Voices from the Dark Years (50 page)

  
2.
  De Monbrison manuscript accounts.

  
3.
  Marie-Rose’s experiences condensed from personal interviews with the author.

  
4.
  Some sources give 640 or more killed.

  
5.
  Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 2, p. 233.

  
6.
  M. Abbadi, ‘Actes du Colloque des Enfants cachés’, unpublished manuscript, pp. 43–60.

  
7.
  Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne sous l’Occupation
, Vol. 3, pp. 90–1.

  
8.
  O. Barton,
Mirrors of Destruction
Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 65.

  
9.
  Thornton,
The Liberation of Paris
, p. 109.

10.
  For the full story, see D. Boyd,
De Gaulle: The Man Who Defied Six US Presidents
(Stroud: The History Press, 2014).

PART 4

THE PRICE OF LIBERATION

21

A
TROCITIES
ON
B
OTH
S
IDES

On 6 June, pre-recorded messages from Churchill and Eisenhower were broadcast and dropped in leaflet form over populated areas.Both leaders exhorted the French people to do everything possible to assist the invasion. Furious at the way he had been sidelined throughout the planning, de Gaulle at first refused to record a message because their speeches failed to acknowledge him as leader of Free France. Unwilling to fragment the Resistance by naming and condemning the factions with their own agendas, he agreed at the last moment to broadcast an injunction for the population to obey only the orders from Gaullist officers. What the Anglo-Saxon Allies failed to appreciate, and what he foresaw all too clearly, was the hideous game about to be played in the plumb centre of France. The town of St-Amand-Montrond lay 300km south of the landings, but less than 40km from the major city of Bourges, where there were important Wehrmacht, Gestapo, Milice and Vichy military units.

Four local Maquis leaders met at dawn on 6 June in the house of René Van Gaver, while the alarm was still being sounded on the Atlantic Wall at the first sight of the enormous invasion armada off-shore. All four men were supposed to take their orders from COMAC, the Comité d’Action Militaire of the united Resistance movements. COMAC was controlled by PCF members using a confusion of titles, initials and code-names to obscure the long arm of the Comintern, which intended the PCF to rule after the Liberation through apparently Popular Front organisations, to confuse the public.

COMAC had called upon all units not only to implement several agreed plans – Plan Green was the sabotage of railways, Plan Slowcoach the blockage of roads, and so on – but also to ‘show a spirit of sacrifice’ in exceeding instructions and taking local initiatives. It was that spirit of sacrifice that was to cause all the misery in peaceful St-Amand, known as ‘the town where nothing ever happened’.
¹

The senior military mind in the Resistance of the Cher
département
was Colonel Bertrand – a career soldier who had been underground with the Armée Secrète since April 1943 – but he had not been invited to the early morning meeting or to a preparatory meeting held on 29 May. Bertrand had been cut out of the line of command to prevent his professional appreciation of the situation dampening the ardour of the young local men frustrated by four years of occupation. In the words of one communist
r
é
sistant
, ‘We were driving a Citroën
traction avant
[car], while Bertrand was riding a bicycle.’
²
At that moment, they should all have been on bicycles and keeping well off the main roads.

When Bertrand learned of the planned local uprising, he was horrified. A single glance at the map was enough to show that it had no hope of success, and would certainly incite German and Vichy reprisals long before any Allied troops could get there from the beachheads. Also, de Gaulle’s order dated 16 May was that no confrontation was to be sought by the FFI in the early stages of the Liberation because it was ‘likely to break the impetus of French Resistance and cause considerable harm to the general population, without any compensating gain’.
³

Having no authority to stop the local commanders from going ahead, Bertrand reluctantly requested the CO of the locally-based Vichy 1RF regiment not to intervene, whatever happened in St-Amand. At 5.30 p.m. de Gaulle’s hastily written speech was broadcast from London, containing the ambiguous phrase that ‘the duty of the sons of France is to fight with all the means at their disposal’.
⁴
As with Pétain’s ambiguous broadcast in June 1940, it set the stage for tragedy. Although exact numbers were afterwards disputed, about seventy men assembled in St-Amand-Montrond, mostly aged between 20 and 25, on the run from the STO and looking for a way of proving their courage and manhood. Many were strangers to each other and introductions were made at the same time as automatic weapons parachuted to a combat group were handed out to men who had never handled anything more lethal than a shotgun. Fortunately only one
résistant
was killed before they learned how easy it was to loose a burst accidentally from the Stens.

The PCF members among the group had been instructed that day to ‘exterminate all the German garrisons and kill without mercy all the murderous rabble of the Milice’.
⁵
Feeling trigger-happy with weapons in their hands, but no training to use them, they surrounded the Milice headquarters and opened fire. An impressive hail of bullets struck the building, but hit no one inside. Nor did the return fire and hand grenades of the
miliciens
score a hit, until a stray shot killed an innocent passerby. The attackers having no unified command, each man kept in touch only with the others he knew, allowing one
milicien
to escape on a motorcycle and give the alarm by telephone.

Inside the building were some girlfriends of the
miliciens
and Simone Bout de l’An, the wife of their national commander. Since one of her children was ill and needed hospitalisation, she thrust a white sheet out of a window about 11 p.m. The
miliciens
walked out, hands above their heads, followed by the women and children. In compliance with the FTP directive, some men wanted to kill them all, but they were locked up as POWs in the sub-prefecture, while the
résistants
used their database to launch a manhunt, with so many people dragged out of their houses at gunpoint that Mayor René Sadrin had to turn the town hall into a prison. The only Germans in the town were three civilians from the STO. They were also locked up, but not maltreated.

Francis Bout de l’An was awoken in his Paris hotel next morning with the news that his wife and children were hostages of the FFI. Darnand, also in Paris, told him to use all necessary German and French forces to retake the town and liberate his family. At the same time, the FFI men in St-Amand-Montrond learned from a patrol of 1RF the disquieting news that the Allies were still bottled up in a few square miles of beachhead and no other city in France had ‘liberated itself’.

Telephoning the sub-prefecture in the hope of getting an update from a Vichy official, Bout de l’An found himself talking to Van Gaver, sitting in the sub-prefect’s chair. The conversation degenerated into an exchange of threats. At more or less the same time, a 35-year-old communist teacher known as ‘Col Kléber’ Chapou ordered his private army of 400 FTP and other
maquisards
to occupy the city of Tulle in central France. With the nearest Allied troops over 400km away, it was obvious that the town could not be held and that killing the forty or so German soldiers there was an invitation for reprisals.

Travelling via Vichy, where he collected thirty
miliciens
, Bout de l’An headed towards St-Amand, stopping 60km short at Moulins, where the Wehrmacht commander promised to attack St-Amand in force the following morning, meantime estimating the enemy’s strength by over-flying a light observation aircraft, whose pilot reported that the town was in a holiday mood, with only a few barricades here and there. Having failed to park their transport under cover, the
maquisards
panicked at the sight of the small aircraft with Maltese cross markings and left town after posting warning notices that the
miliciens
and their women they were taking with them would be shot in the event of reprisals on the townsfolk. Although her captors knew exactly who Simone was, she, alone among the hostages, showed no fear, calling the girlfriends of the
miliciens
‘the little sluts’.

When the German attack came, nineteen civilians were killed, six homes burned to the ground and 200 hostages locked up in the 1RF barracks. As one local summed up bitterly, ‘On 7 June the Maquis ordered drinks all round, leaving us to pay for the drinks next day’.

Finding their three compatriots unharmed, the Germans withdrew in good order, handing the town over to the Milice, who plundered and burned the homes of the departed FFI men. The fact that his wife was still a hostage sent Bout de l’Am into a rage. He ordered all the 200-odd prisoners to be executed if she were not liberated within forty-eight hours.

Tanks of the SS armoured division Das Reich were patrolling all the main streets of Tulle by 6 a.m. on 9 June. SS men forced entry into houses and dragged out any men found inside, also arresting any male on the streets. André Gamblin, a 22-year-old accountant, was shopping for milk for his baby daughter when they picked him up;
gazogène
engineer Raymond Lesouëf was having breakfast with his wife and two children when he was led away. In all, more than 3,000 men were herded inside the walls of the MAT armament factory on Place Souilhac while the SS went around the town collecting ladders and rope. Their commander, Major Kowatsch, remarked to the town prefect: ‘We hanged more than 100,000 at Kiev and Kharkov. What we are doing here is nothing for us.’
⁶

From the hostages in the factory yard, doctors, postal clerks and other people essential for running the town were released and the remainder divided into two groups. At 1.30 p.m. a loudspeaker truck toured the town, announcing that life should go back to normal. To keep the victims calm, they were assured they were being held for an identity check. At 4.30 p.m. several gendarmes were released in time to hear a loudspeaker announcement that hostages were to be hanged and their bodies thrown into the river.
⁷

An amateur sketch of the scene, possibly done by an SS officer, shows soldiers casually walking along a street with corpses hanging from each lamppost. In the centre, an officer watches a soldier on a ladder against a lamppost reaching down to help a hostage awkwardly climbing a second ladder with his hands tied behind his back towards the noose above his head; another soldier steadies the victim’s ladder, ready to pull it away. Three or four other victims under guard watch what is going to happen to them.
⁸
In the end, every balcony, telegraph pole and lamppost along the main street had a body hanging from it.
⁹