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

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СКАЧАТЬ service of the Polish government-in-exile and the American Office of Strategic Services, which ran, among other agents, Gaston Vincent, who was based in Saint-Agnan-en-Vercors until his death in June 1944.

      On the other side, the German and Milice networks often made use of those involved in the black market and, it was said, brothel keepers, barbers and barmen. In his Union report, Thackthwaite added to this list waitresses in small-town and village restaurants, who were used as agents provocateurs. Apart from human sources, the Germans also put considerable effort into gathering signals intelligence and closing down secret radio stations. In one case a Milice agent who had been successfully infiltrated into one of the Vercors’ clandestine radio teams had to be got rid of because, ‘although he was assigned as a trustworthy person’, further enquiries were made and ‘It was discovered that his brother was a Milicien and his sister-in-law worked for the Gestapo.’

      German intelligence even successfully took over some Resistance radio networks in their entirety. For example, a Greek called Guy Alexander Kyriazis was sent by the German secret service to work in a British-run SIS network called Alliance. Posted to Grenoble, he was paid 7,000 francs a month and appears to have operated until the end of the war, planting false messages and passing back codebooks to his masters. When subsequently interrogated by the Allies, he claimed that ‘the Germans … knew the details of the wireless procedure which was being used at Grenoble [and] were intercepting messages’.

      The job of German intelligence was made much easier by that fact that the radio security of both the Resistance in the field and their Free French controllers in London was very lax and their codes extremely insecure. The British government became very concerned about this, especially now that planning had started on the greatest secret of the war, the date and location of D-Day. On 13 January 1944, the British War Cabinet took the decision that, because of the insecurity of the French codes, all signals or messages sent by the French in London and Algiers had to be transmitted through the British communication systems or use British or US codes. De Gaulle was predictably furious, calling it ‘an outrage and an insult’.

      An SOE report on French radio security dated 29 January 1944, just a few days before the Malleval disaster, gives some indication of the scale of the problem: ‘[French] Security … is lamentable … Continual losses of [Resistance] chiefs, money, codes, archives, couriers, list of names which [were] unparalleled … we have continually pointed out over a year that [their] codes are fundamentally insecure and badly coded … We have finally been reduced to breaking them [the French codes] ourselves to prove [to the French] their insecurity … It must be assumed that every [French] message code can be read by the Germans as easily as by ourselves [emphasis in original].’

      Closer to D-Day, the British went further, refusing to allow anyone of any nationality to leave Britain whom they believed knew anything, or thought they knew anything, about D-Day.

      The approach of D-Day was beginning to concentrate German minds, too. As 1943 drew to a close without an invasion, it was clear to all that it must happen in the spring or summer of 1944. This time, however, the task for the Germans would not just be to disrupt the Resistance control networks, as in 1943, but to destroy the Maquis units themselves. And this would involve not individual arrests outside Métro stations or swoops on safe houses, but a series of bloody battles in which no quarter would be given to the ‘terrorists’.

      On 3 February 1944, the German Deputy Supreme Commander West, Luftwaffe Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, set out the policy with chilling clarity in what has become known as the ‘Sperrle-Erlass’ order, prescribing the behaviour of German troops in the struggle ahead:

      1. We are not in the occupied western territories to allow our troops to be shot at and abducted by saboteurs who go unpunished …

      2. If troops are attacked … countermeasures [must be taken] immediately;

      These include an … immediate return of fire. If innocent persons are hit this is regrettable but entirely the fault of the terrorists.

      The surroundings of any such incident are to be sealed off … and all the civilians in the locality, regardless of rank and person, are to be taken into custody.

      Houses from which shots have been fired are to be burnt down …

      … A slack and indecisive troop commander deserves to be severely punished because he endangers the lives of the troops … and produces a lack of respect for the German armed forces.

      Measures that are regarded subsequently as too severe cannot in view of the present situation, provide reason for punishment.

      A week later, on 12 February, the German military commander of France, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, also conscious of the impending invasion, issued an order calling for the urgent destruction of Maquis groups within the next months: ‘The main task in the coming weeks and months is … fully to repacify the areas which are contaminated by bandits and to break up the secret resistance organizations and to seize their weapons … In areas where gang centres form, these must be combated with a concentrated use of all available forces … The objective must be to break up all terrorist and resistance groups even before the enemy landing [emphasis in original].’

      The Germans were moving on to the offensive and the main burden of their offensive in the northern Alps would fall on General Pflaum, who commanded 157th Reserve Division based in Grenoble. Pflaum’s division was, as its name suggests, not a front-line unit. Its main task was not combat but training. But it was also charged with a military task – the maintenance of order, especially where this threatened key German communications routes. Pflaum’s priority was to keep open at all costs the road and rail communications corridors running through the north and centre of his area of responsibility.

      Karl Pflaum himself was a career officer with a good deal of active service as an infantry soldier on the eastern front where he had commanded a front-line division from the autumn of 1941 until he was relieved of his command because of heart disease. Pflaum’s direct superior in France was the commander of the Military Zone of the South of France, Generalleutnant Heinrich Niehoff, whose reporting line ran through Stülpnagel to the Supreme High Command of the German Army in Berlin and thence to Hitler’s bunker.

      When it came to carrying the main burden of infantry fighting in Pflaum’s area, the only troops of true front-line quality he could rely on were his elite Alpine Gebirgsjäger Regiment – it was these troops that had come in overnight on skis to take up positions behind Malleval, cutting off the Maquisards trying to flee from the valley. Well trained and well led, the Gebirgsjäger were exceptionally capable in mountainous areas and winter conditions. But not many of Pflaum’s troops were of the same standard as his Alpine units. One experienced French officer in Grenoble in late 1943 and 1944 commented after the war that the units based in and around Grenoble were ‘mainly troops under instruction, with the exception of the officers and a few more experienced soldiers’. In the German tactic of surround, attack, annihilate, destroy, these were troops who would be employed chiefly in the first and last phases – cordoning before the operation started and reprisals after the fighting had finished.

      For many German soldiers, France, and especially the south of France, was regarded as an easy, even idyllic posting. A German historian of the period wrote that those stationed at Annecy, where the headquarters of one of the Gebirgsjäger regiments was housed in an old hotel, enjoyed ‘A life lived in the midst of this jewel of nature. The fourteen-kilometre lake stretches its arms right into the centre of the city, making it into a veritable oasis designed to please the eye. The houses are beautifully maintained and surrounded by groves and vines, which also decorate the surrounding hills. And everywhere the sparkling lake with its canals crossed by many bridges seems to act as a silver adornment to the whole scene. The men of the Regiment saw themselves as the fortunate inhabitants of a СКАЧАТЬ