Storming the Eagle's Nest (24 page)

Mittelbau was first to the starting gate. On 28 August 1943 the first 107 prisoners from Buchenwald arrived at the old anhydrite mine. As at Oberammergau, the first job was to create a work space by blasting out new tunnels: then to begin the assembly of the rockets. Progress was such that on 10 December 1943 the site was ready for an inspection by Albert Speer. Unlike most of Hitler’s leaders, Speer was a well-educated and cultured man. He was horrified by what he saw – or so he later professed. ‘As I learned from the overseers after the inspection was over, the sanitary conditions were inadequate, disease rampant; the prisoners were quartered right there in the damp caves, and as a result the mortality among them was extraordinarily high.’
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The figure for that month of December was in fact 5.7 per cent, meaning that almost three-quarters of the workers would die in the course of a year. The bodies of the fallen were taken back to Buchenwald for cremation. The first rockets rolled off the assembly line on New Year’s Eve 1943. By the early summer of 1944 more than a thousand had been completed. The cost was
about a third of the 12,000 workers involved. Obergruppenführer Kammler reassured his colleagues, ‘Don’t worry about the victims. The work must proceed and be finished in the shortest possible time.’

Although Mittelbau-Dora has become a byword of the
barbarity
of the Nazi slave labour (Zwangsarbeit) programme, conditions in Ebensee in the Alps were, if anything, worse. Project Cement was begun in October 1943, supposedly to provide another haven for the construction of what Goebbels had decided should be called the V-2: Vergeltungswaffe 2 (revenge weapon 2), in retaliation for the bombing by the Allies of German cities. The first one thousand prisoners arrived from Mauthausen on 18 November 1943 and set to work blasting out two huge tunnels, A and B. The prisoners rose at 4.30 a.m. and were given a breakfast of half a litre of ersatz coffee. They then worked till 6 p.m. Lunch was three-quarters of a litre of hot water garnished with potato peelings, dinner 150 g of bread, the flour of which was bran mixed with sawdust. 150 g is not all that much, and it was generally reduced by those responsible for its distribution taking more than their fair share. The result was that most of the inmates got half as much as the allocation at Auschwitz, itself by no means the Ritz. Some of the prisoners supplemented this diet with coal, one thing with which the camp was well supplied. In
The Straits of Hell
, his account of his experiences in Ebensee, Moshe Ha-Elion, a Jew from Salonika in Greece, described it as ‘sweetish, sufficiently brittle, and easy to chew, was apparently satiating too’. Still, there were snags:

In the first few months at the 1,400-foot-high camp there was virtually no accommodation to protect the workforce from an
exceptionally harsh winter. The inmates had to live in the
storehouse
of an abandoned mill. By day the temperature rarely rose above freezing; by night it could fall to −25 degrees Celsius. The mortality rate rose to become the highest of any of the Nazi labour camps. Bodies were piled in heaps for removal to the crematoria at Mauthausen, as the camp did not yet have such a very necessary facility of its own. When the SS finally provided wooden huts for the workforce that in the New Year of 1944 would average between 5,000 and 6,000, the bodies were left piled up in the huts themselves before collection. The living slept with the dead. Obersturmführer Riemer was appointed as camp commandant in early 1944. Besides the huts he also organised a crematorium, work on which started in March 1944. By the time of his rampage in May 1944 that led to the death of some of his charges, its chimney soared above the camp. When the
crematorium
opened for business on 31 July 1944, the smokestack proved not quite high enough to save the Ebensee villagers from now and then inhaling the remains of their neighbours.

By this time the two main tunnels were complete. However, rather than work starting on A-4 sub-assemblies, the camp was reportedly redesignated by Hitler himself to produce tank gears. A more intriguing alternative account is that von Braun had never intended Ebensee for A-4 production. It was destined for the A-9/A-10. This was a manned intercontinental rocket developed from the A-4, which would have sufficient range to hit New York. Conceived in 1940, work on the manned two-stage rocket was prohibited in 1943 so that von Braun would
concentrate
his energies on the production model A-4. In practice, he managed to continue his labours in secret on his most ambitious brainchild. So he developed the thinking that would ultimately put the intended victims of the rocket – the hated Americans – on the Moon.

Still, Ebensee was – and is – a beautiful place. Moshe Ha-Elion remembered his arrival at the camp from Mauthausen, the last part of the journey on foot.

In the weeks after Speer’s crisis meeting at the Berghof, these
long-standing
endeavours in the Reich’s Alps bore fruit. On 26 July 1944, Leutnant Alfred Schreiber of the new Me 262 squadron at Lechfeld just south of Augsburg went into action. He damaged an RAF Mosquito reconnaissance aircraft of No. 540 Squadron. It was the first victory for a turbojet fighter in aviation history. Five weeks later on 29 August 1944, the stockpile of completed V-2s was such that Hitler would order their operational deployment. At 6.43 p.m. on 8 September 1944, the first V-2 hit Chiswick in west London. It killed sixty-three-year-old Mrs Ada Harrison, three-year-old Rosemary Clarke, and Frank Browning of the Royal Engineers. The age of the ballistic missile, the weapon that defined the Cold War, had begun.

Yet by this time, these efforts smelled of too little, too late. Early on the morning of 6 June 1944, the leaders of the German Seventh Army on the Normandy coast had realised that two American and one British airborne division were in their midst. Word was passed at once to the Berghof, where Hitler was fast asleep. Speer was in the chalet about ten o’clock that morning: ‘one of Hitler’s military adjutants told me that the invasion had begun early that morning. “Has the Fuehrer been awakened?” I asked. He shook his head. “No, he receives the news after he has eaten breakfast.”’
15

Hitler’s hunch had once been that the landings would indeed take place on the Normandy beaches. Now he had changed his mind. When the daily conference was finally convened that
afternoon
, the Führer maintained that the landings on the beaches designated by General Eisenhower – now Supreme Commander
of the Allied Expeditionary Force – Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword were merely a feint intended to divert attention from the main thrust across the Dover Strait. By the time this trail had proved false, it was too late. The D-Day bridgehead had been established, and Allied armies were back in western Europe for the first time since Dunkirk.

Eleven weeks later on 15 August 1944 came Operation Dragoon. This was the Allied invasion of the French Riviera coast to the immediate west of the Alpes-Maritimes at Nice. Here, General Alexander Patch commanding the US Seventh Army and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny commanding the French First Army confronted Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz’s
Heeresgruppe
G (Army Group G). This provided little opposition to the
débarquement
. Churchill was observing the landings from the British destroyer HMS
Kimberley
. In the early afternoon, he wrote to his wife, ‘we found ourselves in an immense concourse of ships all sprawled along 20 miles of coast with poor St Tropez in the centre. It had been expected that the bombardment would continue all day, but the air and the ships had practically silenced the enemy guns by 8 o’clock. This rendered the proceedings rather dull.’
16

Soon after, the way north – the Route Napoléon, taken by the Emperor in 1815 on his escape from Elba – was open. This was the route that led from the Riviera to Grenoble, and from Grenoble to the high Alps. On 30 August 1944, US paratroopers liberated Nice, capital of the Alpes-Maritimes.

Twenty-one months earlier on 10 November 1942, Churchill had said of the Allied landings in North Africa and Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein, ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ For the Alps, Operation Dragoon really was the beginning of the end.

This was the diarist and parliamentarian ‘Chips’ Channon, ten days after the Allied landings in the south of France. The note of euphoria in the wake of the initial success of Overlord in Normandy, then Dragoon on the French Riviera was infectious. There were many who thought the end of the summer of 1944 would bring the end of the war. The 20 July bomb plot to assassinate Hitler, the Russian offensive that had brought the Soviets to the steel doors of his Rastenburg HQ, General George Patton’s drive towards Paris, the pace of General Alexander Patch’s forces thrusting up from the Riviera – all had given credence to the idea. Germany would collapse abruptly, just as she had done in the autumn of 1918. It was a tempting notion, and there were all too many who gave in to temptation. Some of the Allied leaders themselves were no exception.

As a matter of long-agreed policy, in the first days of June they had given a call to action to the Resistance throughout France to support the imminent D-Day landings: to disrupt the
Wehrmacht’s lines of communication, to derail reinforcements, to bomb, to sabotage, to do everything to support the Allied
débarquements
. The resistance was supported by SOE and OSS teams dropped in France for this purpose. Then, within
twenty-four
hours of the Normandy landings, there came more specific, targeted calls. These were from the Free French leader General de Gaulle, and from the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Italy, Field Marshal Harold Alexander. The pair broadcast separate calls to the maquis and the partisans, respectively in the French and the Italian Alps. On 5 June 1944, de Gaulle declared enigmatically from London on the BBC, ‘Le chamois des Alpes bondit’.
1
This was the signal for the insurrection in the Vercors outside Grenoble, the ‘capital of the maquis’. On 6 June itself, as the British, Canadian and American landing craft surged towards the Normandy beaches, Alexander broadcast from the radio station in newly liberated Rome: ‘To those who have arms, use them … to workers and clerks, leave your work … to peasants … do all you can to help the patriots. The Allies are supplying patriot groups with thousands of automatic weapons. Find out whether there is one for you.’
2

The results were momentous. They were also by no means what these two warlords had anticipated. The twenty Italian partisan republics declared during the ‘partisan summer’ – the largest Ossola – were an astonishing act of military and political courage from a people largely written off by the English-speaking Allies as cowards. Of the Vercors, de Gaulle’s biographer Robert Aron wrote, ‘Of all the episodes of liberation, none is more shocking, none more mysterious.’
3

In early June 1944, the thirty-nine-year-old François Huet found himself the newly appointed military head of the Vercors, the great limestone table and natural fortress that lay immediately south-west of Grenoble in the Dauphiné. The plateau dominated the lines of communication, overseeing the routes through which an Allied force from the south of France from the long-heralded
landings might drive up towards the Reich; likewise the lifeline along which the Wehrmacht would retreat. It was for this reason that Capitaine Alain Le Ray’s original plans for Operation Montagnards proposed supplementing the maquis established on the plateau since early 1941 with a force of regular infantry and artillery. The Vercors might then play a strategic role in the defeat of the occupying forces in south-eastern France by sallying forth to attack its lines of communication. A rising might also provide a beacon for the country as a whole. In May, Colonel Marcel Descour had told Huet, ‘The Vercors is the only maquis, in the whole of France, which has been given the mission to set up its own free territory. It will receive the arms, ammunition, and troops which will allow it to be the advance guard of a landing in Provence.’
4
Under General Marie-Pierre Koenig, Descour was Chief of Staff of the newly formed Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). Created at de Gaulle’s instigation, the French Forces of the Interior were an amalgamation of the resistance into properly organised light infantry units. It was a formulation that symbolised the changing status of France from an occupied country to a resurgent nation on the cusp of liberation, of which the Vercors would be an emblem. Descour’s order meant something. The Vercors would not wait passively to be liberated. It would liberate itself. Vive la France!

Huet’s orders were clear and the broadcast from de Gaulle himself was clarion. The commandant mobilised the Vercors on 9 June 1944, three days after the D-Day landings and just as the bridgeheads on Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah were being established more than 500 miles north in Normandy. Huet called not only those on the plateau, but all in the immediate area. Wrote the eyewitness Roland Bechmann-Lescot: ‘From all directions, from Grenoble, Romans and Die, from every district and by every means of locomotion, on foot, by car, by the busload … the volunteers, on being summoned by the leaders of the Vercors, assembled, under the very noses of the Germans.’
5
To the 500 or so maquis on the plateau would soon be added twice that number; according to some sources many more. Setting up
his headquarters in Vassieux-en-Vercors, Huet duly divided his forces into five companies. He needed to train, arm and suitably dispose his maquis.

The village of St-Nizier-du-Moucherotte lay almost at the north-eastern tip of the plateau, immediately overlooking the Grenoble basin. St-Nizier was the terminus of a narrow-gauge tramline that ran the fifteen miles up from the city. The ascent here was moderately steep but of a gradient manageable by the tram: it was the one flank of the Vercors on which it was
vulnerable
. From here the city below could be seen: the Bastille
fortifications
, the square tower of the cathedral, the silvery confluence of the tumbling Drac and Isère rivers. From the city – almost from the barracks of the Wehrmacht’s 157th Reserve Division – the village could also be observed.

There, on the afternoon of 10 June 1944, the maquis under Huet’s orders closed the tramline and raised a giant tricolour. The Vercors was declaring its freedom from the occupying forces. ‘The weather’, wrote Huet’s Chief of Staff Pierre Tanant, ‘was magnificent in this month of June. The sky was a resplendent blue. It felt deliciously good at 1,000 metres in altitude. And above all on those verdant hills one felt free.’
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When the Grenoblois spotted the tricolour billowing lazily in the Provençal breeze, they might have been excused for thinking that the hour of liberation was itself at hand. It was intoxicating. Huet himself declared to the maquis under his command, ‘The eyes of the whole country are fixed on us … We have faith in each other. We have right on our side.’ For those who had lived through the bitter days of the Fall of France in June 1940 and endured the privation, repression, deportations and terror first of Vichy, then of the Italian Fourth Army, now of Generalleutnant Karl Pflaum’s 157th Reserve, it was a day of unparalleled joy. It was a
jour de fête
that evoked the folk memories of the Revolution of 1789.

Commandant Huet was human: he shared the euphoria. Yet as a professional soldier he was aware how precarious was the plateau’s position. The terrain certainly lent itself to defence.
There were just eight roads up to the Vercors. Two of these rose up to passes more than 3,000 feet high. Here a child could turn back an army. The remainder were easily blocked. There were around twenty mountain tracks that scrambled up its flanks, but these too were simply defended. Only St-Nizier itself was problematic. The difficulty lay more with the resources of defence. ‘What is an army without artillery, tanks and air force?’
7
Stalin would ask this of the insurgency that would erupt on 1 August 1944 more than 1,000 miles north-east of Grenoble: the Warsaw Rising. Moreover, despite the efforts of Huet’s predecessors as military commanders of the Vercors going back to Le Ray, many of the Vercors maquis were not even trained in handling light arms. They were civilians with guns. As to the weapons themselves, as the numbers of maquisards responding to Huet’s call grew, as the news from the bridgeheads in Normandy reached happy ears, these too were in short supply.

The
patron
of the Vercors was its civilian leader, the fifty-
year-old
Eugène Chavant. Founder of the resistance group France Combat, he had been taken by the Free French submarine
Casabianca
to Allied headquarters in Algiers in late May 1944 to discuss the Montagnards plan. The French colony hosted the combined Allied guerrilla operations team, the Special Projects Operations Centre. This was a newly – and not very thoroughly – merged team uniting elements of SOE, OSS and their French equivalent, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA). Chavant, son of a cobbler, was supposedly ill at ease amongst the international military top brass. He was nevertheless promised not only materiel in the form of arms and ammunition, but 4,000 paratroopers. As Le Ray had known, the maquis might be expected to hold the plateau and had a good record of conducting skirmishes and running sabotage operations. It could hardly take on a professional army, especially one as professional as the Wehrmacht. Finally, as the Alpinist Pierre Dalloz, one of the civilian architects of the original Montagnards scheme, had pointed out, the combined regular and irregular forces needed to be facing an army on the edge of defeat: preferably an army that
was retreating headlong up the Rhône with the Allies snapping at its heels. In 1942 he had written, ‘If the Vercors plan can be put into effect, it must be done by surprise and against a distressed and disorganized enemy … It will not be a matter of attacking an enemy in full possession of his resources’.
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Huet understood all these points. Chavant, though he had served in the 20th Battalion of Chasseurs in the First World War and was twice decorated, perhaps understood them less well. It was Chavant, though, who had been to Algiers. He assumed that Algiers and London grasped the operation and were committed to it, though at the time they had quite a lot on their hands: Operation Dragoon, the preparations for Operation Market Garden on the Rhine, and – soon – the Warsaw Rising. Certainly the operation had been endorsed formally by de Gaulle himself, the operational head of the SOE, Brigadier Colin Gubbins, and by David Bruce of the OSS in London. These were, Chavant felt, reassuring commitments.

The tricolour raised on the flagstaff at St-Nizier on 10 June 1944 was certainly provocative. Generalleutnant Pflaum’s 157th Reserve Division was mountain light infantry, a Gebirgsjäger formation familiar with mountain warfare. Pflaum himself was a fifty-four-year-old born and brought up in Bavaria. He was a veteran of service in mountain regiments and had an excellent understanding of mountain engagements. He appreciated the strategic threat posed by the Vercors to his lines of
communication
, signalled by the French flag. On 13 June his forces attacked St-Nizier. Huet had done his work well, and a relatively small force of Germans was repelled by a force of 250 maquisards. The turning point of the engagement was the arrival of maquis reinforcements singing the ‘Marseillaise’. The following day Pflaum returned with a larger force, this time to succeed. On 15 June Huet was forced to withdraw the maquisards towards the interior of the plateau. The Germans took fire-and-brimstone revenge on the village.

Pflaum, though, had been taken aback by the strength of the Vercors’s maquis. He was also dealing with an insurrection led by the maquis, inspired by the SOE, in the neighbouring
département
of Ain. The General accordingly regrouped in Grenoble to consider his position, and to gather what forces he could: both air and land. Soon, reconnaissance aircraft from the local airbase of Valence-Chabeuil were overflying the Vercors, identifying concentrations of maquis and using any stragglers as machine-gun target practice.

Over the course of the next four weeks, as the Allies in the north under General Patton pushed slowly towards Cherbourg and Caen through the bocage country, Huet consolidated his defences. He was supported by no fewer than fourteen airdrops from Algiers, and the arrival of a party of French engineers to prepare a landing ground at the resistance HQ in Vassieux. This surely heralded the Allied regular forces, the 4,000 paratroops promised to Chavant. The BBC – alongside the regular bulletins on Normandy – broadcast the electrifying news of the liberation of the Vercors. It was part of a propaganda policy to destabilise the occupying forces throughout France.

Friday 14 July was Bastille Day. All France was celebrating the storming of the prison-fortress in Paris and the beginnings of the republic. The Vercors was no exception. There was a parade in Vassieux, parties all over the plateau, a gun salute, and – best of all – an airdrop. Seventy-two B-17 bombers from the Eighth Air Force overflew the half-finished airstrip in Vassieux and dropped no fewer than 860 containers of materiel. Only the Reich could rain on this parade and rain it did. No sooner had the roar of the B-17s’ Pratt and Whitneys died away than another sound was heard. It was the Luftwaffe. Focke-Wulfs from Valence-Chabeuil had been alerted to the drop and strafed Vassieux with machine guns and incendiaries, diluting the best efforts of the USAAF. Huet’s forces crept out after nightfall to scavenge what they could of the drop.

Scarcely had they recovered from Bastille Day when
Generalleutnant
Pflaum attacked again. Huet’s local intelligence was all
too good. On 17 July he heard that German reinforcements were approaching both from Chambéry to the north and Valence to the west. By 19 July, Huet was surrounded by forces supposedly amounting to 10,000 men; some sources say 20,000. By the following day, intelligence suggested that Pflaum had turned the tables on the maquis. From a mountain fortress from which to harass a beleaguered enemy, Huet’s forces had been entrapped. If there were few ways for attackers to get onto the table, so too were there few for the defenders to get off. Pflaum had blocked all the eight main roads with infantry and artillery. On Friday 21 July the Generalleutnant launched the operation to clear the plateau. Where were the 4,000 paratroopers promised to Chavant?