The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (27 page)

More than six hundred and thirty
résistants
were killed in the battle of Vercors.
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Scattered and divided by the enemy, some survivors made it to the Lente forest in almost inaccessible mountains. News of the defeat was sent to Algiers: ‘Vercors defences pierced... after fifty-six hours of battle. Have ordered dispersal in small groups in order to resume the fight if that should prove possible. Everyone has performed his duty courageously in a desperate struggle, but we are saddened at being obliged to yield because of the enemy’s numbers and at having been completely abandoned while the battle was in progress.’

The commander of the Secret Army in south-east France, General Henri Zeller, had managed to leave the Alps after the attack and fly to Algiers to petition de Gaulle himself. ‘Thanks to their weapons - the cannon, mortars, tanks and planes - the Germans are still capable of carrying out terrible reprisals. But once they have done so, they return to huddle in their garrisons. They do not dare to send an isolated car or a liaison agent out on the road. The railroad lines are blocked. One out of every two truck convoys transporting provisions is attacked, despite armed protection. The Germans, who will never dare surrender to the “terrorists”, are hoping almost as much as we are for the arrival of the Allied troops.’

De Gaulle listened attentively. He handed the colonel a blue file. ‘The Allies will be landing on the coast of Provence in a few days. Here are the main features of the operations plan. Sit down at this table, study them, and give me your opinion.’

The colonel took the file and began to read. At last, the long-awaited invasion was about to happen! He was excited, but as he scanned the pages his spirits slumped. Typed before him in black and white was the expected date for the liberation of the Alpine region:
Grenoble, D-Day plus 90
.

In three months’ time, he thought to himself, we’ll all be long dead.

VI - Liberation

The Germans continued their ruthless campaign against the Vercors Résistance for a further two weeks, destroying crops and killing cattle, burning farms and ruthlessly hunting down anyone who was suspected of being in the Maquis or of assisting it. The survivors saw the dream of liberty promised by the stand in the mountain fastness dissolve, and the rhetoric and heroics seemed to have resulted in nothing but death and defeat.

The veterans of Vercors were left with bitter feelings of resentment that in the moment of their greatest need they had been betrayed and abandoned. And yet, apart from the big set battles, the Germans had never been more vulnerable. Despite everything, the Maquis regrouped in small units and managed to go back on the offensive, attacking trucks and patrols. But now these actions were violently opposed by local inhabitants who bore the brunt of German retaliation as yet more farms were set alight.

Meanwhile, in Algiers, General Henri Zeller studied the invasion plans shown to him by de Gaulle. As commander of the Secret Army in south-eastern France, he knew the Maquis still had an essential role to play despite the price it had paid in the Alps. The calculation that the Allies would not reach Grenoble until three months after the initial landing meant that the Germans would have ample time to complete their strategy of attacking Maquis strongholds in force, one after the other, and destroying whatever pockets of Résistance remained. Unless he could persuade his superiors to change their plans, and the Allies broke through quickly, thousands of Maquis fighters would be sacrificed and the fate of the mountain Résistance sealed.

De Gaulle had asked for the general’s opinion of the plan, so he gave it forcefully. ‘This is far too cautious. Once the coastal area has been occupied to points twelve miles inland, the Allies must be audacious and not hesitate to send out light columns, supported by armoured cars and cannon, on all the north-south roads. If the Allies advance north through the mountains, in particular the Route Napoleon, they will be virtually unchallenged. They’ll be in Grenoble in days, not months.’

De Gaulle was openly astonished at what he heard. Keenly aware of the disaster of Vercors, he had interpreted the rout to mean that the Résistance in the region had been broken. Zeller established a different reality as he described the military situation in the mountains. The Germans had powerful forces that were invincible when applied against poorly armed
résistants
, but there were large areas they no longer controlled where they were always at risk. ‘Virtually the whole of the French Alps is in our hands for all practical purposes,’ Zeller said. ‘Once the assault troops have a firm bridgehead, it is vital that we lose no time in thrusting some armed columns north. With the support of the FFI they cannot fail to advance very fast.’ And the strategy could be successful with a force of only a couple of thousand men. Once in Grenoble, the Allies would be able to strike west and cut off the enemy’s retreat from the coast.

‘Are you sure?’ de Gaulle asked, sceptically.

‘Absolutely.’ The Germans would be no match for Allied armour operating in Alpine country, where it would not only have the military support of the Maquis, but would also be provided with accurate intelligence of enemy positions and movements.

‘This is extremely important,’ de Gaulle said, convinced. He ordered Zeller to leave immediately for Naples to explain the situation to General Alexander Patch, the American in command of the invasion force. Zeller gave an equally impressive and persuasive performance in front of the commander and his senior staff, and it was agreed to adapt the invasion plan accordingly.

On 15 August 1944, the Allies finally made their landing in southern France, in near perfect conditions. Operation Anvil-Dragoon comprised an invasion force of twelve hundred ships carrying three hundred thousand men made up of divisions from the newly constituted American Seventh Army and the French Second Army. The assault force made an amphibious landing and airdrop on the Côte d’Azur, between Hyeres and Cannes. By nightfall some ninety-four thousand men and more than eleven thousand vehicles were already ashore, with fewer than two hundred Allied killed and wounded. The German coastal defence, made up of two second-line infantry divisions, was broken and over two thousand prisoners taken. The prayers of the Alpine Résistance had been answered, and as news of the landing reached the mountains, hope returned.

The French troops turned west towards Toulon and Marseille, while the American Seventh Army thrust north. Eighteen units of an armoured brigade advanced up the Route Napoleon, where nearly one hundred and thirty years earlier Bonaparte had led his men on the march to Paris after his escape from the island of Elba.

Unknown to Michel, Suzanne had begun to work in Lyon for Allied intelligence. She had continued to live a precarious existence in the city, sharing an apartment with her mother, and worked closely with a young German officer who had deserted the Wehrmacht. They were now sent south to liaise with the invasion force and supply the Americans with important intelligence regarding troop strength and positions around Lyon. Both were supplied with false papers and money, and Suzanne - a veteran of wartime uncertainty - took along her jewellery.

As they approached the Riviera, they passed unruly bands of gun-toting Frenchmen at the side of the road. These groups had sprung up all over France since the Allied invasions and were anarchic, undirected and dangerous. Most of them had nothing at all to do with the genuine Résistance but belonged to a breed dubbed, in a phrase of scorching irony, Résistants de la Derniere Minute - Resisters of the Last Minute.

The car was waved down at an improvised roadblock set up by one of these gangs and Suzanne and her colleague were ordered out and asked for their papers. The German explained that they were on an urgent mission to meet with advance units of the Allied invasion force. As he spoke, the most aggressive of the ‘
résistants
’ leaned forward, listening intently. The agent’s French was not very good, and betrayed a distinct German accent. The group of volatile bandits became convinced they had found a member of the German occupation force making his escape. He was dragged roughly from the car, together with Suzanne, and the vehicle was searched. This turned up the false papers and a large amount of money and jewellery. Explanation only served to enrage the young hotheads, while Suzanne’s accent with its Austrian tang further convinced them that they had caught Nazis on the run.

Sensing the danger, Suzanne attempted to calm everyone down as the gang grew increasingly excited and belligerent. The agent quoted the code names of contacts in Lyon who could prove his story, but these meant nothing to the men around him who seemed to have had no direct affiliation to any of the Résistance groups. Nobody was listening anyway. There was shoving and pushing, and one of the gang moved towards the German waving a pistol. A single shot sounded, an almost insignificant noise amid the raised, angry voices. He fell down dead.

Suzanne was manhandled back into a car, driven along the coast road to Nice and handed over to the authorities. She was put in a cell in the same jail where she had awaited trial by a Vichy court for influence peddling, except now she was accused of collaborating with the enemy.

True to General Zeller’s passionate advocacy, advance US Army units were a few miles south of Grenoble in five days rather than three months. Life for the occupying enemy inside the city had become increasingly circumscribed. A force of two thousand men had been mobilised in the Isere by the Résistance and isolated the Germans by sabotaging rail and road links in and out of the city. Traffic to Chambery was cut off completely, and only one or two convoys a day left Grenoble, escorted by armoured and repair trains. A strict curfew came into force after six in the evening, when the Germans withdrew into a cordon of armed posts that inspected every vehicle that went in and out. The only life in the streets consisted of the numerous German patrols of frightened troops. They panicked easily and recklessly opened fire on anyone and anything: doctors visiting patients, night workers, lamp-posts and stray dogs.

The Résistance groups were ordered to penetrate the city on the night of 21/22 August at the same time that the Germans began to pull out, an act they announced by blowing up their ammunition dumps. Retreating enemy convoys came under fierce attack on all routes, and there was sporadic fighting within the city itself. Michel states proudly: ‘It should never be forgotten that in the end Grenoble was liberated by the Résistance.’

The population awoke the following morning to find themselves free for the first time in four years. Colonel Frangois Huet, who had commanded the Maquis in Vercors, bicycled furiously to meet the American armoured column rumoured to be a few miles south of the town. He came upon an American tank in the village of Le Pont-de-Claix and demanded to be taken to the officer in charge. The commander of the unit, Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Johnston, greeted him warmly.

‘You can push on into the city,’ Huet told him through an interpreter. ‘We want to see American uniforms there today!’

‘But I’ve only got a tank squadron and an artillery battery and a company of infantry,’ Johnston objected. He explained that he commanded a small advance unit and the main force was further down the road.

‘Foncez, foncez!’
Huet urged, gesturing dramatically towards Grenoble. Charge, sweep on!

Johnston did not need a translation. ‘Okay,’ he said, grinning.

American tanks pushed into the town and found the streets jammed with cheering locals. The taking of Grenoble turned the Germans’ left flank in the Rhône valley, levering them out of all southern and eastern France. And the objective had been taken, thanks to the Résistance and the eloquence of General Zeller, not in three months but in a single week.
[117]

Grenoble was liberated, but still in the war. Skirmishes between FFI forces and Vichy police units now erupted on street corners and down back alleys. More importantly, the city lay on the escape route to the north-east, and the day after liberation a retreating German column of twenty-five vehicles was reported to be advancing towards it, intending to force its way through. It was attacked by Résistance commando groups at three different points and turned back. Large concentrations of German troops were still positioned in the mountains to the east, including men from the 157th Alpine Division that had seen action on the Vercors plateau. They shelled the city with heavy 88 mm artillery in an attempt to keep the road open. American troops joined with Résistance forces to attack, and spotter planes accurately directed US artillery on to the enemy. The combined action brought about the surrender of the last Germans, who were surrounded in Grésivaudan.

Lieutenant-Colonel Johnston was standing with his French colleague, Colonel Huet, when a lieutenant from the Wehrmacht bearing a white flag was brought to him. The German officer asked to speak to Johnston alone, explaining that his orders were to surrender only to an American officer. The American draped his arm around the Frenchman’s shoulders. ‘My comrade and I belong to the same army of liberation,’ he said. ‘We will only accept your surrender together.’ For the men of the Résistance, who had never surrendered, it was a powerful moment: a German officer formally conceding the defeat of a crack Wehrmacht regiment.
[118]

Michel experienced his first encounter with American troops. His commando group had been active around the clock since the landing in the south and had captured a dozen German prisoners. ‘They were afraid to be captured by the Résistance, for obvious reasons. They expected to be summarily executed in revenge. In fact, I had no strong feelings towards the prisoners. I saw them simply as soldiers.’