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

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СКАЧАТЬ beaches, but the grand strategist in him still balked at the Anvil landings on France’s Mediterranean coast. He would still have preferred to continue the Allies’ northern push through Italy ending with a swing west across the Alpine passes into the Savoie, the Isère and the Haute-Savoie.

      The War Cabinet minutes record: ‘The Prime Minister … was inclined to agree that Overlord should be strengthened and that Anvil should revert to pre-Tehran dimensions’ (that is, at most, a possible diversionary attack to draw troops from the north, if needed). Churchill would in fact make several determined attempts to divert Roosevelt and Eisenhower away from Anvil, each more desperate than the last, as the date for the Mediterranean landings approached. For the moment, however, he was content to prepare the ground for a return to his preferred strategy if and when the opportunity arose. The minutes of the War Cabinet meeting that day at Government House in Gibraltar reflect this change of course very clearly. Having spent the last year denying that the French Resistance had any strategic importance (and consequently refusing them priority in the supply of arms), Churchill and his key advisers now agreed that ‘A vigorous plan should be worked out to stimulate guerrilla operations in the mountains of the Savoie and in the country between Ventimiglia and the Lake of Geneva.’

      The implications of this decision for the Vercors and other possible Alpine redoubts were considerable. First, they would now have first place in the supply of arms they had so far been denied. And secondly, they had become key to whichever southern French strategy the Allies would finally decide on: to both Cammaerts’ ‘leapfrogging’ plan in the case of Anvil, and to Churchill’s Alpine passes plan if Anvil was dropped in favour of a push through Italy.

      Miksche’s study had proposed six possible areas for the establishment of redoubts: the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the Morvan forest, the Vosges mountains, the Jura and the Alps. But of the options that were now being developed by the Allies (albeit unknown to the French) for the purpose of a southern invasion, only the Alps and the Jura would be relevant. If de Gaulle wanted the Resistance to coordinate its actions in a way which would make them most valuable to the Allies, it was in the Vercors and the other Alpine redoubts that he needed to invest. Unfortunately, he and his advisers had other ideas – ideas which, driven more by political considerations than military ones, would have profound implications for the Vercors.

      The next substantive meeting between Churchill and d’Astier was at a conference chaired by Churchill in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street on 27 January. Again, all the British Prime Minister’s key advisers were there. First, Churchill played the Yugoslav card: ‘I aided Mihailovic – they were brave men. Now I am helping Tito. The more the Germans slaughter his men, the more ferocious they get. That’s what I am looking for.’ Then he questioned d’Astier about the reliability of the Resistance: ‘Can you assure me that you French will not use the weapons we provide to shoot each other? That you will follow strictly the orders of Eisenhower without question or considerations of a political nature?’ Finally, he reverted once more to his master card – gracious generosity. ‘I have decided’, he said at the end of the meeting, with the air of a kindly uncle giving money to an impecunious relative, ‘to help the French patriots.’

      The minutes of the meeting, normally dry affairs, give a flavour of the event in which the Prime Minister’s peculiarly personal cadences can be easily detected: ‘The Prime Minster said that he wished and believed it possible to bring about a situation in the whole area between the Lake of Geneva and the Mediterranean comparable to the situation in Yugoslavia. Brave and desperate men could cause the most acute embarrassment to the enemy and it is right that we should do all in our power to foster and stimulate so valuable an aid to the Allied strategy.’ Perhaps more important than these fine words was the conclusion of the meeting, which was that the RAF’s first priority – after the bomber offensive on German cities – should now be ‘The French Maquis’. Churchill went on to stipulate that, as a start, arms sufficient to equip 8,000 Maquisards should be dropped into the Alpine region during the month of February 1944.

      Though the Americans would also, in due course, throw their formidable weight behind the arming of the French Resistance, it was Churchill’s decision of 27 January 1944 which began the process which would, in the end, deliver 13,000 tonnes of arms by air to France, sufficient to equip some 425,000 Maquisards. Churchill reinforced the decision he had taken at the meeting with d’Astier by establishing a British committee specifically tasked with coordinating government action to aid the French Resistance. But Eisenhower, rightly spotting an attempt by Churchill at unilateral action in support of his own strategic preferences, insisted that the British committee should be subsumed into his command. And matters did not end there. On 3 March, Eisenhower complained to Churchill that aid to the Resistance in south-east France was being sent at the expense of assistance to the Maquis in the Normandy/Brittany area, where it was needed in support of Overlord, the Allies’ agreed first priority. In a typically terse handwritten note, Churchill rejected Eisenhower’s request to change the priorities he had set in the meeting with d’Astier on 27 January: ‘The Mountain people have had little enough. No alteration in my plans as arranged. WSC 4.3.44.’ This was not romance; far less was it charity. It was Churchill keeping his strategic options open in case, as he hoped, Anvil would be abandoned.

      But, whatever Churchill’s motive, the effects for the Maquis in the Alps and the Jura was dramatic. Thanks to the Prime Minister’s personal intervention and the strategic opportunities he saw along the Italian/French Alpine border, the ‘Mountain people’ of south-east France had now leapt above those of central Bosnia as Britain’s first priority for supply and reinforcement from the air. Probably more than any other place in south-east France, it was the Vercors which would benefit most from this largesse, becoming, over the ensuing months, a huge depot and distribution centre for arms and supplies dropped, not just for the Vercors but for the Maquis in the neighbouring Belledonne, Chartreuse and Oisans ranges as well.

      The first effects of the 1943 decision to encourage ‘air-nourished guerrilla operations in the southern Alps’ were felt in the Vercors on the night of 5/6 January 1944. In the early hours of 6 January, the Union Mission, together with twelve containers of arms and six packets containing 16.25 million francs, was parachuted to a landing site at Eymeux, under the western edge of the Vercors plateau. The three Union Mission members who parachuted into Eymeux that night were an ex-British schoolmaster turned SOE agent, Henry Thackthwaite, a US Marine called Peter Ortiz and a French radio operator.

      The Union Mission’s task was to assess the state of the Resistance in the Savoie, Isère and Drôme (especially in relation to the Maquis’ needs in terms of weapons and clothing) and their possible deployment after D-Day. Although the Mission members dropped wearing civilian clothes, they brought uniforms with them and wore these for the rest of their visit – the first Allied officers to have been seen in uniform in metropolitan France since the fall in 1940.

      The Mission’s first visit was to the Ferme d’Ambel. André Valot was there. Though his description suffers from a number of inaccuracies and is characteristically over-coloured, the general impression – and especially in his account of how this event was seen by the Maquisards – is probably fairly accurate: ‘[One day] a huge yellow limousine arrived … magnificently decorated with three flags flying from its bonnet: the French Tricolour in the centre and the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes fluttering proudly on either side. Even before the doors were fully open an extraordinary figure leapt out: a gangly red-haired giant with a lanky body, a bony face – sunburnt to the colour of coffee – and the expression of a child with a permanent grin on its face … “Hi, boys,” he said, pulling a hip flask out of his back pocket. “You sure are up pretty high here, but great country, yeah! I’m Lieutenant Jean-Pierre [Ortiz carried false identity documents in the name of Jean-Pierre Sellier]. Here have a drink. It’s whisky – the real McCoy. It came from the sky last night, like me. I would rather have broken my leg than break this. You bet!”’

      Valot’s narrative continued: ‘In the back of the yellow limousine there was a coffer full of Chesterfield cigarettes and chocolates, whose distribution СКАЧАТЬ