Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (10 page)

Clair and Anjot then enlisted the help of other officers and NCOs from the disbanded 27th Battalion of Chasseurs Alpins, the elite mountain warfare troops formerly headquartered in Annecy, which lay only a few miles south-east of the plateau. Their undisciplined and untrained rank and file numbered about 467 men from assorted political and social backgrounds, of whom the most likely to be useful were eighty-eight men of mixed ages from the communist FTP and fifty-six Spanish republican refugees who had joined the Maquis because they had no wish to be handed over to the Germans and sent to the gas chambers, as had happened to thousands of other Spaniards who had fought for the communist brigades in the republican army during the civil war and had since been held in French concentration camps.

The Glières plateau.

Wishing to demonstrate to the Germans that it was capable of dealing with the anti-government forces in Haute Savoie, the government in Vichy charged Lelong with wiping out the growing number of Maquis bands. For this purpose, he attempted to seal off the plateau with 125 gendarmes, 700 men of the specialist anti-terrorist units known as Gardes Mobiles and 650 of the Groupes Mobiles de Réserve (GMR), plus 700 ordinary
miliciens
. Attempting reconnaissance in force up on to the plateau on 12 February and 8 March, Gardes Mobiles forces fell into an ambush that cost them three dead, six wounded and three men taken prisoner – with no losses on the defenders’ side.

Charismatic OAS officer Lieutenant Theodore ‘Tom’ Morel was in charge of organising rudimentary military training on the Glières plateau and attempting to weld his disparate force into something like a military formation under his morale-raising slogan ‘Live free or die!’
On the night of 13 February Morel’s men received their first airdrop, consisting of fifty-four containers of ammunition and weapons: Sten guns, some Bren light machine guns, hand grenades and explosives for sabotage, but no heavier weapons that would stop a tank, or even an armoured car. Further drops were received on 5 and 10 March.

After four men who had been given a safe conduct by the GMR were arrested below the plateau and medical student Michel Fournier was also apprehended on 1 March while seeking medical supplies in Grand Bornand, Morel decided to act. On the evening of 9 March he led half his force in an attack on the village of Entremont, lying below the plateau, which was held by sixty GMR men. That night 150
maquisards
encircled the village. A squad leader named Roger Cerri described the action in his log book thus:

With some other guys I made a detour to cover the high ground above the village. Just as we reached the outskirts of the village, a sentry saw us and began firing a light machine gun in our direction. We returned fire straight away. The tracers formed a rainbow [sic] and we took cover behind some piles of firewood. After about an hour the GMR, who were getting worried, stopped fighting. Leading his section of Chasseurs Alpins, Lieutenant Morel captured the Hôtel de France, which was the GMR HQ. There was a violent argument between him and their commanding officer Major Lefebvre, who had only taken over on 7 March. We disarmed the prisoners, but Lefebvre took a small revolver from a pocket and shot Morel down with one bullet through the heart at point-blank range. Lefebvre was immediately shot and killed, but the loss of Lieutenant Morel, who was a very motivating man, left us with a big problem. We rounded up our prisoners with their arms and materiel on the road, and made off back up to the plateau.
²

After receiving Lelong’s promise to liberate Michel Fournier – a promise that was not kept – the prisoners were released, not just as a goodwill gesture but also to avoid having to share rations with them. Their release was to cost many lives in the coming weeks. The attack on Entremont proved a pyrrhic victory for the Maquis forces. Three days after the killing of Morel, another large arms drop attracted savage reprisal by the Luftwaffe, in which the upland farms and isolated chalets where the Maquis were hiding were bombed and strafed. With this softening up came several skirmishes and losses on both sides.

On 18 March 1944 Captain Anjot took command on the plateau at what could not have been a worse time. Colonel Lelong’s masters in Vichy were looking for heroic action on the part of the anti-terrorist units in Haute Savoie, to prove to the Germans that they could be an effective fighting force when up against a determined resistance, as against arresting a few dissidents and Jews here and there. Those expectations were not to be fulfilled: on 20 March the Milice launched a number of attacks on the plateau, each one easily driven off by the defenders. On 24 March another Milice attack was driven off by the Spanish republicans, who lost two of their men.

In Annecy’s Imperial Hotel a council of war was chaired by General Julius Oberg, commanding 12,000 men in the 157th Alpine Division, with Luftwaffe General Knochen, who promised ground support missions, and two representatives of the Gestapo. Officers of the Vichy anti-terrorist forces were also present. It had already been agreed that, if they could not eliminate the Maquis on the plateau, Lieutenant General Karl Pflaum’s 157th Reserve Division would take over. The division was a heterogeneous force formed for training purposes and currently tasked with eradicating the concentrations of
maquisards
in the wild country near France’s eastern borders.

Ground forces totalling 3,000-plus of Pflaum’s men now moved in to encircle the plateau in an operation code-named Aktion Hoch-Savoyen. For the defenders, the most dangerous were the trained mountain warfare troops of Reserve-Gebirgsjäger-Regiment 1, organised in four battalions, plus two battalions of security police. Their armament included heavy machine guns, mortars, mountain artillery, anti-tank weapons and armoured cars, with Luftwaffe ground-support missions available on call. Backing up the German forces were some 1,200 Vichy anti-terrorist troops who might not have been great shakes in the firing line, but had knowledge of the terrain and could therefore act as guides.

On 25 March all hell broke loose on Anjot’s men, their positions on the plateau bombed by three Heinkel 111 medium bombers and strafed by four Focke-Wulf 190 fighters. The main ammunition dump was destroyed. They were also shelled by 75mm mountain artillery and, in many places, locked in close combat with their attackers. Although Pflaum’s force managed to occupy less than a quarter of the plateau, Captain Anjot rightly decided that the odds were impossible and that the only sane course was to exfiltrate his men while there were still some gaps in the cordon. However, Captain Rosenthal again used his standing as the officer representing BCRA to veto this move. His motive was of the sort that has led to so many military disasters: he wanted a heroic stand to be made in the name of the Free French forces, with all that this implies. Anjot gave way, still hoping to save as many of his men’s lives as possible.

Then began an all-out confrontation between lightly armed French irregulars and a trained German force as three of Pflaum’s four battalions of mountain troops on skis wearing white camouflage overalls advanced on to the plateau. After aerial reconnaissance and photography by a Fieseler Storch, Luftwaffe ground-support missions pummelled the Maquis bases again while two battalions of the Gebirgsjäger probed the defences. In the first attack at Lavouillan, they were driven back. The second attack targeted Monthiévret
³
on the easiest route up to the plateau. Although at an altitude of 3,000ft, the hamlet stood only 1,200ft above the jumping-off point in the valley of the Borne River. The previous afternoon, Roger Cerri recorded in his diary:

Saturday 25 March – heavy shelling on our positions at Monthiévret. The shells whistled over us and exploded everywhere for two hours, releasing a strong smell of gunpowder. The chalets (in which we were quartered) were all set on fire.

First contact with ground forces was a probing attack by a single section of the Gebirgsjäger. The main assault had been planned for 28 March but was brought forward, according to a telex sent immediately afterwards from Lyon by SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr Knab:

The earlier attack took place, as reported in a personal interview with Lt Gen Pflaum [commanding 157th Division] as a result of a decision taken by Col Schwehr without referring to Gen Pflaum or warning the Milice. His three battalions [one was kept in reserve] had already been en route [to their jumping-off position] for two hours before the Security Police were informed. Col Schwehr took this decision after receiving definite intelligence that the terrorists had been ordered to evacuate the plateau in small groups. According to the interrogation of terrorists taken prisoner, the artillery bombardment of 26 March and the attack of an assault section the same day had convinced the terrorist commanders that the main attack was beginning. They therefore planned to evacuate the plateau during the night of 26–27 March.
⁴

After a first contact that morning at Lavouillan, the name of a place too small to be shown even on local maps, towards dusk a second section of fifty men with four MG34 or MG42 machine guns and a 50mm mortar managed to outflank the Maquis at Monthiévret.

Roger Cerri’s diary continues:

About 1700hrs
⁵
firing broke out behind us. The alert was given, but we could see nothing. One of my guys did a circuit and came back to tell us that a lot of Boches had managed to get behind us. The situation was serious. There were only eighteen of us on the level ground, spread out in three positions. The Boches advanced silently between the trees. We heard nothing. Suddenly they emerged, automatic weapons firing and grenades exploding everywhere. Several comrades were wounded. We lost touch with the first section that had advanced. After outflanking us, the Boches were throwing grenades down from the rocks above. We could not hold. The order was given to disengage. We slipped away and took refuge in a cave.

Another eyewitness account relates how the Bavarian mountain troops used a difficult route up to Monthiévret, which the Maquis had thought impassable. This explains how they got behind the Maquis positions unnoticed. All accounts of the fighting are confused, as is understandably the case with many accounts of conflict, especially in bad light, but they do agree that there were moments of intense firing and some lulls between. In one of these, a six-man squad under Second Lieutenant Baratier, which was stationed further up the road to Petit Bornand, made a counter-attack on the Germans. This was greeted by a hail of fire that wounded one man and killed another immediately. Some grenades were thrown by the attackers at close range, but they were also using a light portable mortar with a range of 50 yards. The counter-attack failing after one Bren gun seized up, Baratier wrote afterwards to another survivor:

You remember that your Bren did not work and I took the Belgian’s Bren and kept firing alone for fifteen minutes. More importantly, do you remember that I kept calling my men by name and no one replied?

A runner was sent along the road to where some of the Spaniards were positioned. He was unable to make himself understood, but they had in any case received orders not to get involved. Calling his men to retreat, Baratier heard no reply and disengaged, successfully making his way down into the valley. The rearguard had travelled no more than 200 yards through the darkness and thick snow when they heard a chorus of shouts in German and sustained firing as their abandoned positions were overrun. Emerging from the cave after dawn, some of Cerri’s comrades also succeeded in slipping between the German positions and escaping into the valley of the Borne. Three only made their escape up on to the snowbound plateau. The defenders had suffered eighteen casualties and lost several men taken prisoner and facing torture to extract information about the defenders’ numbers and dispositions.

At 2200hrs Anjot decided that his men had done all that honour required and ordered a complete exfiltration, so that when the German forces pressed home their attack after dawn they found no resistance, and had to content themselves with unearthing and destroying the hidden dumps of airdropped weaponry. However, the end was not in sight for the
maquisards
, many of whom were tracked down by the Milice or denounced by collaborators.

On the Western Front in the Second World War, Wehrmacht forces generally respected the rules of war when taking prisoners in uniform, but on the Glières Pflaum’s men were fighting guerrillas. Many having seen service on the Eastern Front, they meted out to
maquisards
taken prisoner the same treatment they had given captured Soviet partisans. Twenty wounded men were shot where they lay; other prisoners died under torture, were shot by firing squad or were deported to death camps in Germany.