dignitaries of the town should attend the funeral service, including the sub-prefect. The whole thing passed off without further incident. But it was clear that the gendarmes were no longer in control of their turf.

• • •

Three tragedies struck the Plateau in July and August 1944, the first of them on 5 July. The Beau-Soleil guesthouse, which for four years had bustled with refugee children and students from the New Cévenole School, was now reduced to hosting three students. Other rooms were occupied by maquisards, some of them recovering from their mauling in the Battle of Mont Mouchet. Three adolescents were together in the house on the fateful day: Manou Barraud, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Georgette Barraud, the proprietor of Beau-Soleil; Manou’s classmate and boyfriend, Jean; and a third youngster.

The trio of teenagers wandered aimlessly around the house. Most of the maquisards had gone into the village of Le Chambon, so their rooms were unoccupied. The three looked idly in cupboards and drawers. In a drawer, Jean found a pistol left behind by one of the maquisards. He picked it up. There was an ammunition clip still in place, so Jean removed it to make the pistol safe—or so he thought. He then began to fiddle with the safety catch, and with the trigger. There was still one bullet in the breech, and Jean accidentally fired it.

The bullet struck Manou in the abdomen, cutting a major artery. She fell instantly. Manou’s older sister, Gaby, heard the shot from downstairs. She rushed up to the room. She and Jean did their best to comfort Manou. Then Gaby raced to fetch Dr Le Forestier. He and Gaby returned in his car to find a very weak Manou. Dr Le Forestier examined her, but it was a foregone conclusion. ‘She’s lost,’ he said simply.

The entire village of Le Chambon was immersed in grief. Georgette Barraud was a close friend of André and Magda Trocmé’s. Manou was buried in the Trocmé family plot in the Le Chambon municipal graveyard, near the Protestant church.

It was not the end. There was more tragedy to come, this time directly affecting the Trocmé family.

• • •

One of the bloodiest events in the story of the Plateau has been more or less airbrushed from history. It rates a couple of perfunctory sentences in most histories, and facts are hard to come by. Yet the Wehrmacht daily report of 10 July 1944 estimates that ‘135 terrorists were shot and some 200 killed in battle’. This is clearly a wild exaggeration, but there is general agreement that between 30 and 50 civilians were killed, and there are claims of around 50 German casualties.

The action took place over two days, on 5 and 6 July 1944, in and around the small town of Le Cheylard in the foothills of the Plateau, about 25 kilometres south of Saint-Agrève. Le Cheylard had been a centre for Resistance activity, and the Germans decided to put a stop to it. It may or may not have been a coincidence, but 5 July was a Wednesday, which meant it was market day in Le Cheylard. The streets were crowded at 11 am, when the first of many aircraft arrived overhead and began strafing the town indiscriminately.

At the same time, two columns of German troops now headed for the village. The first column came from the southwest, from the direction of Mézilhac in the Dorne Valley. The 17th Company of the  Secret Army ambushed them at the tiny village of Sardiges. With  the help of some Polish Resistance fighters, they managed to push the Germans back towards Noirol. One of the heroes of the day was a twelve-year-old boy named Roger Planchon, who had previously acted as a runner for the Resistance. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his part in the action,
⁵⁴
one of the youngest Resistance fighters ever to receive such an honour.

The second German column arrived from the southeast along the Eyrieux valley from the direction of Saint-Barthélemy-le-Miel. There it ran into the 31st Company of the Secret Army. This time the Germans made no mistake. After bloody fighting, they pushed
past the Resistance troops and on to Le Cheylard, which was by now in flames. Resistance reinforcements from the FTP (Francs-tireurs et Partisans, roughly ‘French gunmen and Partisans’) rushed in from Lamastre and managed to catch some Germans, but it was too late. Le Cheylard had been devastated. The Germans now withdrew, leaving the Resistance to bury the dead, including civilians. There are no reliable figures for German casualties, though there are reports of up to 50 killed or wounded. The same sources talk of ‘dozens’ of French civilians and Resistance fighters killed.

The appalling fate of Le Cheylard led many on the Plateau to wonder if any of their villages were safe. Should the Plateau be evacuated? Some people from the villages took to the forests to avoid being caught in the next aerial attack.

There was a further lesson. For the second time, the Resistance learned that it was too poorly armed to be a match for a well-trained regular army, particularly an army that could call up air support. Hit and run would have to be the policy until the Allies arrived. Or the Germans left.

• • •

On 11 July 1944 the village of Fay-sur-Lignon ‘fell’ to the Resistance, the  last village on the Plateau to do so. A  mere five weeks after D-Day, the Plateau was now entirely in Resistance hands. The same appears to have been true of most of the Haute-Loire. The Germans still occupied the departmental capital of Le Puy-en-Velay, where the Gestapo, the German military police and the Vichy Mobile Reserve Groups were still on the loose. However, they were completely surrounded in Le Puy, and they knew it. On 16 July the local head of the Vichy government’s thuggish Milice, wrote in his report: ‘The encirclement of Le Puy is complete. Within a very few kilometres from the centre, [the Resistance] are masters of the Haute-Loire.’

Reprisals began on 12 July. Members of the 07.106 Company of the FTP shot two Germans and a Frenchman at Saint-Agrève. They were buried in a mass grave in Astier Wood. To this day, the area is known as the Bois des Allemands, ‘the woods of the Germans’.

• • •

By 11 July, Pierre Fayol had begun to worry about the shipment of arms promised by ‘Diane’ for 15 June. Almost four weeks had passed without the expected coded message from London, and there had been no word from Diane. On 11 July, he sent Jacqueline Decourdemanche to Cosne-sur-Loire to investigate. To her astonishment, Jacqueline found herself face to face with Diane. The drop was that night.

It duly arrived. No fewer than 21 parachutes brought Sten submachine guns, Bren machine guns, Remington rifles and machine guns, ordinary hand grenades, Gammon anti-tank grenades, plus ammunition for the various weapons. With each parachute container, there was also a small box of tea marked ‘Diane’. The FFI of the Plateau would now be properly armed. And Virginia Hall had some of the comforts of home. Hall also needed somewhere to stay. It needed to be a site with good radio reception, which suggested a hill rather than a valley. At first she lodged with Pierre Fayol and his family, spending a lot of time at the kitchen table coding and decoding messages. However, radio-detector vans were busy trying to track down spies, and it made no sense to put both herself and Fayol at risk at the same time and in the same place. She moved to Panelier, the guesthouse used by Fayol’s friend, the writer Albert Camus. It had the advantage of being very isolated. Next, she moved in with the redoubtable Madame Lebrat, who had a farm between Le Chambon and Villelonge. Hall asked if Madame Lebrat would mind if she sent the occasional radio message from the farm. Madame Lebrat was indignant. ‘What on earth are you going on about?
A radio transmitter! Yes, I’m very happy with that. But I don’t want any guns in the house.’

At first Hall hid her code books and other incriminating material under the ashes in Madame Lebrat’s fireplace. Then she found a complicated way of isolating one part of the house’s water supply so that she could create a dry chamber. The code books and equipment would be safe there. Earlier, she’d had problems with interruptions to the electricity supply, which meant interruptions to her radio transmissions. So she built a makeshift electricity supply from an old bicycle. She removed the wheels and attached the pedal mechanism to a generator. She could then pedal for dear life while transmitting. For someone with a wooden leg, it cannot have been easy.

She now reported on troop movements and strengths, and kept London up to date on political developments and the mood in France, and particularly in the Haute-Loire. She was also the chief liaison between London and the Resistance in the area. If they needed anything, ‘Diane’ got it for them.

Hall was nothing if not diligent. The message log of the Special Operations Executive in London records on 18 June: ‘20 telegrams from this operator.’ On 1 July it recorded: ‘21 telegrams received from this operator.’ The 23 July summary for ‘V. Hall’ reads: ‘Has 400 maquis in 5 groups. Awaiting arms for unlimited recruitment.’

In a memorandum dated 27 October 1944—in support of a request to have her awarded a medal for bravery—Lieutenant de Roussy de Sales wrote to his superior officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul van der Stricht, head of the Western European section of the Secret Army, describing her activities.

While in the Haute-Loire, Miss Hall made many receptions
[Translation: organised many parachute drops],
and with the cooperation of a Jedburgh team she succeeded in organising, arming
and training three FFI battalions which were involved in several engagements with the enemy and many sabotages.