The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944

4

THE ARMY GOES UNDERGROUND

All day and all night, General Laffargue stayed in his grand office with its heavy Empire desk in the Hôtel de la Division on one side of the Place Verdun in Grenoble. The date was 10 November 1942, two days after the Allied landings in French North Africa, and the General was expecting a telephone call from his superior which would set in train the plan already drawn up by Vichy military headquarters for mobilization of the Armistice Army against a German invasion in the south. All through the long day and night, into 11 November (the anniversary of the German surrender in 1918), the General waited. But the call never came.

The truth was that the government of Vichy had been thrown into complete confusion, not to say panic, by the Allied invasion of North Africa. The Vichy leaders knew what would come next, but should they oppose, or acquiesce? Anticipation and indecision came to an end at dawn on 11 November 1942, when Hitler’s personal emissary arrived in Vichy and delivered a letter from the Führer to Marshal Pétain informing him that Axis troops were taking control of Vichy France. In fact, the Germans had already launched Operation Attila. Some hours previously Italian units had stormed across the French/Italian frontier with orders to occupy Grenoble. Meanwhile German columns under Generalleutnant Heinrich Niehoff, the newly appointed German Army commander for southern France, pressed at full speed towards Lyon where they swung south heading for the Mediterranean coast.

Early on the morning of that same day, 11 November 1942, a young cavalry officer, Lieutenant Narcisse Geyer, received orders to man the Pont de la Boucle in Lyon and maintain public order when the Germans arrived.

The thirty-year-old Geyer, known as ‘Narc’ to his friends, was in many ways a man born out of his time. Small in stature, dapper in dress, never other than a soldier, never out of uniform, ever impetuous of spirit, courageous to the point of folly and always in search of la gloire, he would have been far more at home among Dumas’ Three Musketeers than in the dull, gloryless existence of a junior officer in a defeated army. He was the scion of a military family: his father’s last words to the priest who comforted him as he lay dying of wounds in October 1918 had been ‘It is a terrible shame that my son is too young. He could have replaced me.’ Geyer, true to the family tradition, had fought with distinction under the then Colonel Charles de Gaulle before the fall of France, earning himself a Croix de Guerre for his bravery.

But it was not only the man who represented what was seen at the time as the forever vanished days of France’s military glory. The unit he commanded in Lyon that day was itself one of the most illustrious of France’s cavalry regiments. The 11th Cuirassiers (motto ‘Toujours au chemin de l’honneur’ – ‘Forever the path of honour’) was founded by Louis XIV in 1668, still carried the French royal insignia of the fleur de lys on its regimental standard and had fought with distinction in all the great battles of the Napoleonic Wars.

To ask such a man and such a regiment to guard a bridge in order to facilitate the entry of a hated occupier was too much for Geyer to bear. Wilful as ever and largely on a whim, he ignored his orders and, leading a troop of fifty-six of his troopers, mounted on horses and accompanied by eight machine guns and four mortars, headed north out of the city towards the forests of the Savoie. A few kilometres out of Lyon, Geyer appears to have had second thoughts – or at least to have concluded that going underground with his troops required more preparation than a spur-of-the-moment canter through the streets of Lyon. He turned his troops round and, rather ignominiously one imagines, led them back to barracks.

A few days after the occupation of Grenoble by the Italians, General Laffargue called his senior commanders together in the Mairie of Vizille, a small town south of Grenoble, to discuss what should be done. The meeting broke up in indecision. Aimé Pupin, one of the Café de la Rotonde plotters, rushed to Vizille and did his best to persuade Laffargue’s men not to hand over their weapons to the Germans. But the officer in charge refused even to see Pupin and ordered his regiment to disarm, leaving Pupin to comment: ‘We Resistants were left with just empty hands.’ At Christmas 1942, Pupin listed the arms at his disposal as a revolver and a rubber hammer.

On 27 November the Germans disarmed the remaining French units, disconnected their telephones and emptied the French barracks in Lyon and Vienne.

Narcisse Geyer’s second opportunity for a more considered escape came that day when the Germans burst into the Cuirassiers’ barracks in the Lyon suburb of Part-Dieu and began to drive the regiment from their quarters. Geyer grabbed his unit’s regimental standards and took them to the barracks guardroom, from where they were passed over the wall to a party waiting outside. Geyer’s initial intention had been to leave Lyon for the forests by bicycle. But how could a cavalryman leave without his horse? So that night he led a small group back to the barracks where, having muffled his horse Boucaro’s hooves to deaden the noise, he walked his mount to a nearby lorry and drove out of the city and into life as a Maquisard.

Geyer, his horse and two or three of his Cuirassiers took refuge in a fortified farm with thick walls and a massive iron-studded gate, attended by stables and substantial outbuildings in the Forêt de Thivolet, 8 kilometres west of the Vercors. It was from this farm that Geyer took the nom de guerre Thivolet by which he would from now on be known. Over the next months, Geyer, who had a disparaging view of non-military Maquisard units, referring to them as ‘as civilians playing at soldiers’, returned several times to see his old troopers, eventually persuading some fifty of them to join him. The 11th Cuirassiers was reborn as a clandestine unit of the French Resistance under a courageous but headstrong young officer, complete with its standards, its insignia, its uniforms, its ranks and its proud customs, such as the habit of saying the regimental grace before every dinner: ‘Gloire et honneur à ce cochon de popotier’ – ‘Glory and honour to the pig of a cook (who made this)’.

On 28 November, another much loved commander of one of France’s best Alpine units gathered his men in the square of the little town of Brié-et-Angonnes, 5 kilometres south-east of Grenoble, and asked them to sing the regimental song for one last time. Then he told them, with tears in his eyes, that he had just received the order for the battalion to be disbanded. But, he reassured them, ‘one day soon the bell will toll again to call us to action … no power on earth can break the bonds which bind us together as a fighting unit’.

Another French officer central to this story was among the many who chose the clandestine life during these turbulent days of November 1942. The forty-three-year-old Marcel Descour, one of the earliest organizers of secret resistance within the old Armistice Army, was, like Geyer, a decorated and courageous cavalry officer. Tall, and spare of build, Descour had a thin angular face adorned with a small military moustache and topped with carefully coiffed, lightly oiled, swept-back black hair. With an air of command that indicated that he expected instant obedience, Descour, conventionally military in his ideas, decidedly right wing in his political views and strongly Catholic in his beliefs, was always accompanied by his ‘religious counsellor’ and éminence grise, a Benedictine monk called Dom Guétet. Guétet’s omnipresence, reinforced by a cadaverous frame and sombre monk’s habit, made him look, according to one observer, ‘A bit like one of those holy soldier monks of the Middle Ages who accompanied their feudal masters on the Crusades’. Descour’s view of himself may be guessed at by his choice of alias, Bayard – after the fifteenth-century knight Pierre Terrail, the Chevalier de Bayard, famous as ‘The knight without fear and without reproach’.

Pierre Dalloz, in his house at La Grande Vigne in Côtes-de-Sassenage, watched all the farce and tragedy of the days after 11 November with despair. He confided his fears and his concept of the Vercors as a guerrilla base behind enemy lines to a young friend, Jean Lefort, who was not only an enthusiastic caver, with a deep knowledge of the Vercors, but was also a decorated officer in a French Alpine regiment. Lefort was as enthusiastic about the idea as Dalloz, and encouraged the older man to put the concept down on paper.

That mid-December night in 1942, Dalloz made the first three-page draft of his plan. ‘The project had ripened in me over the time [since he had first discussed it with Jean Prévost] and my thoughts flew easily off my pen on to the paper. After I had finished, I opened the door and breathed in the cool night air. The highest branches of the almond tree in the garden swayed in the wind, as though trying to sweep the stars from the sky, and the clamour of the local stream filled the silent darkness. The Vercors was there, very close – almost alongside me. I thought for a long moment. Secrecy suddenly seemed my co-conspirator; the moment was heavy with responsibility, resolution and hope.’

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?’