Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (22 page)

For his part in the failure to make Montagnards work, Huet was among the small number of military commanders in the FFI who were not given the honorific ‘Compagnon de le Libération’. Gilbert Joseph wrote a scathing indictment of him for pitting ‘hundreds of young men up there simply to avoid the STO and with no desire to fight’ against elite German troops. Joseph also argued that the idea of the Vercors redoubt was a lunatic fantasy, as irrelevant to modern warfare as the Maginot Line. During his time on the plateau he had not spoken up because Huet had a prison camp at La Chapelle where not only suspect strangers and
collabos
of both sexes were locked up, but also defeatists – a term that included anyone who openly criticised his leadership.

Joseph’s criticism of Huet and his officers was simple. They were, he says, of that generation of French army officers who had led the country into defeat in 1940. Instead of adopting guerrilla tactics and keeping their forces dispersed for occasional sorties to ambush Germans below the plateau, they were more intent on rifle drill and irrelevancies such as training the young men under their orders to defend fixed points – which guerrillas must never do. As to the weapons that were dropped on to the plateau, he accused Huet of concentrating them in a few inaccessible centralised dumps, like the tunnel at the Col de Rousset – much of which were recovered unused by the Germans – instead of dispersing them on mule-back to smaller dumps, where desperate men could have replenished their exhausted supplies.

After the liberation, the Vercors campaign was hailed as a heroic battle against odds and the men who died on the plateau have been made heroes of the liberation, as indeed they were. Yet, Joseph was not alone in treating Operation Montagnards as a pointless waste of human lives, property and materiel, with 639
maquisards
and 201 civilians shot, many after torture, and forty-one others deported to camps in Germany – all this for German losses of 100 killed and another fifty dying later of wounds. The plateau was devastated, with 573 homes destroyed and over 4,000 head of livestock and large stocks of grain and potatoes carted and driven away as spoils of war by the German forces.

Joseph contrasts this sad record with the achievements of the group of fifty men with whom he escaped from the plateau under the command of Captain Costa de Beauregard. With a few rifles and one machine gun, they managed without suffering a single casualty subsequently to account for more than 100 Germans in a series of ambushes and skirmishes in south-eastern France. Using proven guerrilla tactics of conducting ambushes far from their camp, so as not to give away its location, and never continuing the action for more than a few minutes before disengaging and slipping away via prepared escape routes, they caused almost as many enemy losses as all the 4,000 men who suffered up there on the plateau.
²

It is hard to disagree with Joseph’s analysis that everything was wrong with Operation Montagnards, from its initial conception onwards. Whether the conflicts on the plateau from January to July 1944 made any difference to the success of the Allied invasions in Normandy on 6 June and in southern France in 15 August is an open question, except for the families of those who died.

Because of the near impossibility of escaping from the plateau through the cordon of Pflaum’s troops, it is estimated that more than 2,000 men were hiding in the forests as the Vercors ‘campaign’ drew to a close. After Dragoon forces swept up the Rhône valley and liberated the area, roughly half of them chose to accept de Gaulle’s offer to don French uniform and continue the drive to get the Germans out of their country, while the others were urgently needed back home to deal with the coming harvest, rebuild their homes or simply to get the machinery of local government working again.

Picirella was not one of them. After a series of skirmishes, sometimes with American support, sometimes not, and sweeps to round up and kill
miliciens
firing on the joyous crowds celebrating their liberation, he was among the FFI who marched into his home town of Lyon on 3 September. They had been told that the Germans had evacuated the city, but were held up by excited crowds, with all the women wanting to embrace these tattered veterans. After shots rang out from last-ditch
miliciens
, who knew their fate if taken alive, the Senegalese sharpshooters who had been rescued on 23 June took them out one by one.

Picirella’s diary includes a plaintive note to the effect that he and his comrades had not received any pay for the previous six weeks. What especially nauseated them were the
napthalinards
, army officers who had done nothing, yet put on their uniforms smelling strongly of mothballs and paraded about wearing white gloves and expecting to be saluted by the men who had done the fighting.

Two years later, on 26 July 1946, France’s senior serving general, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, made a speech at Vassieux, in which he said:

It was the character of the men who live here that made this region one of the strong points of our Resistance. It served for months as a strongpoint where the enemy could not come. And when they decided to destroy it, they had to devote the forces required in a large-scale combined operation. To those who denigrate the merits of our Maquis forces, I say that here it was not a little war, it was
the
war.

There were many speeches like that, understandably paying respect to the memory of those who died in the Resistance and the Maquis, but an objective examination of Dalloz’s Trojan horse initiative suggests rather the reaction of another French general to the pointless charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Witnessing it caused General Pierre Bosquet to comment: ‘
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. C’est de la folie
’
– ‘It’s magnificent, yet it’s not war, but madness’.

Notes

1
Testimony of Denise Noaro on website of Les Ecoles de Villard de Lans.

2
Full details in Joseph, G.,
Combattant du Vercors
, Paris, Editions Curandera, 1994.

ATROCITIES ON BOTH SIDES

At the time of the Normandy invasion, 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich was refitting in south-west France after suffering enormous losses of men and materiel on the Eastern Front. Under the command of Gruppenführer Heinz Bernhardt Lammerding – his rank was equivalent to a Wehrmacht major general – were 18,000 men with armoured cars and tanks, many in the process of being repaired. The refitting was badly behind schedule due to the sabotage of railway lines over which spare parts were being transported from the Reich.

According to historian Dr Peter Lieb, 2nd Das Reich possessed all the characteristics of a unit likely to perpetrate atrocities: its command chain was fanatically Nazi; it had been carrying out brutal anti-partisan reprisals on the Eastern Front; and its men regarded themselves as being a military elite. Shortly before the invasion, Lammerding received orders to move the division to the area of Tulle and Limoges and suppress the terrorist attacks and sabotage by Resistance groups, mainly communist dominated, in that region.

Under the Sperrle-Erlass anti-terrorist ordinance issued in February 1944 by Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschal Hugo Sperrle, commanding all German forces on the Western Front, local commanders were given permission to take any measures they considered necessary to eliminate ‘terrorists’. Commanders who used too little force were to be punished for having put the lives of their men at risk. The Sperrle ordinance was thus a carte blanche for escalating reprisals, under which it became routine for German troops to open fire immediately upon being attacked, regardless of civilians present, their deaths to be blamed on the Resistance; areas where attacks occurred were to be cordoned off, all inhabitants arrested and houses that had been used by ‘terrorists’ were to be burnt down; for each German soldier killed, ten terrorists or hostages were to be hanged. Hanging was not a usual form of execution in France, and was chosen to signify that the executed men and women no longer belonged to the French people. Use of these tactics was intended to achieve the reverse of the PCF’s aim when launching its campaign of assassinations in autumn 1941 – in other words, to make the population withdraw support for the Resistance fighters who brought such misery upon them.

The
département
of Corrèze in central France had already been the scene of severe reprisals in April, when Vichy anti-terrorist units, German Sipo-SD personnel from Limoges and the Brehmer Division of anti-terrorist troops mounted a concerted campaign against local Maquis bands. Pierre Trouillé, prefect of the Corrèze
département
, noted privately: ‘The wolves of the Security Police and the vultures of the French Gestapo have joined forces.’

The Brehmer Division was another composite put together expressly for anti-partisan operations. It comprised both German Security Police and a Georgian infantry battalion recruited among POWs who had been captured serving in the Red Army on the Eastern Front. In the first week of April, the division arrested 3,000 people in the town of Le Lonzac, 18 miles north of Tulle, 300 of whom were deported to concentration camps in Germany. At Brive-la-Gaillarde seventeen people were killed and thirty-four houses burned down. By the time the division left Corrèze in May, it had also killed 200 Jews without apparently ever making contact with a major Maquis force.

At the beginning of May a 35-year-old communist assistant schoolteacher known as ‘Colonel Kléber’, real name Jean-Jacques Chapou, was in command of the FTP groups in the
département
of Corrèze and already planning to ‘liberate’ the town of Tulle without waiting for the Allied invasion, of which the date was then unknown.

This was in obedience to a PCF disinformation that the coming Allied invasion would ‘incite the German army to make mass arrests and massacre millions of French people’.
¹
The impossible claim was intended to dissimulate a PCF initiative to cause such civil unrest during the liberation that the party would be able to seize political power while all other parties were still too disorganised to prevent it.

Chapou’s plan for Tulle called for the disarming and killing of the garrison of approximately 280 German security troops
²
and 600-plus men of the GMR and Milice who were stationed in the town. To carry out his plan, Chapou reckoned he would have 1,350 men under his orders. As soon as the local representatives of OAS heard of this, they were horrified and refused to sanction such a criminally stupid idea, forcing Chapou to put his plan on the back burner.

After hearing of the Allied landings on 6 June, when the Allied forces were still clinging desperately to the first few miles of beachhead, he hastily resurrected the plan. General Bernard Montgomery’s schedule was for the town of Caen to be taken by the British 3rd Infantry Division on the evening of D-Day but, as his reading of Count Helmuth von Moltke’s
Militärische Werke
, Vol.
2
ought to have told him, no plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first contact with the enemy’s main strength. Normally abridged to ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy’, the maxim certainly applied to D-Day. The first Allied troops in Operation Goodwood – the liberation of Caen – broke in five weeks behind schedule on 9 July, and the last Germans were not driven out of the town until 19 July.

Thus, with the nearest Allied troops fighting for their lives over 300 miles distant, never mind advancing, it must have been glaringly obvious even to Chapou that Tulle could not be held and that attacking the garrison was an invitation for reprisal massacres.

At 0500hrs on 7 June, Prefect Trouillé was awoken in Tulle by a fusillade of small arms fire directed at the Champ de Mars barracks and the explosion of a bazooka rocket. These were the opening rounds of what Chapou called the battle for Tulle. At this time, his forces amounted to some 400 men – far short of his original estimate. An hour later, with the element of surprise in their favour, they were in command of the post office and town hall, and all buildings occupied by the German garrison were surrounded. Shortly afterwards, the railway station was also ‘liberated’. The eighteen
gardes-voies
and one railway employee found there were invited to join Chapou’s forces, but politely declined and stayed – as they thought, safely uninvolved – inside the waiting room.

At 1130hrs the GMR and Milice contingents hoisted a white flag over the Champ de Mars barracks. After more than four hours’ negotiation, they were allowed to leave the town, taking with them all their weapons and ammunition. Chapou had counted on acquiring their materiel to replace his own losses, but had insufficient men to impose an unconditional surrender on the Vichy forces and subdue the German garrison, which had taken advantage of the negotiations to recapture the railway station and there shoot dead all but one of the
gardes-voies
– some say because their blue-and-white duty armbands resembled the FFI armbands of Chapou’s men.