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

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СКАЧАТЬ the réfractaires. Typically a Uriage flying squad would spend several days in a camp, following a set training programme which provided military training, cultural awareness and political education. The curriculum included instruction in basic military skills, training exercises, weapon handling, physical exercise, map reading and orientation, security, camp discipline, hygiene and political studies covering the tenets of the Gaullist Resistance movement and a briefing on the aims of the Allies and the current status of the war. One camp even received instruction in Morse code. In the evenings there were boisterous games and the singing of patriotic songs around the campfire. Study circles were established which continued to meet after the flying squad had moved on. In many cases camp members were required to sign the Charter of the Maquis, which laid out the duties and conduct expected of a Maquisard. The Uriage teams even produced a small booklet on how to be a Resistance fighter with a front cover claiming it was an instruction manual for the French Army.

      There was also some less conventional training given by one of the Vercors’ most unusual and remarkable characters. Fabien Rey was famous on the plateau before the war as a poacher, a frequenter of the shadowy spaces beyond the law, an initiate into the mysteries of the Vercors’ forests and hidden caves and an intimate of the secret lives of all its creatures. During the summer and autumn months of 1943, when not striding from camp to camp to share his knowledge with the young men from the cities, his latest crop of trapped foxes swinging from his belt, he could always be found sitting in his cabin invigilating a bubbling stew of strange delicacies such as the intestines of wild boars and the feathered heads of eagles, which he would press on any unwary visitor who passed. He also wrote a small cyclostyled handbook on how to live off the land on the plateau. It too was widely distributed and eagerly read.

      In February 1943, Yves Farge, who had by now become the chief intermediary between Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s emissary, and the Vercors Resistants, made the connection between Pierre Dalloz and Aimé Pupin’s organization. From now on, the two organizations, which were soon joined by their military co-conspirators, were fused into a single Combat Committee which directed all Resistance activity on the plateau.

      On 1 March 1943, at a meeting in the Café de la Rotonde, Yves Farge handed Aimé Pupin the first tranche of the money London had sent by parachute to pay for the camps. Farge stayed the following night with Pupin and then, on the morning of 3 March, the two men set off on a day’s reconnaissance of the southern half of the plateau in a taxi driven by a sympathizer. They went first to La Grande Vigne to collect Pierre Dalloz and then continued their journey up the mountain to Villard-de-Lans, where they collected Léon Martin. From there the little group pressed on to Vassieux: ‘What I saw in front of me was the wide even plain around Vassieux … The aerial approaches to the plain from both north and south were unencumbered by hills, especially to the south. Somehow I had known that we would find an airstrip and here it was – and even better than I could have dreamed of … all around were wide areas which appeared specially designed to receive battalions parachuted from the sky.’

      The little group stopped for a drink in a small bistro in Vassieux, pretending that they were looking to buy a piece of land on which to construct a saw-mill. But according to Dalloz, no one in Vassieux was deceived and the whole town, from that day onwards, believed that General de Gaulle himself was about to descend from the sky at any moment. The impression that secrets were impossible on the Vercors was further reinforced at lunch when, despite their attempts to appear discreet, the waiter at the Hôtel Bellier in La Chapelle announced their entry into the hotel dining room with the words ‘Ah! Here are the gentlemen of the Resistance.’

      That afternoon, the party returned to Villard where they dropped off Léon Martin before taking a quick detour to look at Méaudre and Autrans in the next-door valley. Crossing back over the Col de la Croix Perrin, they were surprised to see Léon Martin standing in the middle of the road flagging them down urgently. It was bad news. The Italians had raided the Café de la Rotonde and arrested Pupin’s wife and fourteen other core members of the Grenoble organization.

      Pupin immediately went to ground in Villard but not before taking two precautions. He dispatched Fabien Rey to Ambel to tell the réfractaires to decamp until the coast was clear. And he sent a friend down to Grenoble to try to prevent his records from falling into the hands of the Italians (whose soldiers had often frequented La Rotonde). He needn’t have bothered. The quick-witted Mme Pupin had burnt the records before they could be found. In the absence of any evidence, the Italians had to release all the detainees a few days later.

      Aimé Pupin and his co-conspirators should have realized that they had been given two warnings that day. First that their activities were no longer secret. And second that keeping centralized records was dangerous folly. Sadly neither warning was heeded.

7

       EXPECTATION, NOMADISATION AND DECAPITATION

      Flight Lieutenant John Bridger, DFC, throttled down and watched the needle on his Lysander’s air-speed indicator drop back. Almost immediately the little aircraft’s nose dipped towards the three dots of light laid out ahead like an elongated ‘L’, the long stroke pointing towards him and the short one at the far end pointing to the right.

      Bridger was one of the most experienced pilots in RAF’s 161 Lysander Squadron. On a previous occasion he had burst a tyre while landing Resistance agents at a clandestine strip deep in France. Worried that, with one tyre out, his Lysander (they were known affectionately as ‘Lizzies’) would be unbalanced for take-off, he pulled out his Colt automatic, shot five holes in the remaining good tyre, loaded up his return passengers for the UK and took off on his wheel rims.

      Maybe it was because of his experience that he had been chosen for Operation Sirène II. Tonight, 19 March 1943, he was carrying passengers of special importance – Charles de Gaulle’s personal representative in France, Jean Moulin, the Secret Army’s commander General Charles Delestraint and one other Resistance agent. In truth, with three passengers on board, the little plane was overloaded for it was designed to take only two. But 161 Squadron pilots were used to pushing the limits.

      Bridger’s destination this night was a flat field close to a canal a kilometre east of the village of Melay, which lies in the Saône-et-Loire valley 310 kilometres south-east of Paris and 700 from 161 Squadron’s base at Tangmere on the English south coast. This meant a round trip in his unarmed Lysander of some 1,500 kilometres, most of which would be flying alone over enemy-occupied territory. With a cruising speed of 275 kilometres per hour and allowing for headwinds and turn-around time on the ground, Bridger would be flying single handed for the best part of seven unbroken hours.

      Like all of the RAF’s clandestine landings and parachute drops into France, tonight’s operation was taking place in the ‘moon period’ – roughly speaking the ten nights either side of the full moon (sometimes known by the codeword Charlotte). The remaining ten nights of the month were known as the ‘no moon period’ when conditions were too dark for accurate parachuting or safe landings. The March 1943 full moon occurred two days after Bridger’s flight, which meant that the moon’s luminosity this night was 91 per cent of that of the full moon, enabling Bridger to see many of the main topographical features such as woods and towns of the area he would be flying over. Most visible of all would have been the great rivers of France, which were 161 Squadron’s favourite navigational aids.

      According to his logbook Bridger took off from 161 Squadron’s base at RAF Tangmere at 22.44 hours, two and a half hours after sunset that day. His post-operational report of his route is laconic and sparse on detail: ‘went via St Aubin-sur-Mer, Bourges, Moulins and direct to target. Apart from meeting a medium sized [enemy] aircraft 4 miles north of Moulin … the journey was uneventful.’

      At Moulins, Bridger would have turned due east to pick up the River Loire, now turned by the gibbous moon СКАЧАТЬ