Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (19 page)

There is one bridge across the River Drôme by a route I have ordered to be kept open at all costs until noon tomorrow. Crossing here will enable the escaping men to reach the forest of Saou, where they can easily evade pursuit. That might save the civilian population up here from a great deal of suffering. If you are not capable of exfiltrating 3,000 men in twelve hours, you’re not fit to command them.

Huet refused to give way, even when Chavant and Colonel Zeller, the senior officer present, sided with his critics.

‘Then colonel, you can assume my command,’ said Huet.

‘You know perfectly well that I have other responsibilities in the region,’ Zeller retorted.

Having made no preparations, Huet pointed out that it was now impossible to contact everyone about the breakout in time and that in any case he had insufficient transport to get them all away. On that, there was general agreement, but the point was made that a fighting breakout stood the best chance of success, with some at least living to fight another day, instead of dying pointlessly on the plateau. The argument continued between those who maintained that the best course was to exfiltrate in small groups, every man for himself, and those who supported Huet’s plan to take to the forests and continue the fight on the plateau. The latter plan won the day, or rather, the night. Zeller and Cammaerts dissociated themselves, saying that their other responsibilities required them to get out before that became impossible, and left immediately.

‘And you?’ Huet asked the most vociferous critic among his officers.

‘I gave you my views,’ was the reply. ‘But they were rejected.
Tant pis!
But you are my superior. I shall remain here with you.’
⁹

The meeting broke up after it had been agreed to evacuate at least the hospital, in case the Germans took reprisals on the wounded being cared for there. The order reached the hospital during a violin recital being given by one of the patients. By 0200hrs the evacuation was under way. Meanwhile, Huet’s headquarters staff busied themselves with despatching the orders to disengage and head for the forests at 1600hrs the following day. With Huet’s and Chavant’s agreement, a signal was sent to Algiers reading:

LA CHAPELLE, VASSIEUX, ST-MARTIN BOMBED BY GERMAN AIR FORCE STOP ENEMY TROOPS LANDED AT VASSIEUX STOP REQUEST IMMEDIATE BOMBING RAID STOP WE PROMISED TO HOLD OUT FOR THREE WEEKS AND HAVE DONE SO ALREADY FOR SIX STOP NEED RE-SUPPLY IN FOOD MEN AND MATERIEL STOP POPULATIONS MORALE EXCELLENT BUT WILL TURN AGAINST YOU IF YOU DO NOT TAKE STEPS IMMEDIATELY AND WE SHALL AGREE WITH THOSE WHO SAY THAT LONDON AND ALGIERS UNDERSTAND NOTHING OF THE SITUATION IN WHICH WE FIND OURSELVES AND ARE CONSIDERED AS CRIMINALS AND COWARDS STOP YES REPEAT CRIMINALS AND COWARDS ENDS
¹⁰

Of this, the rank and file were unaware. As Joseph wrote afterwards, had the
maquisards
known of this signal, they would have pointed the finger at Huet and his officers as being the true criminals.
¹¹
Not until 1030hrs on 27 July did the signal reach General Cochet’s desk. Both at the time and afterwards, considerable effort has gone into trying to unravel the tangled web of accusations and denials that surround the failure to provide air support for the beleaguered Vercors. The Minister for Air in de Gaulle’s provisional government was Fernand Grenier, a communist. Accusing his non-communist colleagues of obstruction and failing to take action in order to discredit him and the PCF, on 27 July Grenier signalled de Gaulle:

I CANNOT BE ASSOCIATED WITH A CRIMINAL POLICY WHICH CONSISTS OF HAVING FORCES AT YOUR DISPOSAL AND NOT USING THEM WHEN OUR BROTHERS IN FRANCE APPEAL FOR HELP ENDS
¹²

In reply, de Gaulle ordered Grenier to apologise in writing or resign. Grenier’s personal preference was resignation, but the PCF Central Committee insisted he apologise in order not to lose his position in the provisional government. When it moved to Paris after the liberation of the capital on 25 August, Grenier left the Cabinet and was replaced by Charles Tillon, a communist more acceptable to de Gaulle.

Meanwhile, Cammaerts, Zeller, Christine and a few others found transport to take them to the Col de Rousset, the only way off the plateau still open. Cammaerts’ account gives the feeling of this escape while the noise of battle was still raging nearby:

Trying to make no noise whatsoever, we stumbled down through the undergrowth, which was not easy because it was very steep and 3,000 feet down and we had to carry very heavy gear, radios and all our own personal equipment with us. Finally we reached the valley and then we had about 4 miles to the road and the Drôme river. We were at a point just west of Die. We crossed fields very slowly because we were aware that German troops were using that axis. We never saw them and reached the river and forded it up to our knees, climbed up to the railway, crossed it and the N93 road was another 100 yards away. It wasn’t a large arterial road, just wide enough for two lanes of traffic and it wound through the valley with very steep sides, every step you took with great care and we darted across it one at a time. Coming down towards Die we met the ambulance convoy with the badly wounded making its way back towards the Vercors. They’d tried to transfer their worst cases to the hospital at Die, but a totally hysterical matron had waved them away: ‘The Germans are coming. You’d better go back’. And that was what they were doing. Unfortunately, it was a tragic mistake because eventually they used the Grotte de la Luire as a hospital. If they’d gone south, as we were doing, they would have been all right. But they went the wrong way.
¹³

The matron had been right. When German troops invaded the hospital, the nursing staff of nuns could only watch impotently as every wounded man in the building was killed with a burst from a sub-machine gun where he lay in his bed.

On 22 July meteorological conditions improved sufficiently to allow several flights by Fieseler Storch observation planes transmitting weather reports and identifying Maquis positions, which were then strafed with machine guns and 20mm cannons by Focke-Wulf 109s. It is a testimony to the determination of the
maquisards
that the airborne assault force holed up in Vassieux was to lose 60 per cent of its strength before reinforcements arrived on 23 July, when breaks in the cloud cover enabled a further twenty-one DFS 230s and two larger Gotha GO 242 gliders to take off from Valence-Chabeuil airfield, destination Vassieux. One glider broke its cable in turbulence; the tugs of two others got lost after being swept 25km off course by the strong mistral wind blowing down the Rhône valley. The turbulence was so strong that one of these gliders had a wing torn off by the wind and crashed, killing all on board.

However, the remaining gliders disgorged another 232 Waffen-SS to reinforce the survivors of the first landing. The newcomers were Central Asian conscripts, whom the defenders nicknamed ‘the Mongols’, not only because of their physical appearance but also because of the sadism with which they tortured uninvolved civilians. In Picirella’s words: ‘The Mongols raped every female from thirteen to sixty-five years old.’ The supreme irony was that the landing strip at Vassieux was used to bring in several of the GO 242 gliders carrying arms and ammunition for the attackers.

In addition, by now Pflaum had 700 men who had crossed the ‘insuperable’ barrier of the eastern escarpment, 3,000 advancing from the south, 3,000 advancing from the west and 4,000 driving down from the north. In addition to all these combat troops were the thousands more in support units and the girdle blockading the massif, making odds of over 10:1 against the armed
maquisards
continuing the fight. By the time the last shot was fired, the last artillery round exploded, the last agonised victim tortured to death, more than 650
maquisards
and 200 civilians had died, 100-plus people had been deported and uncounted wounded were being cared for in the forests, in homes and hospitals, many to die later.
¹⁴

In Algiers, General Cochet was still working away at the system, bogged down by the in-fighting between various political factions. De Gaulle being absent at the time and since General Koenig insisted that the Vercors was London’s operation and not Algiers’ responsibility, it was to Koenig that Cochet sent a signal requesting latest details of German dispositions on the plateau, so that MAAF could be requested to organise a raid on the Sunday evening or Monday morning. Koenig replied:

ALL INTELLIGENCE SITUATION VERCORS PASSED TO SPOC IMMEDIATELY AFTER RECEPTION STOP EFFECT MAXIMUM DROPS ST MARTIN CODENAMED PAPER KNIFE … AND ARRANGE MAXIMUM SUPPORT MISSION VERCORS AND RAIDS AIRFIELDS AMBERIEU AND ST RAMBERT AND CHABEUIL ENDS
¹⁵

A book could be written about each day of the Battle of Vercors, but one uneven confrontation reads very like another, one more massacre like the previous ones, the agony of one tortured prisoner shamefully like the agony of any other although the details of the torture may vary for a myriad reasons, including the sex of the victim.

In a cave near the precipitous Pas de l’Aiguille twenty-three
maquisards
managed to hold out against considerable odds for thirty hours on 22 July. Realising that their position was hopeless, the able-bodied slipped away under cover of night, leaving eight comrades dead and three badly wounded men who could not be moved. They chose to shoot themselves rather than surrender.

Considering that the long-awaited Allied reinforcements had never arrived and that there was a general shortage of weapons and ammunition, there was remarkably little panic at most of the Maquis positions, manned by young and inexperienced amateurs facing what must have looked by now as though the whole German army and air force were arrayed against them. On 23 July word was passed from Huet that it was time to disengage. Some groups decided to seek refuge in the forests; others tried their luck in making it through the German cordon at the foot of the plateau, where many were arrested and summarily shot.

General Cochet was doing his best. Returning to Italy, but unaware that it was now too late to have any effect on the defence of the plateau, he saw a mission scheduled for 24 July, in which a squadron of Marauders flown by FAFL pilots would target the field at Chabeuil. The following day, the flight took off but missed Chabeuil due to cloud cover and attacked targets of opportunity instead.

At Vassieux, the landing strip prepared for Allied airborne troops was repeatedly pressed into use for Luftwaffe flights bringing in weapons and evacuating German wounded aboard Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft. On 24 July another Gotha brought in a GebflaK38 20mm howitzer, which rained death on the Maquis positions. Despite a suicidal rearguard action on the belvedere above Valchevrière hamlet by Lieutenant Chabal and his men, who all died weapon in hand, every house was burned to the ground.

After the fighting died down, a brief silence was rent by screams and shots as civilians of all ages were dragged out of hiding and executed, in the case of females usually after rape. In addition to ninety-one
maquisards
who died at Vassieux, seventy-three of the 430 civilian inhabitants were summarily executed in this way. Most of the men were hanged with hands tied behind their backs and their outstretched toes just touching the ground, so that they died slowly of exhaustion and prolonged strangulation. In the surrounding fields, dozens of corpses lay unburied for weeks.

By the time the German ground troops who had fought their way up on to the plateau linked up with their airborne contingent on 25 July, the Maquis of Vercors was a spent shadow, but individual feats of courage still claimed German lives. The zigzag road leading up to the Col de Rousset did not actually reach the pass itself, but cut through the mountain below it by a tunnel 700ft long. This had been used on Huet’s orders to store much of the materiel recovered from the drop on 14 July and a substantial part of the food reserves. As his critics later said, storing the ammunition in centralised dumps denied it to men in desperate need.

A couple of hundred men who had chosen this way off the plateau stormed into the tunnel and broke open crates of food to gorge themselves and fill their pockets with provisions after days of being cold, soaked to the skin and ravenously hungry. After all the others left, two men remained in the tunnel mouth, watching a German convoy creeping slowly and cautiously up the twisting road towards them. Instead of slipping away while there was time, they calmly affixed a fuse to two lumps of plastic explosive and placed these in a gallery near the entrance that was filled with ammunition and other explosives. Waiting until the last minute, they lit the fuse and ran desperately for the other end of the tunnel, hoping to reach it before the charge went off.

Gasping in the open air, they waited. No explosion, but they could hear the engine noises of the convoy approaching the far end of the tunnel. Just before the first vehicles reached the entrance, a colossal explosion brought the roof down, blocking vehicular access to the plateau by that route.

On 24 July – two days too late – American aircraft bombed the airfield at Valence. On the following day, 23-year-old Paul Borrel watched from a distance as German troops rounded up the entire population of his home town, La Chapelle en Vercors. Nearly all the houses had already been burned down but after the Germans departed the inhabitants crept out of the woods and huddled together in those houses still habitable, after trying to save what was salvageable of their possessions. When the Germans returned and arrested the men, the village priest courageously protested that they were innocent, and was told there was nothing to worry about. In the end, sixteen young men were kept hostage. That evening the soldiers got drunk and the terrified villagers could hear them singing marching songs. At about 2200hrs the priest heard a fusillade near the village square. Running to the scene, he found sixteen dead bodies in a farmyard, which is now a memorial shrine. They included comrades of Paul Borrel, who had disregarded instructions not to go back to their homes. Borrel said afterwards: ‘If they had been as scared as I was, they would be alive today.’