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

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СКАЧАТЬ with de Gaulle’s instructions, a Liberation Committee which would, among other things, coordinate all Resistance military and political action in the area. Exceptionally, Alain Le Ray was invited by Chavant to attend, despite the fact that he was about to leave the Vercors. Significantly Geyer was not. One of the conclusions of the conference was to confirm that the Vercors would not fall under either the Drôme or the Isère Resistance structures, but would have its own autonomous organization under Eugène Chavant’s leadership, because ‘the redoubt is supposedly under the control of the supreme Allied Command’.

      During the meeting there was a heated discussion as to whether the best policy was to remain hidden until D-Day or to become active immediately. In the course of this one of the delegates warned, ‘If, on the great day, I am asked to go to the Vercors, I shall immediately refuse. In my opinion the Vercors is nothing more than a trap.’ Although no one at the meeting knew it, just the kind of trap he was warning about was already beginning to close.

      In Malleval an attempt had been made by an ex-Alpine regimental commander to conscript the young men of the Malleval Maquis into a reconstituted version of his old unit. This caused serious tensions between the Maquisards and the French Alpine soldiers in the little closed valley. To the horror of the Maquisards, their much loved and trusted commander, Pierre Godart, was first effectively dismissed and then, on 20 January, replaced by Gustave Eysseric, an Alpine unit officer. When some of the Maquis attempted to raise a petition to express their concerns, they were cut short. ‘This is the Army. You don’t have personal opinions and we do not recognize petitions.’ Disgusted, almost half the Maquisards left the Malleval valley. They were the lucky ones.

      In the very early hours of 29 January, the day after Pflaum had announced he was taking personal charge of anti-partisan operations, German units arrived in the little town of Cognin, lying across the narrow mouth of the Gorges du Nant, which, at the time, provided the only properly motorable access to the steep-sided amphitheatre of the Malleval valley. A little after dawn, a German column set off up the winding, snow-covered road over one shoulder of the gorge, heading for Malleval village. They took a local man as hostage. They seemed to know exactly what they were aiming for, having been, some said, informed by a local spy. At 08.20, with the hostage walking in front of the first vehicle, the German column emerged out of the gorge and took Eysseric’s guard post at the mill below Malleval village completely by surprise. The outpost’s defenders were overrun after a brief but ferocious fight. The telephone line to Eysseric in the village was cut but not before a warning had been phoned through.

      Eysseric tried desperately to rally his scattered and sleeping troops but he soon realized that he had no hope of holding the attack and ordered a withdrawal into the forest behind the village. As his men ran for cover, they were cut down by Alpine troops who had skied in over the high passes the previous night and, in their white camouflaged uniforms, taken up positions around the village, cutting off all the possible exits. Only very few got away from the slaughter. One who didn’t was Gustave Eysseric himself. After the raid, all the wounded and some of the prisoners were shot, including some Yugoslav deserters who had arrived to join the Resistance in Malleval only days before. Later, the villagers were interrogated and beaten: six of them, including a Jewish woman refugee, were shoved into a nearby building and burnt alive. The village itself was sacked and burnt. In total at Malleval, thirty-three were killed and twenty-six buildings destroyed.

      By the end of January 1944, it should have been clear to all from the burning of Les Barraques that the Germans could mount punitive expeditions on the plateau at will. And the disaster at Malleval illustrated their strategy for doing it. Surround – attack – annihilate the enemy – destroy their bases and the property of those who helped them. Unhappily even after these two January tragedies, too many of the Vercors commanders continued to act as though neither Les Barraques nor Malleval had ever happened.

      And in this they were not alone. Even as Malleval was burning, young Maquisards were already gathering, on the ‘impregnable fortress’ of the Glières plateau, 200 kilometres north of the Vercors. They, too, believed they were in a fortress, when in fact they were in a trap.

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       OF GERMANS AND SPIES

      One thing was clear from the string of setbacks suffered by the Organisation Vercors in January 1944. German knowledge of what was happening on the plateau was detailed and accurate. By late 1943 both the Germans and the Resistance had developed extensive networks for gathering intelligence on each other.

      Right from the start the Vichy intelligence services, including the Milice, had managed to infiltrate many of the réfractaires’ camps and build up a network of informers among the local French population. During the summer of 1943, the able young Resistance commander of Camp C2 near Villard-de-Lans, Pierre Faillant de Villemarest, was so concerned about infiltration that he suggested to the Vercors’ civil and military leaders that a proper intelligence and security service be established on the plateau. It was agreed that he and a girl called Charlotte Mayaud from Villard should undertake the task. The two quickly established an intelligence network among local doctors and set up a rudimentary surveillance service and a warning system to sound the alert in the event of an approaching threat. Villemarest very soon realized that the problem was much worse than he had thought, and concluded that the whole of the Organisation Vercors was deeply penetrated.

      In September 1943, a man called Henri Weiss suddenly appeared and took over the running of a café in Villard. Surveillance quickly revealed that he was in contact with a Belgian named Lecuy who appeared to have no visible means of support but was staying in Villard’s most luxurious hotel, the Splendide. Further investigation uncovered a ‘spy ring’ which included two hotel owners and a groom called ‘Mistigri’, who was himself a member of one of the réfractaires’ camps. It was obvious to Villemarest that, between them, they had perfect oversight of everyone who arrived and left the town. Further surveillance established that the Belgian, Lecuy, held regular clandestine meetings with a German official in Grenoble who turned out to be none other than the infamous Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. Villemarest gave a full report with supporting evidence to Chavant, but le Patron dismissed it all as ‘too imaginative’. Not long afterwards, the body of the Belgian, Lecuy, was found in a wood outside Villard. Local rumour said that he had been tempted to the spot by a Villard lady of relaxed virtue and that Villemarest had had something to do with the death.

      Disgusted by Chavant’s naivety, Villemarest relinquished his job and left the plateau in February 1944. In the first half of 1944, however, Villemarest’s worst suspicions were confirmed when several Maquisards deserted from the camps. Some of these were suspected of being Milice infiltrators. One, Cémoi (we know only his alias), who had joined one of the camps in February, deserted to the Milice on 24 April. He was later captured and executed. It was not until June 1944 that a proper system of security was finally established on the plateau.

      Although the plateau itself was riddled with insecurity, there were active and successful Resistance intelligence networks operating in the Grenoble area which were able to provide the Vercors leaders with reliable information on German intentions. These included many in the Vichy civil administration and the local police as well as the Gendarmerie. Post offices were also a fruitful source of information, as were local telephone-exchange operators who turned their well-known habit of listening to conversations into a patriotic duty. Others on whom the Organisation Vercors could normally rely included especially the local restaurateurs, who formed an extensive intelligence network of their own. This included establishing an organization for stealing side-arms from Germans dining at local restaurants and smuggling these to the Resistance in the forests.

      Alongside the local intelligence organizations operating in the Vercors during this period there were also a number of French and Allied secret services doing the same thing. These included the French intelligence services based in London, SOE, SIS (also known СКАЧАТЬ