Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (15 page)

If the symbolic mobilisation looked good on paper to Huet and his officers, many of the men involved like Gilbert Joseph saw clearly that with so few armed men covering the 460 square miles of the plateau, its most likely effect was to taunt the Germans into some kind of retaliation, which their slender resources would be insufficient to counter. His section was posted to the tunnel of Engins, overlooking the twisting road climbing up from Sassenage, traffic on which was out of range for any of their weapons except three light machine guns. Through binoculars they watched 500 German troops per hour negotiating the bends on trucks laden with arms and ammunition and with mortars transported on mule back.
¹

On 6 June 1944, as news of the landings in Normandy spread by word of mouth, people all over France thought that the whole country would be liberated within a few weeks at most. On the plateau the entirely unjustified euphoria reigned supreme. A 23-year-old girl who had volunteered to serve as a nurse with the Vercors Maquis wrote, ‘Everyone was so happy. We had a lovely day. We thought the war was as good as won. People came out from Grenoble to the villages of the Vercors to share our joy.’

On 7 June the envoys sent to Algiers returned to the Vercors, full of enthusiasm for the role they thought they were about to play. Road signs were improvised at the top of the access routes bearing the legend ‘
Ici commence le pays de la liberté
’
– ‘
Here begins the land of freedom’. It was a beautiful dream that was about to turn into a nightmare. On 9 June several hundred able-bodied men in the town of Villard de Lans volunteered to join the Maquis. They came by the coachload, having ‘liberated’ all the vehicles of the local transport company, whose owner was to pay a hard price, with his garage burned down, his home blown up and two sons killed in German reprisals. Even the local gendarmes volunteered. To give them an alibi and avoid reprisals on their families, a mock kidnapping was arranged, so they could be seen to be ‘arrested’ by armed
maquisards
and forced to get into one of the coaches. Some criminals locked up in the Gendarmerie insisted on coming along too.

With 2,000 of the new arrivals having no weapons at all, on 9 June Huet’s HQ radioed Algiers:

WE HAVE RECEIVED ONLY ONE DROP, FROM WHICH WE RECOVERED ONE MACHINE GUN, ELEVEN RIFLES, TWENTY-TWO SUB-MACHINE GUNS, ONE HUNDRED AND TEN GRENADES AND EIGHTY PAIRS OF SHOES ENDS

Another signal radioed that day from Captain Robert Bennes in charge of re-supply by air, read:

REMINDING YOU OF URGENT NEED FOR AIRDROPS OF ARMS AND MEN IN THE VERCORS AREA STOP WE CAN ACCOMMODATE AT LEAST A REGIMENT OF PARATROOPS STOP MOBILISATION ACCOMPLISHED IN THE VERCORS BUT CURRENT ARMAMENT COMPLETELY INSUFFICIENT STOP WE SHALL NOT BE ABLE TO RESIST IF ATTACKED STOP LACKING LIGHT AND HEAVY WEAPONRY FOR TWO THOUSAND MEN STOP URGENT NEED TO ARM AND EQUIP THEM STOP WE ARE STANDING BY NIGHT AND DAY AT LANDING FIELD NEAR VASSIEUX AND BOTH FIELDS AT ST MARTIN ENDS

Bennes’ message was reinforced by one from Lieutenant Colonel Descour:

VERCORS TWO THOUSAND VOLUNTEERS TO BE ARMED STOP INITIAL ENTHUSIASM SAGGING AS WEAPONS LACKING STOP EXTREMELY URGENT SEND MEN WEAPONS GASOLINE TOBACCO IN NEXT FORTY-EIGHT HOURS MAX STOP ENEMY ATTACK POSSIBLE STOP CURRENT CONDITIONS RENDER EFFECTIVE RESISTANCE IMPOSSIBLE STOP FAILURE WOULD MEAN PITILESS REPRISALS STOP WOULD BE DISASTER FOR REGION’S RESISTANCE ENDS

On the following day, he radioed:

NOT KEEPING PROMISE NOW WILL CREATE DRASTIC SITUATION VERCORS ENDS

On 12 June, Bennes radioed:

URGENT SEND MAXIMUM QUANTITY MACHINE GUNS AND MORTARS AND IF POSSIBLE CANNONS AND ANTITANK WEAPONS ENDS

About the same time as his message was transmitted, a signal from BCRA in London arrived that stunned everyone who read it:

SEND THE MEN HOME STOP MOBILISATION PREMATURE ENDS

The background to this is that General de Gaulle had not been told of the date of D-Day until after the first troops hit the beaches at dawn on 6 June. Messages broadcast to Europe from Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill made no mention of him as leader of the provisional government and commander of the Free French forces. After hours of tense negotiations between his HQ and Downing Street, he had been allowed access to a BBC microphone at 1730hrs. The hastily composed speech he then broadcast contained the ambiguous phrase ‘the duty of the sons of France … is to fight with all the means at their disposal.’
²

All over France, this premature call to arms was to cause tragedy. In a desperate attempt to avert the massacre of thousands of
maquisards
and
résistants
, for whom no Allied reinforcement was possible, General Koenig, C-in-C of the FFI, broadcast on 11 June the following message: ‘Since it is impossible for us to supply you with food, arms and ammunition, I repeat that all guerrilla activity should be kept to a minimum. Stay in small groups.’
³

But it was too late to send the men home from the Vercors, the Germans having roadblocks in place on the exit routes.

An airdrop of weapons on the following day at St Nizier brought sustained artillery fire from batteries in Grenoble. On 14 June Picirella recorded a sad event. A patrol disguised as
miliciens
stopped two men in civilian clothes, one of whom tried to pull rank on the disguised
maquisards
by telling them that he was a Milice officer on his way to infiltrate a Maquis camp – in proof of which he showed them written orders hidden in a shoe. The would-be traitor was recognised as Picirella’s old comrade Cémoi. Shrugging his shoulders, he admitted everything and was duly shot.

The Germans in Grenoble could hardly believe their eyes when an enormous banner was defiantly displayed on the cliffs overlooking the city, bearing a French flag and the legend ‘Free Republic of Vercors’. When Lieutenant General Karl Pflaum saw it while eating breakfast on the terrace of his HQ, it was a red rag to a bull. He decided that the time had come to relegate the Milice and GMR to a secondary role and move his specialist anti-partisan troops on to the plateau.

Although the Maquis had laid booby traps and mines at the head of all the access routes, and had set ambushes, between 13 and 15 June Pflaum’s forces pressed up the winding road from Grenoble to occupy St Nizier, which was the key to the northern plateau, destroying the village in the process. Code-named Operation Bettina, the neutralisation of the plateau was under way.

Also on 15 June, a German armoured column roared into Barcelonnette in the Ubaye valley. A lone British liaison officer who was present managed to destroy two tanks before being killed, together with 150 local men. Zeller and his entourage extricated themselves from the slaughter and headed for the Vercors, arriving there just in time to see the 14,081 men of Pflaum’s division, guided by Vichy collaborationist paramilitaries, commence deploying on the plateau on 17 June
.
Pflaum’s core element was again the 157th Reserve Division including the four battalions of Reserve-Gebirgsjäger-Regiment with mule-transported mortars and light mountain artillery that made them a formidable enemy for the lightly armed
maquisards
. Two of his anti-partisan formations – Sicherungsbataillon 685 based in Grenoble and II Sicherungsregiment 194 based in Digne – had recently committed atrocities against civilians when mopping up Maquis bands in the Jura region, despite Pflaum’s personal disapproval. He also had Luftwaffe support, both for reconnaissance and to strafe and bomb the farms and villages where the
maquisards
were hiding.

Henri Rosencher was a medical student who arrived on the plateau on 17 June after a most un-Hippocratic day spent advising on the use of explosives at a railway tunnel near Lus-la-Croix-Haute. His military experience included service in North Africa and Italy, where he had been taken prisoner and escaped, little knowing that he would end the war in Dachau concentration camp. Surviving this, he later wrote cold-bloodedly of the sabotage mission that day:

TNT and plastic charges were placed to collapse the mountain, sealing off the tunnel at both ends and its air shaft. We stationed our three teams and ensured they could communicate with each other. I settled down in the bushes near the tunnel’s entrance. Towards 1500hrs we heard the train coming. First came an empty flatcar, to detonate any explosives that might have been laid on the tracks. Next was a wagon with repair equipment, followed by an armoured wagon. Then, the train stuffed with men in field-grey, followed by another armoured wagon. After the train had completely disappeared into the tunnel we waited a minute before setting off the charge at our end. Boulders cascaded down in a huge mass blocking the entrance. Right afterwards, we heard the other two explosions. The 500 men in field grey had no way of escape and the railway was blocked for a long time.

That evening I arrived at St-Martin-en-Vercors, where two brilliant surgeons from Paris named Fischer and Ullmann had set up a well-equipped hospital in the buildings of a holiday camp outside St-Martin with a local doctor named Ganimède. He was there also, with his wife and young son. Some forty wounded men were undergoing treatment, including ten Germans, who were astonished to be cared for, after believing that ‘terrorists’ like us would massacre them or leave them to die since they knew and we knew that the Germans tortured and killed all our wounded whom they captured.
⁴

A perpetual menace hanging over the plateau was the Fieseler Storch observation aircraft that haunted the sky day after day. Knowing that it came from the airfield at Valence-Chabeuil, Huet’s HQ radioed BCRA in Algiers, begging daily for a raid on Chabeuil, where the Germans were also assembling a fleet of gliders that could be used for airborne landings on the plateau. BCRA in turn forwarded these requests to the HQ of Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAAF) in Naples, which allocated the missions for all Allied aircraft in the theatre.

Many individual
maquisards
were unaware of the threat building up. Typical was Paul Wolfram, a 20-year-old student from Lyon, who wrote:

When I arrived on 25 June, life in Vassieux was comfortable. Instead of the weekly ration of 250 grams of butter that we got at home, we had huge lumps of it and as much bread as you could eat. The atmosphere was like a holiday camp and we made no preparations for defence because it seemed impossible that the Germans could attack Vassieux.

A 36-year-old nurse named France Pinhas summed up by recording that everyone on the plateau believed the Vercors was already liberated, so they thought themselves quite safe there.
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The fluid nature of guerrilla warfare is illustrated by an expedition mounted on 23 June, when a convoy of two empty trucks and two others transporting a Maquis task force drove all the way to Lyon and liberated fifty-three black Senegalese soldiers with their French NCO and his wife – all of whom were given a rapturous welcome on the plateau.

On Sunday 25 June there was a grand parade in St-Martin. Picirella’s photograph of the event shows three impeccably uniformed officers on horseback being saluted by a sentry as they lead a column of marching men along the main street. It seemed briefly that the
maquisards
’ dream of re-supply and reinforcement was coming true when American aircraft dropped 420 containers in daylight while Colonel Huet was officiating at a memorial service following the parade. The contents included seventy Bren light machine guns, 1,000-plus Stens, 648 Lee-Enfield .303 rifles and thirty-four bazookas. But where, the
maquisards
asked, were the Allied airborne troops that they were expecting?

On 29 June SPOC in Algiers sent in by parachute a fifteen-man American mission code-named Justine and a four-man US-British-French mission code-named Eucalyptus. Although the sight of these officers and men in Allied uniform was a brief morale-raiser, they could do little except provide training with the parachuted weapons. Neither they nor anyone else on the plateau had any way of knowing that the invasion of southern France was planned for mid-August, a date so far in the future that there was no way irregular forces in open insurrection against the Germans could possibly hold out that long.

On 3 July Yves Farge, who was now de Gaulle’s personal representative in the Vercors, proclaimed the restoration of the Republic and the abolition of all Vichy legislation. Posters announcing this were plastered on walls in the villages and locally printed newspapers entitled
Le Vercors Libre
and
Le Petit Vercors
circulated with Farge’s latest proclamations. More sobering was the text of a cable to Algiers on 6 July, summarising the forces at his disposal:

HEAD COUNT OF MEN ARMED TWO THOUSAND STOP PARTIALLY ARMED ONE THOUSAND STOP NO WEAPONS ONE THOUSAND ENDS
⁶