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Kitabı oku: «The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944», sayfa 4

Paddy Ashdown
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5
CAMPS AND PLANS

The bitter winter of 1942/3, which destroyed Hitler’s armies before the gates of Stalingrad, also held the Vercors in an icy siege. The cold that Christmas cut like a knife. The plateau lay under a deep layer of snow which weighed down branches in silent pine forests, piled up thick white quilts on timbered roofs and gave an extra tinge of blue to the woodsmoke rising from farmhouse chimneys.

It was a bad time to be away from home. Yet this was the choice that many young men in France faced that December: to leave home for the forests or join the work transports to Germany. By December 1942, the number of fleeing réfractaires was causing severe administrative problems for Resistance movements such as the Martin/Samuel organization in Grenoble and Villard-de-Lans. In early December, a group of young railwaymen from Grenoble station approached one of Eugène Chavant’s friends, Jean Veyrat, who had by now joined the Café de la Rotonde plotters in Grenoble. The young men told Veyrat that they wished to go underground to avoid having to leave for Germany. But where could they go?

In the second week of December, Eugène Samuel went to the little town of Pont-en-Royans, whose ancient houses cling impossibly to the vertical sides of the Gorges de la Bourne, guarding the narrow bridge which spans the river and the western entry to the plateau. Here he knocked on the door of one of his brothers-in-law, the café owner and town Mayor Louis Brun, and asked if he could help. Brun said he knew just the place.

On 17 December 1942, Brun, accompanied by Simon, Samuel’s younger brother, struggled through deep snow to look at an isolated farmhouse with substantial outbuildings called La Ferme d’Ambel, which lay in a desolate and deserted valley in the south-western corner of the plateau. It was ideal. The farm, fed by a bountiful and permanently running spring, is tucked under a high ridge covered in woods, which sweep down almost to its back door. The main access for vehicles is by a rough track served by stone bridges, leading down through beechwoods which shield the area from the nearby mountain road. The house, together with the loft space above and its outbuildings, was capable of accommodating, the two men estimated, around fifty or so réfractaires.

To add to its advantages the Ferme d’Ambel lay at the heart of a large timber concession centred on the nearby Ambel forest, which provided good cover for human activity in the area – indeed the réfractaires could be employed as a useful local labour force. These timber concessions played an important part in the life (and especially black-market life) of wartime France. Timber produced charcoal and charcoal produced the gas which, in the absence of readily available petrol, was the main driving power of the gazogène lorries and cars which could be seen everywhere puffing and wheezing around the streets of Grenoble and struggling their way in a cloud of smoke up the steep roads of the plateau. It was for this reason that timber concessions were often closely linked with the haulage industry – and so it was with the concession at the Ambel forest, two of whose most active partners were members of the transport firm run by the three Huillier brothers who had helped to found the Villard-de-Lans group of early resisters.

On 6 January 1943, a dozen or so young men, made up chiefly of railway workers and Polish refugees from Villard, moved into the Ambel farm. That month, as the pressure of conscription grew, a clandestine system was established to deal with the increasing flood of young men seeking refuge from the transports to Germany. Would-be réfractaires would be asked to go to a hardware shop, run by two sympathizers just a couple of hundred metres from the Place Verdun in Grenoble. The shop was served by two entrances, one on the main street and a second leading on to a small street at the rear. Here, in a back room, they were interviewed by Eugène Chavant and, if found acceptable, were instructed to go home, pack a few necessaries in a rucksack and catch the little funicular railway run by the Huillier brothers to Villard-de-Lans. There they would transfer to a Huillier bus to Pont-en-Royans where they would go to Louis Brun’s restaurant. From here they were guided across the mountains at night to Ambel. On arrival, they would be met by the site director of the Ambel forestry concession, Louis Bourdeaux, who had been appointed by the Villard group as the Ambel’s camp commander.

Measures were also put in train to make Ambel as secure as possible. The lights in the Ferme d’Ambel, which depended on a single electric cable supplied from the hydroelectric plant at Pont-en-Royans, were left on all day and night. This enabled a Resistance sympathizer at the plant to warn of approaching danger by turning the supply (and therefore Ambel lights) on and off three times in quick succession. Ambel was now a properly structured Maquis camp. Some claim that it was the first to be established in all France.

Meanwhile, at Côtes-de-Sassenage, Pierre Dalloz was thinking of ways to pursue his own ideas about the use of the Vercors to fight back against France’s occupiers. Encouraged by Jean Lefort’s welcome for his plan (but still completely unaware of the existence of his co-conspirators in Grenoble and Villard-de-Lans), he decided to take matters further. He was advised by a left-wing friend at Grenoble University that the man to see was Yves Farge, the foreign affairs editor of the regional newspaper Progrès de Lyon, who was known to have high-level Resistance connections.

In late January 1943, Dalloz, with his plan carefully tucked into an inside pocket of his jacket, took the train to Lyon, calling a little after midday at the offices of Progrès where he asked for the foreign affairs editor. The two men went to a nearby restaurant, where over lunch Dalloz explained his idea. He left a copy of his paper with Farge, who expressed enthusiasm for the plan and promised to ensure that it would be seen by the ‘appropriate people’. Farge must have briefed Jean Moulin very shortly after the lunch, for on 29 January Moulin sent a courier to de Gaulle in London with full details of the Dalloz plan and a personal recommendation that it should be supported.

On 31 January, Farge paid Dalloz a return visit in Grenoble to tell him that Moulin had seen the plan, approved it and agreed that 25,000 francs should now be assigned to Dalloz to develop the idea. Dalloz hurriedly typed a second, more comprehensive paper on his ideas. A few days later, he received a note which instructed him to join Farge and to ‘Be in the waiting room at Perrache station in Lyon at 12h15 on 10 February where “Alain” will meet you.’ The two men found their contact ‘Alain’ in deep contemplation of the window display of the station bookshop. ‘The meeting place has been changed,’ he instructed. ‘Someone will be waiting for you at Bourg-en-Bresse station. There is a train at 16h20. When you arrive, stand in front of the station entrance and carry a copy of the newspaper Signal in a prominent place. General “Vidal” will approach you. He will be dressed in a grey overcoat with a white silk handkerchief displayed in the top pocket.’

The two men did not have to stand long outside the station entrance before they saw, in the light of a street lamp, a rather small man with a brisk military step displaying a most luxurious silk white handkerchief, which fluttered in the wind from his top pocket. After introductions, the old soldier led them away from the station, turning left into the main street of Bourg-en-Bresse and, 200 metres further on, passing a cake shop whose éclairs Dalloz remembered with great affection from his youth. The General stopped in front of the next-door building, a three-storey turn-of-the-century terraced town house. Here he took a step back to get a better look, as though checking he was in the right place, and then fumbled with his key for a moment in the lock of the heavy oak front door before it opened. Inside, the General lit a match to find the switch and turned the lights on. They were in a large room with closed shutters which turned out to be the offices of an insurance company. A moment later they were joined by a fourth, older man with a magnificent white moustache who introduced himself as General ‘Richard’.

In fact, the two civilians were in the presence of the two most important military officers in the hierarchy of the Secret Army in France: the man de Gaulle had charged with heading up the Resistance’s military wing, Charles Delestraint and his deputy General Desmazes. Dalloz ran through his three-page report, a copy of which he gave to Delestraint, together with an annotated map of the Vercors, a guidebook of the plateau and several supporting photographs. After asking Dalloz some searching questions, Delestraint pronounced his verdict: ‘From now on the Vercors will be part of the national military plan for liberation. From today it will be known as the Plan Montagnards.’

Two days later, on the moonlit night of 12/13 February 1943, two Lysander light aircraft from the RAF’s 161 Squadron landed in a field near Ruffey-sur-Seille in the Jura. Here they picked up Jean Moulin and Charles Delestraint, who carried a briefcase containing Dalloz’s papers, maps and photos for Plan Montagnards, and flew them back to Britain. During his stay in London, Delestraint had several meetings with de Gaulle at which he discussed his plans for the Secret Army, including in the Vercors. Afterwards, according to de Gaulle, Delestraint ‘was able to work usefully with the Allied leaders. Thereby, the operations of the Secret Army during the landing in France would be linked as closely as possible to the plans of the Allied Command.’

On 25 February 1943, just under a fortnight after Delestraint had landed in Britain, Dalloz was listening to the ‘personal’ messages for France broadcast by the BBC in its nightly programme Les Français parlent aux Français when he heard the announcer say: ‘Les montagnards doivent continuer à gravir les cimes.’* It was the code message that Dalloz had been given by Delestraint to indicate that his proposal had been agreed by London. Plan Montagnards was to proceed as discussed.

It has always been presumed that Plan Montagnards was a purely French affair, known only to the Free French authorities in London and specifically not shared with the British, either at this stage or later. But we now know that Dalloz’s plan was in fact discussed with the British officer acting as French Regional Controller, who was directly responsible to the head of SOE, Brigadier Gubbins. A minute addressed to the Controller dated 10 April 1943 concluded that Montagnards could be ‘of appreciable value in support of an operation directed against the Mediterranean coast of France’. Noting that Dalloz’s plan ‘provides for co-operation with Allied airborne troops’, the minute makes it explicitly clear that ‘It seems extremely unlikely that such co-operation could be provided, except possibly from Africa, and it is certain that we could not promise it. We therefore feel that even if the organisation is to be encouraged they should be told … that they must expect to work on their own.’

Back in the Vercors, Dalloz immediately set about assembling a small team to help him carry out a full-scale study of the plateau. This included the head of the Department for Water and Forests on the Vercors, whom Dalloz asked to make a record of the plateau’s topography including its many caves and underground caverns, and an ex-commander of the Mountain Warfare School at Chamonix, whom he tasked with drawing up an inventory of all the huts, refuges, food resources, secret caches of arms and explosives and available vehicles on the plateau.

Dalloz, looking for a third member of his team, also sought out a young ex-Army officer whom he had not met, but had heard of as a skilled and courageous mountaineer. Alain Le Ray, who at thirty-two was Dalloz’s junior by almost ten years, was also an ex-member of a now disbanded Alpine regiment and had a number of noted Alpine climbing firsts to his credit. First captured by the Germans in 1940, he escaped, only to be recaptured and sent to the supposedly escape-proof PoW camp of Colditz Castle. But Colditz held him for only three weeks before he escaped again, this time making successful ‘home run’ back to France.

Le Ray, tall, athletic and striking to look at, was a most unusual Army officer for his time. Scrupulous about maintaining his political neutrality, meticulous in his analysis, cool in his judgements, he had, unlike most of his Army counterparts, a natural feel for irregular warfare, including an understanding of the need to make compromises in order to combine both the military and civilian elements of the French Resistance. Dalloz asked Le Ray to conduct a full-scale military study of the Vercors. Assisted by three fellow ex-officers, one of whom, Roland Costa de Beauregard, would later command a guerrilla unit on the plateau, Le Ray completed his study (see Annex B) while awaiting Delestraint’s return from London.

While Dalloz’s team were conducting their various surveys of the plateau, Dalloz and Farge were busy touring the shops in Grenoble and buying up all the available guidebooks and Michelin maps of the area. On the few days the two men were not scouring map shops they were criss-crossing the plateau in a taxi, looking for parachute and landing sites. On one such visit in early March, with the snow melting, Farge and Dalloz clambered over a forest-covered ridge to inspect one of the enclosed high mountain pastures which are a feature of the Vercors. The place was called Herbouilly and they immediately recognized it as an excellent parachute landing ground. There was only one problem. Right in the middle of the valley was a substantial, but unoccupied, farmhouse which was the property of someone suspected of being sympathetic to the Germans. Farge solved the problem by bringing in a special group of Resistants from Lyon one night to burn the place to the ground. By mid-March the two men felt they were ready for Delestraint’s return from London and the next stage of Plan Montagnards.

Elsewhere on the plateau, however, things which had started so well for Eugène Samuel and his team working with the réfractaires suffered a serious setback.

* ‘The mountain men should continue to climb to the peaks.’

6
EXODUS AND FOLLY

‘So you do not wish to go and work in Germany?’ Eugène Chavant asked abruptly, pulling his pipe out of his mouth for a moment.

‘No, M’sieu.’ The young man, no more than twenty or so, nervously twisted his beret between his fingers.

‘Who told you to contact me about this?’

‘My boss at the shoe factory, M. Blanc, told me you would be a good person to talk to, M’sieu.’

‘So you want to join the Maquis?’

‘Yes, M’sieu.’

‘Are you aware that life in the Maquis is very hard?’

‘Yes, M’sieu.’

‘Do you understand the risks involved – great risks?’

‘Yes, M’sieu.’

‘And you know how to keep your tongue, do you?’

‘Absolutely, M’sieu.’

‘OK. Go to the Fontaine halt on the tramway which takes you up to Villard at five o’clock tomorrow evening. Ask for one of the Huillier brothers and tell him discreetly that you have come to see “Casimir” – that’s the password. He will tell you what to do next. Follow his instructions closely and without any questions. Take a rucksack with what you need. But be careful. Don’t take too much. You must look like a casual traveller.’

The young man nodded and left the room, closing the door behind him.

Eugène Chavant took out a small piece of paper and wrote a message for his friend Jean Veyrat: ‘There will be one colis [package] to take up to Villard tomorrow evening.’

The following evening a Huillier bus set the young man down in the main square of the town of Méaudre on the northern half of the Vercors plateau. Here, following his instructions, he went to a café in one of the town’s back streets where he found he was among a number of young men who likewise seemed to be waiting for something – or someone. A short time later an older man arrived. He was wearing hiking clothes and boots and carried a small khaki rucksack.

‘Follow me,’ he said, and led the way out of the café and into the darkness.

The little group walked north along back roads for forty minutes or so and then took a short break before starting to climb steeply up the mountain. Half an hour later they entered a forest and five minutes after that their guide stopped in the darkness and gave three low whistles. Out of the night came three answering whistles. A guide emerged from the trees and led the little group of newcomers to a shepherd’s hut in a clearing in the forest. Though it is doubtful that any of them realized it, they had all taken an irreversible step out of normality, into the Maquis and a life of secrecy and constant danger. One way or another, their lives would never be the same again.

As German demands for manpower increased, the trickle of réfractaires turned into a flood. The numbers at the Ambel farm quickly rose to eighty-five. There was no more space. In Eugène Samuel’s words, ‘The young men coming up the mountain became more and more numerous. Now it was not just the specialists who were being called away, but whole annual intakes of young men whom Laval wanted to send to help Hitler’s war effort. There was a mood of near panic among the young men, and the resources of the Gaullist resistance organizations were very soon swamped. We needed new camps; we needed more financial resources; we needed food; we needed clothes and above all we needed boots. We needed to organize some kind of security system to search out the spies who we knew the Milice were infiltrating with the réfractaires. We needed arms.’

New camps were soon found. And not just in the Vercors. Elsewhere in the region, other early Resistance groups were also establishing camps for fleeing réfractaires in the remote areas of the nearby Chartreuse Massif and the Belledonne and Oisans mountain ranges which bordered the Grésivaudan valley. Between February and May 1943, eight new réfractaire camps – housing some 400 men in all and numbered consecutively from Ambel (C1) – were established across the Vercors plateau under the direction of Aimé Pupin. To this total must be added two military camps, one set up in May by an ex-Military School in Valence, another established in November under the control of Marcel Descour.

Map 3

Those who joined the camps between March 1943 and May 1944 (that is before the Allied landings in Normandy) were of differing ages and came from a wide area. In a sample of forty-four réfractaires in the initial influx between March and May 1943, almost half were over thirty years old, many of them married. As might be expected, the majority (60 per cent) were from the immediate locality (the region of Rhône-Alpes), but among the rest almost 10 per cent were Parisians, a further 10 per cent were born out of France and nearly 15 per cent came from the eastern regions of France. There was similar diversity when it came to previous employment. In C3, above Autrans, nearly half the camp members had been ordinary workers, almost a third technicians of one sort or another, some 12 per cent were students and nearly 10 per cent had been regular soldiers. Politically, too, there was a broad variety of opinions and views. The fact that the great majority of the Vercors’ civilian camps were loyal to de Gaulle meant that the organized presence of the Communists and the French far right was almost non-existent on the plateau. Individually, however, the camps included adherents to almost every political belief (except of course fascism). Political discussions round evening campfires were frequent, varied and at times very lively.

By autumn 1943, every community of any size on the plateau had a secret camp of one sort or another near by – and every inhabitant on the plateau would have been aware of the unusual nature of the new young visitors in their midst. For Samuel, Pupin, Chavant and their colleagues, the administrative burden of all this was immense. Pupin later said: ‘We didn’t have a moment of respite. Our eight camps occupied our time fully.’ The biggest problem by far, however, was finding the money to pay for all this. Collections were made among family, well-wishers and workplaces – two Jewish men contributed between them 20,000 francs a week which they had collected from contacts. But it was never enough.

London started providing huge subventions to support the réfractaire movement. During Jean Moulin’s visit to London in February 1943, de Gaulle charged him with ‘centralizing the overall needs of the réfractaires and assuring the distribution of funds through a special organization, in liaison with trades unions and resistance movements’. On 18 February, Farge delivered a second massive subvention amounting to 3.2 million francs to be used for Dalloz’s Plan Montagnards alone. And on 26 February Moulin’s deputy sent a coded message to London containing his budget proposals for March 1943. This amounted to a request for no less than 13.4 million francs for all the elements of the Resistance controlled by de Gaulle, of which some 1.75 million francs per month was designated for the Vercors. This was in addition to the private donations pouring into Aimé Pupin’s coffers by way of a false account in the name of a local beekeeper, ‘François Tirard’, at the Banque Populaire branch in Villard. This level of support made the Vercors by far the biggest single Resistance project being funded by London at this point in the war.

Despite these significant sums, money remained an ever-present problem for those administering the Vercors camps through 1943 and into the following year. A British officer sent on a mission to assess the strength and nature of the Maquis in south-eastern France visited the Vercors later in 1943 and reported that those in the camps ‘have to spend much of their time getting food etc. They have to do everything on their own and are often short of money. In one case they stole tobacco and sold it back onto the Black Market to get money.’

Not surprisingly this kind of behaviour, though by no means common, caused tensions between the réfractaires and local inhabitants. With food so short, the proximity of groups of hungry young men to passing flocks of sheep proved to be an especially explosive flash-point. On 14 June 1943, the réfractaires of Camp C4, fleeing to avoid a raid on their camp by Italian Alpine troops, arrived on the wide mountain pasture of Darbonouse where they were met by a flock of sheep numbering some 1,500. Their commander told them: ‘If there is any thieving I will take the strongest measures against the perpetrators. Remember that it is in our interests to make the shepherds our friends. Remember too that it is through our behaviour that the Resistance is judged.’

On the other hand, not far away at the Pré Rateau mountain hut above Saint-Agnan, another band of young réfractaires who had absconded from their original camp enjoyed a merry summer of pilfering and theft, to the particular detriment of the flocks of sheep in the area.

Tensions between local farmers were considerably eased when spring turned into summer and some camp commanders offered their young men as free labour to cut and turn grass and bring in the harvest. It was very common during the summer days of 1943 to see small armies of fit and bronzed young men among the peasant families in the fields and pastures of the Vercors. The easy habits of city living were being replaced by the calloused hands and sinewed bodies necessary for survival as a Maquisard.

This was not so everywhere. There was considerable variation between camps according to how and by whom they were run. By the middle of 1943, many camps had ex-military commanders and were run on military lines. Here, by and large, there was good order, effective security, discipline and good relations with the locals. In other camps, however, things had ‘the appearance of a holiday camp [with] young men taking their siestas in the shade of the firs after lunch or lying out in the sun improving their tans’.

One feature dominated the daily routine of all the camps, whether well run or not – the routine of the corvées, or camp chores. There were corvées for almost everything from peeling potatoes to gathering water (which in some camps had to be carried long distances from the nearest spring), bringing in the food, collecting the mail, chopping and carrying the wood (especially in winter), cooking, washing up and much else besides. Some camps – the lucky ones – were able to use mules for the heavy carrying, but many relied for their victuals, warmth and water on the strong legs and sturdy backs of their young occupants alone.

Soon it was realized that work in the fields was not going to be enough to keep the minds of intelligent young men occupied – or prepare them for what everyone knew would come in due course. One of the organizations established by the Vichy government – and then dissolved shortly after the German invasion of the south – was a school to train ‘cadres’ or young professionals to run Vichy government structures. The École d’Uriage, many of whose students came from the Army, was located some 15 kilometres outside Grenoble. Following the lead of its commander, the École soon became a hotbed of Resistant sentiment. When the École d’Uriage was dissolved in December 1943, most of the students and staff swiftly reassembled in the old château of Murinais, just under the western rim of the Vercors. It was from here, at the suggestion of Alain Le Ray, who had by now become the effective military commander of all the camps, that flying squads, usually of three or four students and staff, were sent out to the camps to provide training for the réfractaires. Typically a Uriage flying squad would spend several days in a camp, following a set training programme which provided military training, cultural awareness and political education. The curriculum included instruction in basic military skills, training exercises, weapon handling, physical exercise, map reading and orientation, security, camp discipline, hygiene and political studies covering the tenets of the Gaullist Resistance movement and a briefing on the aims of the Allies and the current status of the war. One camp even received instruction in Morse code. In the evenings there were boisterous games and the singing of patriotic songs around the campfire. Study circles were established which continued to meet after the flying squad had moved on. In many cases camp members were required to sign the Charter of the Maquis, which laid out the duties and conduct expected of a Maquisard. The Uriage teams even produced a small booklet on how to be a Resistance fighter with a front cover claiming it was an instruction manual for the French Army.

There was also some less conventional training given by one of the Vercors’ most unusual and remarkable characters. Fabien Rey was famous on the plateau before the war as a poacher, a frequenter of the shadowy spaces beyond the law, an initiate into the mysteries of the Vercors’ forests and hidden caves and an intimate of the secret lives of all its creatures. During the summer and autumn months of 1943, when not striding from camp to camp to share his knowledge with the young men from the cities, his latest crop of trapped foxes swinging from his belt, he could always be found sitting in his cabin invigilating a bubbling stew of strange delicacies such as the intestines of wild boars and the feathered heads of eagles, which he would press on any unwary visitor who passed. He also wrote a small cyclostyled handbook on how to live off the land on the plateau. It too was widely distributed and eagerly read.

In February 1943, Yves Farge, who had by now become the chief intermediary between Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s emissary, and the Vercors Resistants, made the connection between Pierre Dalloz and Aimé Pupin’s organization. From now on, the two organizations, which were soon joined by their military co-conspirators, were fused into a single Combat Committee which directed all Resistance activity on the plateau.

On 1 March 1943, at a meeting in the Café de la Rotonde, Yves Farge handed Aimé Pupin the first tranche of the money London had sent by parachute to pay for the camps. Farge stayed the following night with Pupin and then, on the morning of 3 March, the two men set off on a day’s reconnaissance of the southern half of the plateau in a taxi driven by a sympathizer. They went first to La Grande Vigne to collect Pierre Dalloz and then continued their journey up the mountain to Villard-de-Lans, where they collected Léon Martin. From there the little group pressed on to Vassieux: ‘What I saw in front of me was the wide even plain around Vassieux … The aerial approaches to the plain from both north and south were unencumbered by hills, especially to the south. Somehow I had known that we would find an airstrip and here it was – and even better than I could have dreamed of … all around were wide areas which appeared specially designed to receive battalions parachuted from the sky.’

The little group stopped for a drink in a small bistro in Vassieux, pretending that they were looking to buy a piece of land on which to construct a saw-mill. But according to Dalloz, no one in Vassieux was deceived and the whole town, from that day onwards, believed that General de Gaulle himself was about to descend from the sky at any moment. The impression that secrets were impossible on the Vercors was further reinforced at lunch when, despite their attempts to appear discreet, the waiter at the Hôtel Bellier in La Chapelle announced their entry into the hotel dining room with the words ‘Ah! Here are the gentlemen of the Resistance.’

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Litres'teki yayın tarihi:
28 aralık 2018
Hacim:
764 s. 58 illüstrasyon
ISBN:
9780007520824
Telif hakkı:
HarperCollins
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