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

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СКАЧАТЬ voices could be heard carrying across the valley and the little dots of men’s figures could be picked out against the whiteness of the snow. In due course, each column arrived and filed into the church, Christian and Jew and Communist and atheist alike. ‘It seemed as if all the world was there, in the little white church lit by carbide lamps which cast a flickering glow, making the shadows dance and shooting their beams into even the darkest corners. The old people sat quietly, their walking sticks between their knees, as others squeezed up to make room for the new arrivals. Even the women joined us, including the mothers, wives and some fiancées of the Maquisards, giving our little ceremony some of the sweetness of home.’

      Then the feasting began: ‘The menu would have dignified a prince … the food seemed to have come from every corner of the land. The baker at Cognin brought breads and cakes. A veal calf had been carried down from Rencurel and all the fish and fowl of the area seemed to have been gathered together in our church, especially to grace our Christmas. There were even two cases of champagne freshly arrived from Reims. The feasting went on all the night. Songs were sung; an accordion was brought out – then more songs and more songs until finally the dawn burst in among us. On this night, for us, the men of the Maquis, life was wonderful.’

      Surely, next year – 1944 – the Allies would land and France would be free again. And then life would be wonderful every year.

* The phrase is a Russian one which is used to account for the fact that so many winter invasions of the country have failed. Russians also refer to ‘General Snow’ and ‘General Mud’.

* Festivities at Christmas.

10

       THE LABOURS OF HERCULES

      As the men of the Malleval Maquis were celebrating the Christmas season waist deep in snow, Winston Churchill, dressed in his famous silk dressing gown emblazoned with a red dragon, was lying in bed in an airy room in General Eisenhower’s villa in Carthage (prophetically called La Maison Blanche), recovering from pneumonia and a heart attack. Denied his customary cigar and restrained in his consumption of alcohol, he was tetchy and fulminating against ‘the scandalous … stagnation’ of the Italian campaign.

      It is tempting to believe that his complaints about the slow progress in Italy might have been a displacement activity for the much bigger personal setback he had just suffered at the hands of his ‘friend’ President Roosevelt at the Tehran Tripartite Conference which had just ended. At Tehran, the American President had blindsided Churchill by teaming up with Stalin to defeat one of the Prime Minister’s most ardent and long-favoured schemes, the invasion of what he called the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ on a line which began on the Pisa–Rimini axis in Italy and ran through the Balkans to the oilfields of Rumania. Churchill had invested hugely in arms, supplies and support for Tito’s Yugoslav guerrillas as a preparation for this assault, which was now, thanks to the US/Russian alliance, to be abandoned in favour of a simultaneous double invasion of France, one from the north across the Channel (Overlord) and the second from the south across the Mediterranean from Algiers (Anvil). It was easy to see why the Soviets were opposed to Churchill’s Balkan plans – they saw this area as their sphere of post-war influence and did not want the British anywhere near it. Roosevelt’s reasons were less understandable. He mistakenly believed he could establish a post-war strategic alliance with Stalin and needed Soviet support for what he saw as the cornerstone of this new relationship, the establishment of the United Nations. Churchill was left hurt and fuming at this first stark evidence of Britain’s coming weakness between the two superpowers in the post-war world. ‘There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo and, between the two, the poor little English donkey who was the only one … who knew the right way home.’

      The decisions of Tehran had now shifted the entire axis of the Allied European war effort from the south and the east (Italy and the Balkans), where Churchill had made his greatest investment, to the north and the west (the Russian front and Overlord). Despite these crushing disappointments, the British Prime Minister was not a man to mope for long. If the overall strategy had changed, his must too. Now France, a country he knew well and loved deeply, was to be the main stage, not the Balkans. Within days of leaving his sickbed he was meeting members of the French Resistance in North Africa and planning how Britain, which had so far largely ignored French partisans in favour of those of Yugoslavia and Italy when supplying arms, could help foster the growth of the Resistance movement.

      It is often said that Churchill was a dewy-eyed romantic when it came to partisans. He was. But his attachment to the fostering of internal resistance had a hard-edged military rationale, too; it was a way to keep occupied countries in a ferment of opposition against the Germans and to prevent them from relapsing into apathetic torpor, as France had done after the Armistice; it was also a means by which the ‘skill, dash and courage’ of British agents behind enemy lines could influence the outcome of events in ways which compensated for the relatively meagre matériel resources the country was able to commit at this stage of the war, compared with those of the US and Russian colossi. There were also those in Whitehall (perhaps even including Churchill himself) who thought that, in terms of blood and loss, France’s sacrifice during the war had so far been small. So it was no great thing to ask her now to risk a greater price for her own liberation.

      Churchill had always admired de Gaulle, even if he did not like him. But up to now the French General had been just another leader-in-exile of a conquered European country and these were two to the penny in the London of 1941–3 – though, as Foreign SecretaryAnthony Eden ruefully admitted, de Gaulle stood out from the crowd because he caused ‘us [the British government] more difficulties than all our other European allies put together’. Now, however, with France the main stage for the next phase of the war in the West, de Gaulle, the territory of France and the capabilities of the French Resistance took on new strategic importance.

      De Gaulle himself had started 1943 with few assets and even fewer friends. Disliked by Roosevelt, disregarded by the British war leadership and personally irksome to Churchill, he had almost nothing going for him – and very little he could call his own in France or among the Free French either. Like the Pope, of whom Stalin famously asked ‘How many Divisions does he have?’, de Gaulle may have been the spiritual embodiment of the French Resistance, but of actual ‘Divisions’ he had few.

      De Gaulle might have expected that Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa and the liberation of the French colony of Algeria (where Eisenhower had now set up his headquarters), would have strengthened his position as the French leader with whom the Allies had to deal. In fact the opposite happened.

      The Americans chose instead Henri Giraud, a French general who had been captured at the fall of France, been imprisoned in Königstein Castle, escaped under curious circumstances and made his way to Toulon where an Allied submarine had picked him up and delivered him to Gibraltar. He arrived on the Rock only a few hours before the start of Operation Torch. Eisenhower promptly asked him to assume command of all French troops in North Africa. Giraud at first refused because he was not commanding the whole Allied operation, but eventually relented. When he left Gibraltar for Algiers on 9 November 1942, Giraud remarked, ‘You may have seen something of the large De Gaullist demonstration that was held here last Sunday. Some of the demonstrators sang the Marseillaise. I entirely approve of that! Others sang the Chant du Départ [a military ballad]. Quite satisfactory! Others again shouted “Vive de Gaulle!” No objection. But some of them cried “Death to Giraud!” I don’t approve of that at all.’

      Giraud knew perfectly well that de Gaulle was his deadly rival for the leadership of the free and the fighting French. But he also knew who was in the dominant position – he СКАЧАТЬ