Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (42 page)

The concentration camp at Natzwiller in Alsace, where captured
maquisards
were starved, beaten and worked to death in the stone quarry.

The double fences at Natzwiller, between which ran Alsatian dogs trained to kill.

The camp gallows, on which public hangings were a daily event.

A captured
résistant
faces a German firing squad.

On 6 June 1944 160,000 Allied soldiers headed for the beaches of Normandy, where 2,500 of them died before nightfall.

Supreme Allied Commander US General ‘Ike’ Eisenhower.

British General Bernard Montgomery, commanding all land forces. Neither he nor Eisenhower told de Gaulle the date for D-Day. That mistrust cost many French lives.

The simple pre-war life on the high plateau of the Vercors before the war. The locals had no idea that Allied liaison officers would make them a target for Waffen-SS anti-partisan troops.

The village of Vassieux-en-Vercors. The flat area in centre of the photo was the landing strip cleared by the Allied officers.

On the Vercors Major François Huet (leaning over map) commanded 4,000
maquisards
, but he had no real plan and many of them had no weapons.

Rarely photographed, Lieutenant General Pflaum commanded the 10,000 troops who assaulted the plateau.

On 14 July 1944 1,000 of these containers, stuffed with guns and ammunition, were dropped at Vassieux, after which the Luftwaffe bombed and strafed Maquis positions.

The carcase of one of the twenty-two DFS 230 assault gliders that landed there one week later, disgorging the first Waffen-SS shock troops attacking the Maquis on the plateau.