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

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СКАЧАТЬ not just the specialists who were being called away, but whole annual intakes of young men whom Laval wanted to send to help Hitler’s war effort. There was a mood of near panic among the young men, and the resources of the Gaullist resistance organizations were very soon swamped. We needed new camps; we needed more financial resources; we needed food; we needed clothes and above all we needed boots. We needed to organize some kind of security system to search out the spies who we knew the Milice were infiltrating with the réfractaires. We needed arms.’

      New camps were soon found. And not just in the Vercors. Elsewhere in the region, other early Resistance groups were also establishing camps for fleeing réfractaires in the remote areas of the nearby Chartreuse Massif and the Belledonne and Oisans mountain ranges which bordered the Grésivaudan valley. Between February and May 1943, eight new réfractaire camps – housing some 400 men in all and numbered consecutively from Ambel (C1) – were established across the Vercors plateau under the direction of Aimé Pupin. To this total must be added two military camps, one set up in May by an ex-Military School in Valence, another established in November under the control of Marcel Descour.

       Map 3

      Those who joined the camps between March 1943 and May 1944 (that is before the Allied landings in Normandy) were of differing ages and came from a wide area. In a sample of forty-four réfractaires in the initial influx between March and May 1943, almost half were over thirty years old, many of them married. As might be expected, the majority (60 per cent) were from the immediate locality (the region of Rhône-Alpes), but among the rest almost 10 per cent were Parisians, a further 10 per cent were born out of France and nearly 15 per cent came from the eastern regions of France. There was similar diversity when it came to previous employment. In C3, above Autrans, nearly half the camp members had been ordinary workers, almost a third technicians of one sort or another, some 12 per cent were students and nearly 10 per cent had been regular soldiers. Politically, too, there was a broad variety of opinions and views. The fact that the great majority of the Vercors’ civilian camps were loyal to de Gaulle meant that the organized presence of the Communists and the French far right was almost non-existent on the plateau. Individually, however, the camps included adherents to almost every political belief (except of course fascism). Political discussions round evening campfires were frequent, varied and at times very lively.

      By autumn 1943, every community of any size on the plateau had a secret camp of one sort or another near by – and every inhabitant on the plateau would have been aware of the unusual nature of the new young visitors in their midst. For Samuel, Pupin, Chavant and their colleagues, the administrative burden of all this was immense. Pupin later said: ‘We didn’t have a moment of respite. Our eight camps occupied our time fully.’ The biggest problem by far, however, was finding the money to pay for all this. Collections were made among family, well-wishers and workplaces – two Jewish men contributed between them 20,000 francs a week which they had collected from contacts. But it was never enough.

      London started providing huge subventions to support the réfractaire movement. During Jean Moulin’s visit to London in February 1943, de Gaulle charged him with ‘centralizing the overall needs of the réfractaires and assuring the distribution of funds through a special organization, in liaison with trades unions and resistance movements’. On 18 February, Farge delivered a second massive subvention amounting to 3.2 million francs to be used for Dalloz’s Plan Montagnards alone. And on 26 February Moulin’s deputy sent a coded message to London containing his budget proposals for March 1943. This amounted to a request for no less than 13.4 million francs for all the elements of the Resistance controlled by de Gaulle, of which some 1.75 million francs per month was designated for the Vercors. This was in addition to the private donations pouring into Aimé Pupin’s coffers by way of a false account in the name of a local beekeeper, ‘François Tirard’, at the Banque Populaire branch in Villard. This level of support made the Vercors by far the biggest single Resistance project being funded by London at this point in the war.

      Despite these significant sums, money remained an ever-present problem for those administering the Vercors camps through 1943 and into the following year. A British officer sent on a mission to assess the strength and nature of the Maquis in south-eastern France visited the Vercors later in 1943 and reported that those in the camps ‘have to spend much of their time getting food etc. They have to do everything on their own and are often short of money. In one case they stole tobacco and sold it back onto the Black Market to get money.’

      Not surprisingly this kind of behaviour, though by no means common, caused tensions between the réfractaires and local inhabitants. With food so short, the proximity of groups of hungry young men to passing flocks of sheep proved to be an especially explosive flash-point. On 14 June 1943, the réfractaires of Camp C4, fleeing to avoid a raid on their camp by Italian Alpine troops, arrived on the wide mountain pasture of Darbonouse where they were met by a flock of sheep numbering some 1,500. Their commander told them: ‘If there is any thieving I will take the strongest measures against the perpetrators. Remember that it is in our interests to make the shepherds our friends. Remember too that it is through our behaviour that the Resistance is judged.’

      On the other hand, not far away at the Pré Rateau mountain hut above Saint-Agnan, another band of young réfractaires who had absconded from their original camp enjoyed a merry summer of pilfering and theft, to the particular detriment of the flocks of sheep in the area.

      Tensions between local farmers were considerably eased when spring turned into summer and some camp commanders offered their young men as free labour to cut and turn grass and bring in the harvest. It was very common during the summer days of 1943 to see small armies of fit and bronzed young men among the peasant families in the fields and pastures of the Vercors. The easy habits of city living were being replaced by the calloused hands and sinewed bodies necessary for survival as a Maquisard.

      This was not so everywhere. There was considerable variation between camps according to how and by whom they were run. By the middle of 1943, many camps had ex-military commanders and were run on military lines. Here, by and large, there was good order, effective security, discipline and good relations with the locals. In other camps, however, things had ‘the appearance of a holiday camp [with] young men taking their siestas in the shade of the firs after lunch or lying out in the sun improving their tans’.

      One feature dominated the daily routine of all the camps, whether well run or not – the routine of the corvées, or camp chores. There were corvées for almost everything from peeling potatoes to gathering water (which in some camps had to be carried long distances from the nearest spring), bringing in the food, collecting the mail, chopping and carrying the wood (especially in winter), cooking, washing up and much else besides. Some camps – the lucky ones – were able to use mules for the heavy carrying, but many relied for their victuals, warmth and water on the strong legs and sturdy backs of their young occupants alone.

      Soon it was realized that work in the fields was not going to be enough to keep the minds of intelligent young men occupied – or prepare them for what everyone knew would come in due course. One of the organizations established by the Vichy government – and then dissolved shortly after the German invasion of the south – was a school to train ‘cadres’ or young professionals to run Vichy government structures. The École d’Uriage, many of whose students came from the Army, was located some 15 kilometres outside Grenoble. Following the lead of its commander, the École soon became a hotbed of Resistant sentiment. When the École d’Uriage was dissolved in December 1943, most of the students and staff swiftly reassembled in the old château of Murinais, just under the western rim of the Vercors. It was from here, at the suggestion of Alain Le Ray, who had by now become the effective military commander of all the camps, that flying squads, СКАЧАТЬ