Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (18 page)

By 0400hrs all was ready and the wireless operators were on standby [to talk to the incoming aircraft]. I went off to La Britière, returning to Vassieux at 0700hrs and in spite of the heavy mist covering the plateau I checked again and again every detail to ensure nothing had been overlooked. By 0900hrs everything was absolutely ready. At 0930hrs we heard the drone of engines getting louder and louder. Our planes had arrived! There were about a hundred of them flying in groups of twelve and the fighters circled around [sic] the Halifaxes and Flying Fortresses. The noise filled the whole of the plateau and must have been heard down on the plain at Valence. The Fortresses flew low over the plateau while fixing their positions and then flew off in the direction of Valence and back to us. From each of seventy-two Fortresses poured a stream of 15 to 20 (man-size) containers. It was a splendid sight. A pilot dropped a packet of Camel cigarettes wrapped in a tricolour band on which was written, ‘Bravo lads! Vive la France!’ The aircraft that had dropped their cargo stooged around waiting for the whole operation to be completed. It was around 1000hrs when the last Flying Fortress vanished into the clouds. A few minutes later every available truck arrived to collect the containers. While the patriots of the Vercors were helping to load the containers on the trucks two fighters suddenly flew in. Everyone thought they were British planes but, as they dived towards the landing strip the Swastika markings were plainly visible. They came in at about eight metres above ground level and opened fire at us all. This was only the beginning of the horror. Bombers appeared and bombs rained down on the landing strip and the village. An hour later, our communications were cut and we were completely isolated from any help. No vehicle could have survived the murderous fire. One maquisard did manage to get through to us. Although we appreciated his courage in taking such a risk, he had not thought to bring a weapon. Having sprayed us lavishly with bombs, the enemy planes then flew off after dropping hundreds of grenades [sic] to tear up the strip and make it unusable. To make matters worse, one of our heavy machine guns seized up and we had to strip it down. Vassieux was on fire and so was my shelter. I installed myself with a few men in a shell hole and returned fire. Meanwhile Captain Tournissa was organising the western defences. Hardy was responsible for the eastern sector. In between each wave of bombers we dashed out to try and grab the white parachutes that made such excellent aiming points. There was no let up in the bombing and strafing. As soon as one group left, another appeared. Their base was only 18km away as the crow flies. In case the Germans invaded the village with a battalion of parachutists, it was decided to station a company of the Chasseurs Alpins in reserve in the forest, leaving Vassieux to be defended by the people there who had machine guns and other weaponry. Unfortunately, we had run out of ammunition for one of the heavy machine guns and there was no way of quickly obtaining more.

The enemy spared nobody. The [civilian] population, livestock, houses, roads and even the harvest – all were ruthlessly attacked and destroyed. By 1530hrs, the church of Vassieux was a smoking ruin. Towards 1700hrs the enemy concentrated on other targets. Yet, despite the heavy casualties, everyone went out after nightfall to gather up the containers on the plateau.
³

The Luftwaffe fighter-bombers from Valence-Chabeuil airfield, less than ten minutes’ flying time away, bombed farms and villages and strafed every person and every vehicle that moved in the open throughout the day. Incendiary bombs dropped on Vassieux and La Chapelle en Vercors turned the two villages into blazing infernos. Only after the flames in Vassieux had died down was it possible to recover some 200 undamaged containers from the 1,200 that had been dropped. None contained any of the heavy weapons that were so desperately needed.

Huet’s best estimate of the strength of Pflaum’s forces investing the plateau was based on the knowledge that 15,000 loaves of bread were being baked for them daily in Grenoble. Allowing two men to a loaf, he reckoned that made 30,000 enemy at the gates, while Algiers seriously underestimated their strength at 10,000. Whichever estimate one took, it was all too evident that they were armed with 45mm and 105mm cannons and heavy machine guns, with light and heavy tanks also observed standing by at Valence-Chabeuil. In what can only have been a panic move, on 15 July Huet gave an order, obeyed with reluctance, for press gangs to enter Villard and forcibly recruit every young male there. Mothers hid their sons in cellars, as they would from the Germans. With 150 youths finally embarked on their trucks, the
maquisards
drove home, wondering like Gilbert Joseph what was the point of collecting 150 more mouths to feed when 1,000 volunteers were still without weapons? Their conclusion was that Huet and his officers thought that greater numbers would mean more airdrops and perhaps promotion. There could be no other reason.
⁴

The various Allied missions in the area had transmitted warnings to Algiers and London that the Luftwaffe was building up under camouflage a fleet of gliders at the Valence-Chabeuil field, but neither London nor Algiers gave any priority to destroying them on the ground until 27 July, when it was too late to save so many lives. This was despite a plea transmitted on 20 July:

MUST INSIST ON FOLLOWING STOP ONE DUE TO BUILD-UP GERMAN FORCES REQUEST REPEATED BOMBARDMENT OF ST NIZIER SEVEN KILOMETRES WEST OF GRENOBLE STOP TWO DROP AS MANY PARAS INTO OUR LIBERATED AREAS AS POSSIBLE STOP THREE SEND MONEY STOP FOUR WOULD BE VERY HAPPY TRAVEL TO ALGIERS AND LONDON TO BRIEF YOU ON SITUATION IN MY REGION ENDS
⁵

There was no reply, not even to an urgent tactical message requesting bombing of a German armoured column. This took three days, after being decoded in Algiers, to reach the office where action might have been taken. General Pflaum’s communications had none of these problems. Every detail had been hammered out, including instructions on how to deal with the civilian population on the plateau:

Arrest all men from 17 to 30 years of age who do not belong, and have never belonged, to the Resistance (the others being shot). Burn those houses which have unquestionably been used to shelter terrorists or their stores,
e.g.
schools, mairies, hangars. To prevent the Resistance re-installing itself in the Vercors, we shall leave on the farms only the minimum of animals essential for feeding the inhabitants.
⁶

The result was that death’s second visit to Vassieux came on 21 July, a day of unseasonable rain and low cloud, through which a flight of twenty-two Dornier DO 17 tug aircraft towing DFS 230 gliders appeared. The 400 men labouring on the 1,050m-long landing strip at Vassieux stopped work and stood cheering in the belief that this was the arrival of the long-awaited Allied airborne reinforcements. The mistake was understandable, given that they were working flat out under an FAFL captain parachuted in especially from Algiers to get the strip ready as fast as possible.

Only when they saw the Maltese crosses on the wings and fuselages of the gliders did they realise their mistake. An emergency transmission from Bennes to Algiers reporting the landings was sent at 1111hrs. Decoded at 1150hrs, it got stuck in the machinery like all the others and reached General Cochet by accident at 1420hrs. By this time most of the men who had been working on the landing strip were dead. An earlier message from the Resistance in the Rhône valley, reporting flights of Dornier bombers towing DFS 230 gliders from Luftlandgeschwader Gruppe I en route from Strasbourg to Lyon/Bron airport, seems not to have been evaluated in Algiers as a part of the Vercors jigsaw.
⁷

Expertly dropping tow cables and diving nearly vertically to land fast, each glider disgorged eleven battle-hardened Waffen-SS troops with automatic weapons. It all happened so fast that most of the defenders were stunned at the vulnerable moment when the gliders were landing and heavy losses might have been inflicted, if only Huet’s men had been prepared. One French airman with the
maquisards
named Victor Vermorel reacted in time to throw himself behind a heavy machine gun, with which he shot down the black-uniformed men emerging from two gliders before himself being killed. Swiftly deploying on the ground were two companies of Legionnaire-Lehr-Bataillon Brandenburg consisting of Russians, Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans conscripted into the Waffen-SS for anti-partisan warfare.

Faster thinking could have given the defenders a brief initiative, but courage was not lacking. They moved their few machine guns and light mortars from place to place in an effort to delude the attackers into thinking they were better armed than was the case. Luftwaffe ground support pressed the defenders back on all sides; the wounded could not always be rescued and there was no time to bury the dead. By nightfall the invaders had lost about twenty men and the survivors had taken cover in the still smoking ruins of Vassieux, awaiting reinforcements. A counter-attack on the village ordered by Huet failed miserably in pouring rain. By nightfall, French casualties exceeded 100 dead, including civilians, gunned down by the SS troops like game birds on a shoot.

Many sources claim that 400 men landed in that first strike, but the DFS 230 could only carry ten men and the pilot plus 250kg of equipment, and all accounts agree that only twenty-two gliders landed that morning, making a total of 232 shock troops fighting amateur volunteers for the most part. The news over the radio, passed on by word of mouth, that the attempt on the life of Hitler at Rastenburg had failed, did nothing to raise the defenders’ spirits.

A desperate signal to Algiers read:

MASSIVE ATTACK BY AIRBORNE TROOPS LANDED AREA VASSIEUX IN VERCORS FROM ABOUT TWENTY AIRCRAFT EACH TOWING ONE GLIDER STOP STRONG INFANTRY AND TANK STOP [sic] OTHER ENEMY UNITS ARRIVING ON ROUTE NATIONALE 75 STOP WE HOPE TO BE ABLE TO MAINTAIN RADIO LINK ENDS

This elicited the following response:

CAN SEND THE FOLLOWING ON NIGHT OF TWENTY-THIRD STOP ONE TWO TEAMS OF FIFTEEN MEN STOP TWO FOURTEEN OFFICERS AND NCOS FOR TRAINING STOP THREE SIX BAZOOKAS WITH AMMUNITION STOP TWENTY GRENADE LAUNCHERS WITH GRENADES STOP AMMUNITION FOR AMERICAN MORTARS ALREADY SENT STOP FIFTEEN 50-CALIBRE MACHINE GUNS WITH AMMUNITION STOP FOUR NINETY BRITISH LIGHT MORTARS WITH BOMBS STOP FIVE REPLACEMENT PARTS AND TOOLS STOP SIX MEDICAL EQUIIPMENT STOP ADVISE URGENTLY WHICH OF THESE YOU CAN TAKE AND ON WHICH DROP ZONES STOP COURAGE! ENDS
⁸

Another message promised that MAAF in Naples would be requested to attack the German forces on and around the plateau on the following day.

News reached Huet from the sparsely defended eastern rim of the plateau, where Pflaum’s Bavarian Gebirgsjäger mountain warfare troops had brought mortars and machine guns into play to drive back the defenders in support of the airborne troops in Vassieux. At one of the eastern passes twenty-eight
maquisards
refused to surrender. When the first mortar round exploded inside the mouth of the cave where they had taken shelter, they all agreed to burn any personal papers and photographs to prevent reprisals on their families, and then joined hands singing
La Marseillaise
. Amazingly, considering that they were up against at least 100 of Pflaum’s elite troops, they managed to beat off several assaults.

The Gebirgsjäger changed tactics, clambering up the rock face above the cave and letting down from there an explosive charge on a rope, swinging it backwards and forwards so as to explode inside the cave. The first charge did little damage, but inside the cave there were already six men dead and most of the others had been wounded. Now on their guard, they managed to cut the rope of a second charge and throw it outside the cave before it exploded. Later that evening, a fused 5kg block of Lyddite was let down, a defender leaped for it, but missed as it was jerked out of range, then swung inwards again with little fuse left. The explosion brought down part of the roof, burst several men’s ear drums and filled the cave with choking fumes. At 2300hrs those able to run crept out of the cave and broke through the German cordon by heading away from Vassieux, and not towards it as the Germans were expecting. Their unsung victory was to have killed seventeen Germans and wounded sixty, but this would have no effect on the battle for the plateau.

Among the local commanders was Dalloz’s friend Jean Prévost, a polymath in his element in a university lecture hall or on the athletics track. He was perpetually on the move from position to position, encouraging his men and leading from the front with such effortless energy that nobody could have guessed how little time he had left to live. Occupied with the defence of Valchevrière, he was not present at the emergency orders meeting at St-Martin that night. Huet began with a résumé of the situation in his habitual calm tones:

Our men are facing odds of ten to one and are surrounded or falling back everywhere. Unless a miracle happens, by tomorrow or the day after it will be impossible to continue the struggle. We must split up, leave the villages and head into the forests. Pursued by the enemy, we shall die there, if we must, weapons in hand.

This provoked a violent argument in which half of those present supported him and others accused their commanding officer of sheer stupidity in prolonging the imbecility of fighting on the plateau a battle which there was no hope of winning, and never had been. Huet’s critics, including Francis Cammaerts, proposed instead a complete evacuation of the plateau. To this, Huet retorted that it was too late, since the whole Vercors massif had already been surrounded. Captain Bousquet, his severest critic, disagreed yet again: