Das Reich (16 page)

These injunctions and failings applied to almost every Resistance group in France. On the N20, up which the Der Führer and reconnaissance battalion were advancing, Guedin’s men had wasted hours felling trees and placing carts across the road, ignoring the vital precept of roadblocks – that to be effective they must be covered by fire, since otherwise any convoy with heavy vehicles can sweep them aside with contemptuous ease. So it was with the Das Reich, that long afternoon of 8 June. The Germans were irritated, even outraged. But they were not seriously hampered. The headquarters group of the Der Führer, including its commander Colonel Stadler in his staff car, were still cruising at the head of the division when they reached the little village of Cressensac, ten miles north of the Dordogne river.

It is a pretty, creeper-clad place with a single wide main street dusty in the June sun. It had been the scene of a minor action on 31 March, in which two
résistants
had been killed by the detested Vichyite
Garde Mobile de Réserve
– the GMR. On the afternoon of 8 June, the first vehicles of the Der Führer suddenly found themselves swept by a long burst of fire at the approaches of the village, which hit several men and caused the Germans to leap in confusion from their soft-skinned vehicles. The trucks laden with infantry pulled in beside the road, and for a few minutes both sides exchanged fire without effect. But the infantry, to their considerable fury, found themselves pinned down. Then the huge armoured vehicles of the reconnaissance battalion roared up the road, past the trucks and the headquarters group. Wulf and his men enjoyed the spectacle of the infantry officers crouching in the ditch as the price of their impatience in driving ahead of them. They moved into the village, spraying cannon and machine gun fire into the
maquisard
positions. A 75 mm Pak gun started to blast the houses from which fire was being directed, and blew a
hole in the church spire. The
résistants
began to break east and westwards into the countryside, leaving four dead behind them. The Germans mounted their vehicles again, and prepared to move on, this time with Wulf’s half-tracks undisputed in the lead. It was around 4 pm.

Eight miles further north, at Noailles, on the crest of the hill that guards the approach to Brive-la-Gaillarde, a little group of men of the 1st section, 6th company of the Ace of Hearts covered the crossroads, listening to the gunfire. Their leader, Commandant Romain, had been talking to them when he heard the shooting at Cressensac. He hurried away down the road on his little
moto
, just too late for the action, and narrowly avoided encountering the Das Reich. The Noailles party had just been reinforced by a group of nine defectors from the GMR, whose men had been hastening to join the Resistance in large numbers since D-Day. Several of these
Gardes
, including their leader, a man named Lelorrain, were still beside their vehicle when they heard ‘
un bruit infernal
’, in the words of one of the survivors. The first of Wulf’s vehicles ground over the crest and instantly opened fire, hitting Lelorrain and several others with the first burst. Some of the
résistants
fired a few shots, but more scattered among the houses and gardens by the road. After just three hours’ service to the Allied cause, the GMR leader lay dying by the roadside, along with several other dead or mortally wounded Frenchmen. The long hill into Brive lay open to the Germans. Through the evening and far into the night their vehicles crawled onwards through the little villages, each successive unit speculating idly about the source of the flames that still played through the ruins of houses fired in the little skirmishes, and the wreckage of bullock carts and fallen trees from barricades swept aside by the half-tracks as they advanced up the road. Guedin’s
maquisards
could consider it their principal achievement that it had taken the Das Reich Division six hours, rather than perhaps three, to cover the last forty miles to Brive-la-Gaillarde. A young Swiss girl from the Château de Noailles and a grocer’s daughter named Denise Neymarie ran out into the
gardens to do what they could for the
maquis
wounded, bleeding behind the trees on the hilltop.

The small town of Bretenoux, a medieval
bastide
founded in 1277, stands beside the upper Dordogne at a point where the great river has dwindled to resemble a mellow Hampshire chalk stream, with a race and a graceful weeping willow below its ridge. The old timbered shuttered houses slope to a walled quay on the southern bank, from which generations of townspeople have nursed their fishing rods.

On the morning of 9 June, the 1st Section of the 3rd Company of the Ace of Hearts
maquis
guarded the bridge under the command, ironically enough, of a young Alsatian named Sergeant Frédéric Holtzmann – ‘Fred’ to most of his men. He was twenty, tall and fair, the sort of young man who might have been drafted into the SS had he remained at his home on the German border. In the early hours of the morning, word reached the village – probably by telephone from the St Céré area where the Das Reich armoured column had lagered for the night – that a German convoy was approaching. Many of the townspeople, roused from their beds, prudently departed into the woods and fields for safety. One young
résistant
, seeing a friend on his way to join them, embraced him emotionally in farewell. Then the twenty-six Frenchmen under Holtzmann, armed with rifles and a scattering of Brens and Stens, deployed around the bridge and on the roofs of the houses covering its approaches.

At about 6.30 am the first German vehicles approached the bridge down the main street of Bretenoux. Two
maquisards
who had ridden their
moto
towards St Céré to reconnoitre were fired upon, and hastily fled. The
maquisards
around the bridge began to use their own weapons, and a stubborn little battle began. For the next three hours the Germans fought for possession of the road, while the
résistants
clung to their river bank. At his headquarters at Montplaisir, Marius Guedin heard the gunfire, and sent
a
sousofficier
and a party of men to investigate. They reached the outskirts of Bretenoux to find that there was no means of reaching the bridge. They lay watching and listening as the Germans began to use mortars. Guedin himself arrived to join them. There was nothing to be done. The SS had at last forded the river and worked around the flanks of the
résistants
. Holtzmann himself was badly wounded and could not move had he wished to. Most of the others had left it too late to withdraw. Several houses and three German vehicles were in flames. Eighteen of the twenty-five defenders of the bridge were dead. After the Liberation, Sergeant Holtzmann was awarded a posthumous Médaille Militaire.

Five miles further north, at the village of Beaulieu, another group of Guedin’s men exchanged fire briefly, and lost three killed. One last section, at the crossroads of la Grafouillère still further up the road, saw the armour approaching and decided that discretion demanded that they hold their fire. The right flank of the Das Reich reached the summit of the hills, and began the long descent into Tulle without further interruption.

Resistance estimates of the casualties they had inflicted upon the Das Reich between Montauban and Brive/Tulle on 8 and 9 June ran into hundreds, and as such were written into many regional histories. In addition to the actions reported above, Colonel Kreutz was dismayed to discover that a small maintenance party who were left behind the main body of the column to repair a disabled vehicle had been fallen upon and killed by a Resistance group. There is room for doubt about an additional one or two German casualties. The armoured column was engaged in a further battle, which will be described in the account of the Allied Jedburgh operations. But there seems no reason to doubt the overall German casualty report to 66th Reserve Corps for the fighting on that first march – some fifteen men killed and more than thirty wounded. French dead, as we have seen, were already over a hundred.

A signal was drafted that day from OKW’s Operations Department, concerning the situation in Corrèze, Dordogne and Lot:

From the high plateaux of the Lot, the road falls steeply into the spacious town of Brive-la-Gaillarde – ‘Brive the Bold’, named for its many gallant defences during the wars of the Middle Ages. In 1944 it possessed some 30,000 inhabitants, better fed than much of France at the period thanks to the fruit-growing and market-gardening of the area. Its central streets and squares suggest respectability and prosperity rather than beauty, but Brive has always enjoyed a reputation as a cheerful, welcoming place. Here, on the evening of 8 June, the first vehicles of the Das Reich swept down the road from Noailles and the south. ‘Brive was like a beehive,’ said Heinrich Wulf. Civilians crowding the street corners to exchange rumours and fears fled into their houses when they saw the column approach. As the most powerful German formation the town had ever seen roared up the road to the
Ortskommandantur
, they peered bleakly through the shutters. Some vehicles showed scars of battle. All of them were caked in dust and crowded with grim, camouflage-smocked troopers. A grisly souvenir was draped across the bonnet of one of the half-tracks – the body of a
maquisard
, Maurice Vergne, picked from the roadside in Cressensac.

The local German headquarters received them as an American western fort beleaguered by Indians might have greeted the coming
of the cavalry. For two days they had clung to the safety of the
Kommandantur
building, protected by sandbagged emplacements, convinced that an attack by several thousand
maquisards
was imminent. They had received word of an attack on Tulle on 7 June, but there had been silence from the town all day on the eighth. Most of the Brive garrison and administrative staff were reservists ten, twenty, even thirty years older than the SS troopers. Beneath the universal coalscuttle helmets and detested uniforms of the Occupiers, had the inhabitants of Brive known it, there were several hundred very frightened and unenthusiastic enemies.

Major Wulf, Major Stuckler, Colonel Stadler and Major Weidinger strode into the Brive headquarters at the Hôtel de Bordeaux less than impressed by what they saw. They had always regarded the terrorists with contempt, and been convinced that aggressive, decisive military action could drive them headlong back into their woods. Nothing that they had seen that day at Cressensac or Noailles altered that view. The
maquis
were an infernal nuisance to regular military operations, but it was absurd that they had been allowed to achieve such psychological dominance over local German garrisons. The SS forcefully suggested to Colonel Luyken and the Brive command staff that a more active policy, with intensive sweeps and patrolling, would have prevented the partisans from achieving the concentrations that now threatened Tulle, Brive, and even – it was being reported from the Haute-Vienne – Limoges. In the view of the officers of the Das Reich, all this was the fruit of the infirmity of policy and weakness of execution.

There was a brief discussion of how best to deploy the division’s teeth elements to meet the situation. Divisional headquarters under Stuckler – more than a hundred men and thirty vehicles – were already intending to pass the night in Tulle, and Stuckler himself was supposed to pay a liaison visit to 66th Reserve Corps at Clermont-Ferrand the following day. If there was trouble in Tulle – and panic-stricken messages from the garrison had talked of encirclement and crisis – then Wulf’s reconnaissance battalion with its armoured vehicles and 75 mm guns
should be more than competent to dispose of any
maquis
force. The artillery, flak and interminable tail units would lager along the Brive–Limoges road as they arrived, and General Lammerding proposed to supervise their disposal personally. The Der Führer regiment, as planned, would continue immediately to Limoges and deploy around the town in support of the local garrison. The heavy armour, of course, was still far to the south-east, making sluggish progress up the road south of St Céré.

While the officers of the Das Reich were making their dispositions in the
Ortskommandantur
, among the little crowd of French civilians gazing stonily at the ranks of German vehicles in the Grand Place was a young man named René Jugie, who had been following their progress with the keenest interest since the first word of their coming reached him early that morning of 8 June. Jugie was a member of the Corrèze committee of MUR – the
Mouvement Uni de Résistance
, intended to coordinate the activities of all the department’s fragmented
réseaux
and
maquis
. He was himself the founder of one of them, which bore his codename, ‘Gao’; he was also a great admirer of De Gaulle and a close associate of the SOE officers in the area – first Peulevé and now Poirier and Hiller.