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

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СКАЧАТЬ Italian officers at the Hôtel les Trois Dauphins in Place Grenette. Some Italian soldiers immediately joined the Resistance, but most fled for home. Desperate Italian troops were seen passing through the Trièves area heading for the Italian border 70 kilometres away.

      With Grenoble under German control, it was not long before the Gestapo arrived in the city. Their headquarters were established in the Hôtel Moderne, while another building, 28 Cours Berriat, was converted into an interrogation centre. This address was soon to become infamous in the city as a place of torture. The Gestapo rapidly found their hands full, not because of the Vercors, but because of what was happening outside their own front door. On a bright afternoon in October Paul Gariboldy emptied a whole magazine from the window of a speeding car at the Milice headquarters in the Hôtel de l’Angleterre less than a kilometre from Gestapo headquarters, shouting, ‘Get out. France is free,’ as his vehicle sped away to the sound of tinkling glass and the echoes of gunfire reverberating from the nearby buildings. On 6 October, a jumpy German sentry shot dead a local engineer who was fumbling in his pocket for his house key. By now, tension was rising dangerously in the city. On 11 November, the anniversary of the signing of the 1918 Armistice, the call went out from Resistance circles for a strong show of defiance to ‘raise our voices once more against the [German] oppression’.

      At 10.00 on 11 November, more than 1,500 people turned out ‘as if from a signal’ and marched towards the Diables Bleus monument to the French Chasseurs Alpins to celebrate France’s First World War victory over the Germans. The demonstrators were stopped by a massive show of force by the Vichy police, who herded them back to the city centre where they found themselves blocked by a troop of Germans with machine guns. Caught in a sandwich between the police behind and the machine guns in front, they were embroiled in a tense stand-off. The German officer’s orders in these circumstances were to open fire, but the police intervened and, arresting many, dispersed the crowd. More than 600 protesters were subsequently tried and deported; 120 of them were never seen again.

      Worse was to follow. Two days after the demonstrations at Les Diables Bleus, on the night of 13/14 November, Aimé Requet managed, single-handedly, to blow up 150 tonnes of ammunition at the old French artillery depot, the Polygone de l’Artillerie. The blast could be heard more than 50 kilometres away. German reaction was instantaneous and ferocious. On 15 November, reinforced by a troop of Miliciens drafted in from Lyon, they launched what has subsequently become known as the Grenoble St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It started with information given to the Gestapo by a French couple and was, as before, greatly assisted by the Resistance habit of keeping centralized records. By the time the massacre ended after some two ‘weeks of blood’, the Gestapo, assisted by the Milice, had cut a swathe through the Grenoble Resistance organization with arrests, deportations, summary executions and assassinations.

      Denise Domenach-Lallich, who was nineteen in 1943, noted the new atmosphere of repression and fear in Lyon, writing in her diary in October: ‘the curfew sounds at ten o’clock in the evening and no one gives us passes because of the reprisal troops, Mongol-types who shoot anything that moves … One grows quickly in the moment when one doesn’t die … several of my friends have been caught and shot three days later.’

      Paradoxically, with the Germans so busy in Grenoble and Lyon, these were relatively quiet weeks on the Vercors. On 11 October, the Gestapo arrested a Maquis leader in Saint-Jean-en-Royans. There was also a German raid on a camp on the south-western edge of the plateau, looking for a radio set which their gonio detection vans had identified in the area. (Gonio was an abbreviation of voitures de radiogonio.) But the camp’s inhabitants were able to disperse into the forests quickly enough to avoid capture; ‘we went three days with nothing to eat but artichokes which we found in a shepherd’s garden’, one complained afterwards, ‘… before finally ending up at the Grande Cabane [a mountain refuge] below the Grand Veymont’.

      Although the Germans had so far mostly left the plateau alone, events in Grenoble caused some nervousness in the camps. The diary of Lieutenant Louis Rose in the Forêt de Thivolet records a number of false alerts in October, including an excitable sentry who called the unit to arms at 04.00 because he feared they were about to be attacked by what turned out to be a troop of badgers foraging in the woods.

      And then, on 13 November 1943, just one day after the full moon and the same night that Aimé Requet blew up the ammunition store at the Polygone de l’Artillerie in Grenoble, the plateau received its first major parachute drop at Darbonouse, the isolated Alpine pasture on the eastern side of the plateau which had been the site of the Resistance gathering of 10/11 August. The arming of the Vercors had begun.

      In fact there is good evidence that the original plan had been to begin this process a month earlier, during the moon period in October 1943. The logbook for one of the Tempsford RAF squadrons shows that on the night of 16/17 October a Halifax bomber took off from the airfield on a mission to parachute containers to a site identified as ‘Trainer 96’, a codeword which in relation to other missions refers to Vassieux. This supposition is supported by the list of code phrases for parachute drops to be carried out in the October 1943 moon period which were given out in the BBC’s nightly broadcast to France on 30 September. This list contains one phrase whose main elements would later become indelibly linked with the Vercors: ‘Le chamois bondit’ (‘The chamois leaps’). Unfortunately, however, if such a drop was planned, it never took place for the pilot’s logbook notes that the mission had to be aborted because the ‘A/c [aircraft] caught fire’.

      In some ways the choice of the Darbonouse for this drop was a strange one, for access to this high pasture is by difficult, barely motorable forest tracks and mountain paths. A drop on the parachute sites previously identified by Dalloz, on the open plain near the village of Vassieux or in the wide valleys around Saint-Martin and Villard, would have been much easier for all. It may be, however, that the October German activity in the south-west of the plateau and in Grenoble made it wiser to choose somewhere further away from habitation and main roads.

      André Valot, at the time the second-in-command at the Ferme d’Ambel, recalled this momentous drop on 13 November: ‘It was a Sunday. Louis Bourdeaux and I were sitting … in the dining room after dinner smoking and listening somewhat distractedly to the “Messages personnels” section [of the BBC] broadcast … Suddenly I was transfixed. I felt myself go pale and the shock caused Bourdeaux to drop his cigarette. Had we not just heard our codeword “Nous avons visité Marrakech” [“We visited Marrakesh”]? Disbelieving, we listened again; the voice said it again – more insistently this time. The message we had been waiting for! The aircraft we had been longing for were at last coming! They were coming just as promised … Now the voice was gone and they were playing some recorded music. We looked at each other, our eyes filled with tears, our spirits full of disbelieving laughter. We hugged each other. At last our hopes had been fulfilled; our resolution rewarded; our confidence confirmed. “Shall we go?” I said. “You bet,” Louis replied. “I will telephone to make the arrangements.”’

      Valot and Bourdeaux quickly gathered their men and set off in trucks for the Darbonouse pasture. They were not alone. The entire plateau had either heard the BBC broadcast or heard of it and knew what it meant. As Valot’s gazogène trucks wheezed up the steep tracks leading to the eastern plateau, threading their way through the forest, it seemed as if half the Vercors were there as well. Young men from other camps marching along, singing patriotic songs, groups of peasants driving pack mules, old carts drawn by oxen and, of course, more ubiquitous gazogène trucks, all making their way to the drop site – all intent on carrying away at least a share of the booty which the distant BBC voice had promised would fall from the sky that very night.

      It was 22.00 by the time Valot and his team reached the shepherd’s hut at Darbonouse. Here they joined a small crowd who had already arrived from other camps, milling around an assortment of trucks, carts and motorcycles. Around them a recent fall of snow had gathered in drifts at the edges of the forest and in the pasture’s shallow undulations. And in the distance the great mass of the СКАЧАТЬ