Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (20 page)

On 25 July Pflaum congratulated himself that his ground troops had met up with the airborne contingents more or less on schedule. From all sides, his forces were converging on the centre of the plateau with the Luftwaffe continuing to harass the fleeing
maquisards
.
Confirmed in his original assessment of Operation Montagnards, Tillon gave orders to his FTP men to disperse and fall back on the southern side of the plateau, thence to exfiltrate in small groups by night to avoid the daylight strafing by the Focke Wulf 109s that were attacking everything that moved.

The Justine mission split up after seeing surrendering and wounded
maquisards
shot out of hand, although the American uniform of Lieutenant Chester Meyers, recovering from an emergency appendix operation, was respected. He was taken prisoner and ended the war in a POW camp in Poland. Other members of the Allied mission spent weeks avoiding German ground patrols and air searches under great privation before finding safety with the Resistance. On the plateau, to quote Rosencher’s account:

The civilian population served as target practice for the [Germans]. Women, old and young, and little girls too, were raped. Old men and children were shot down … others locked inside their burning houses. The SS shot anything that moved, massacred man and beast, looted anything that could be taken by the cartload, blew up and set fire to entire villages. Any maquisard who was caught, was tortured before being killed. Men working in the fields, shepherds and old folk were mowed down, and their animals too. The SS blew up and burned any isolated farm and house.
¹⁶

Notes

1
Joseph, p. 193.

2
Dreyfus, p. 76.

3
Unpublished Picirella diary.

4
Joseph, pp. 200–3.

5
Dreyfus, p. 9.

6
Ibid., p. 27.

7
Ibid., p. 32.

8
Ibid., p. 36.

9
Ibid., pp. 81–7.

10
Ibid., pp. 89–90. An alternative, but disputed, version of this signal is given in Dreyfus, pp. 295–302.

11
Joseph, pp. 239–40.

12
Jenkins, p. 182.

13
Ibid., p. 178.

14
Joseph, p. 287–8.

15
Dreyfus, p. 102.

16
Rosencher, pp. 269–301.

THEY GOT WHAT THEY DESERVED

On 26 July Resistance teams along the Rhône valley sabotaged all railway communications with Grenoble and also cut all telephone and telegraph lines in preparation for Operation Anvil/Dragoon, but these measures to make life difficult for the German forces came too late to help the men marooned on the plateau. That day, Algiers received this final message from the shrinking perimeter, within which the survivors were holding out:

ABANDONED AND WITHOUT SUPPORT EVERY MAN HAS DONE HIS DUTY AND SADLY HAS TO CEASE THIS HOPELESS FIGHT AGAINST ODDS ENDS

The unhelpful reply from Algiers was:

YOUR SADNESS IS UNDERSTANDABLE ENDS

Surgeons Ferrier and Ganimède decided as a last resort to hide the wounded in a deep cave known as La Luire, whose entrance was 60ft wide and 90ft high, but surrounded by thick woodland and half a mile from the nearest road. Volunteer stretcher bearers staggered through the woods along barely discernible pathways, carrying the wounded unable to walk to this natural haven, where the stretchers were placed in rows. Other injured were laid on blankets on the bare earth. A Red Cross flag was pinned outside the cave mouth, just in case.

Among Huet’s HQ staff the argument continued between those who said the plateau should have been evacuated to give everyone a chance to get away after the fighting of 15 July and those who insisted that Huet had to hold on in obedience to the orders to await the reinforcements promised by Algiers. The most anger was shown by those who had seen the prepared landing strips used by the Germans to bring in weapons and reinforcements. Rosencher had encoded some of the daily messages pleading for the weapons:

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE THAT THE ALLIED FORCES … COULD NOT TEMPORARILY SPARE FROM THEIR IMMENSE RESOURCES A FEW HUNDRED HEAVY MACHINE GUNS A FEW HUNDRED MORTARS A FEW DOZEN MOUNTAIN CANNONS AND ANTITANK ARTILLERY … AND THE FIFTY PLANES THAT COULD HAVE DROPPED THESE TO US ENDS
¹

Rosencher was unaware of Zeller’s last signal sent through Cammaerts to Algiers after their escape from the plateau:

HAVE LEFT VERCORS VIOLENTLY ATTACKED BY GREATLY SUPERIOR FORCE OF ABOUT TWO DIVISIONS SUPPORTED BY AIRCRAFT AND ARTILLERY STOP FOLLOWING THE ATTACK LANDING OF GLIDERS AND CAPTURE OF [THE TOWN OF] DIE SITUATION EXTREMELY DANGEROUS STOP MANY OFFICERS HAVE DISAPPEARED BELIEVED KILLED STOP AM TRYING TO JOIN [ANOTHER NETWORK] WHOSE WHEREABOUTS I DO NOT KNOW STOP TROOPS AND COMMANDERS CURSE FAILURE TO PROVIDE AIR SUPPORT STOP HOPE FOR EARLY LANDING IN SOUTH STOP SEND NEWS ENDS

The reply from Algiers read:

FULLY UNDERSTAND YOUR SADNESS AND YOUR FEELING OF ISOLATION STOP THE AIRCRAFT EARMARKED FOR DROPPING TO YOUR MEN HEAVY ARMS AND AMMUNITION HAVE BEEN READY FOR THE LAST SIX DAYS STOP THIS MATERIEL AND MEN WILL NOW BE DROPPED INTO AREAS OF DRÔME AND HAUTES-ALPES DÉPARTEMENTS STOP AM CONFIDENT THAT VERCORS TROOPS DESPITE DISPERSAL WILL HAVE SUCCESS AND REVENGE THROUGH ACTION AS GUERRILLAS ENDS
²

Rosencher and other orderlies in the cave at La Luire were ordered to leave with the walking wounded, and make a final desperate attempt to escape through the ring of steel around the plateau. More days of waiting followed for those left behind. Two
maquisards
died, leaving twenty-one badly wounded patients, three doctors, nine nurses, a civilian priest and a chaplain. Sounds of firing and explosions were coming from all directions as their comrades were hunted down. The medical staff tried to maintain a semblance of hospital routine, with meals and changing of dressing, etc., at fixed times. Some peasants carried half a veal carcase up to La Luire, where it was stored in a cool part of the network of tunnels below the cave. The meat was jointed with scalpels and cooked in a converted instrument steriliser run on bottled gas. The bread supply soon ran out. The only liquid available for drinking or cleaning wounds was moisture dripping from the roof of the cave.

On Thursday 27 July an aircraft overflew the cave several times. This was not necessarily because of any specialised knowledge of the plateau. La Luire was a major geological feature mentioned in all the guide books. At 1630hrs bullets sprayed the Red Cross flag at the entrance and twenty green-camouflaged figures could be seen outside. The four wounded Germans were released as spokesmen and explained that they had been correctly treated during their captivity, and also that there were women and wounded men in the cave. It was a waste of breath, as was the invocation of the Geneva Convention by doctors Ferrier and Ganimède.

The Germans divided the patients into two groups. Fourteen badly wounded men were unable to leave their stretchers. Nurse Anita Winter volunteered to stay with them. The other group consisted of eleven walking wounded, the three doctors, eight nurses, the wife and son of Dr Ganimède, two wounded female civilians, the Jesuit chaplain and one wounded American officer. Roughly handled by their escort, this group was harried down the path to the nearest road. Before they reached it, a black Senegalese soldier who stumbled and accidentally fell against an SS man was beaten to death by the escort.

Arriving at the village of Rousset, the prisoners were locked in a filthy barn to await their fate. At about 2300hrs Anita Winter was shoved in with them, weeping. Hardly able to speak, she recounted the story of what had happened at the cave:

After you all left, the Germans continued to search the cave, taking what remained of our food stored there. I was busy looking after the wounded and got permission to distribute some food to them. They thought this was a good sign. At the end of the afternoon, the Germans carried the stretcher cases out of the cave, saying that a truck was waiting for them, down on the road. After an order was countermanded [sic], the stretchers were lined up all together on the ground in the field below the cave. The wounded who could still stand were herded into a wagon. I was hurried away, down toward the road, not wanting to guess what was happening. Then I heard burst after burst of sub-machine gun fire.
³

One injured man survived the massacre at La Luire, having found his way deeper into the warren of tunnels beneath the cave, where he stayed without food or water for forty-eight hours before daring to come out. All this was watched by four other wounded men who had taken refuge with two civilian helpers from the hospital at St-Martin in another cave less than a third of a mile away on the other side of the valley. Seeing the Waffen-SS arrive in Indian file by the footpath from the road, everyone hid in the scrub, from where they observed the massacre of La Luire through binoculars.

Towards midday on 28 July the people locked in the barn at Rousset were divided into two groups by their captors. When the three doctors were being herded into a truck with the nurses, the two wounded women and Dr Ganimède’s wife and son, one of the doctors asked what was going to happen to the wounded. He was told by a German officer that they would shortly be following in another truck. Instead, they were driven out into a field, where eight of them were machine-gunned to death. Another black North African soldier was taken behind the village cemetery and hanged. The tenth man, Second Lieutenant François Billon of the Free French forces, who had recently been parachuted in wearing uniform, was taken to a German military hospital, but afterwards shot. Only the American officer was correctly treated as a POW and placed in a truck with two of the German wounded from the cave and several civilians.

After the truck’s arrival in Grenoble, the driver told one of the civilian women to make herself scarce. Ganimède’s wife and son were also released. After being interrogated by the Gestapo, Ganimède managed to escape during the panic among his captors caused by an air raid.
⁴
Ferrier and a civilian doctor were shot with the chaplain Yves Moreau. The seven female nurses were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, where one of them was to die. Left in Grenoble were the two surgeons and the Jesuit. In the evening of 10 August they were taken out of their cell and marched to a disused firing range behind the main station. There, looking up at the moonlit massif of the Vercors, they too were shot, after which, General Pflaum issued more explicit orders for the clean-up operation as follows:

1. Enemy Resistance fighters in the Vercors have been dispersed and are attempting to escape through our lines.

2. It is now necessary to root out the bands hiding out up there and eliminate them completely, to unearth their stores of munitions and food and destroy their hiding places so that they cannot re-install themselves there.

3. The Vercors must be tightly controlled from the encircling lines to the upper slopes. On the high plateau, the Gebirgsjäger will wipe out any enemies.

4. A period of seven days will be allowed for this operation.

5. The male population of the Vercors between ages of 17 and 30 who have neither been in, nor supported, the French Resistance are to be arrested and formed into labour teams under strict military control for removal of mines, reconstruction of bridges and removal of booty into our safekeeping. Their future fate will be communicated by the Commanding General for Southern France. Houses used by the Maquis must be burned, the only exception at the discretion of local commanders being where the inhabitants were forced to shelter Resistance fighters. To prevent a return of the French Resistance to the Vercors, you will leave in each farm only enough animals, cows and pigs, etc., as is necessary for the survival of the legitimate inhabitants. After slaughtering sufficient for their needs, the units involved will ensure all other livestock is rounded up by the local population and driven into marshalling areas.

6. Orders for transporting war booty, treatment of civilian prisoners and the transporting of livestock will be given later.
⁵

In enthusiastic compliance with these orders, from 28 July to 3 August Pflaum’s troops, especially the Central Asian SS units, took an unholy pleasure in plundering the entire plateau. Records show that, in addition to personal looting, 2,763 cows, 305 horses and 1,301 pigs were driven off for slaughter by Pflaum’s men. Animals not seized as booty were killed, so denying any food to the remaining
maquisards
hiding deep in the forests, where the German patrols were wary of setting foot for fear of ambushes.