Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (29 page)

Near the wall is a plaque noting that the Croix de Guerre was awarded to St-Amand-Montrond in 1958. The inscription reads:

First town in France to be liberated by the Resistance on the very day of the Allied landings, 6 June 1944, St-Amand-Montrond suffered enemy reprisals on 8 June 1944. Situated in the Free Zone at the beginning of the war, it became the refuge for many Jewish families who did not escape the persecutions of 24 July 1944.

Still, no mention of who the enemy was. Asking at the tourist office for information about the Resistance who liberated the town on 6 June, when the nearest Allies were more than 200 miles distant and having too many problems of their own to worry about St-Amand, the visitor is greeted with a blank look and a shrug that seems to say, ‘Nothing ever happens here’.

On 5 May 2010 a ceremony was held to honour the many Gentile families in the area who were awarded the title ‘Just Among The Nations’ for saving the lives of Jewish children and adults during the Second World War. Next to the commemoration wall for the men shot on 8 June is a plaque reading:

On the night of 21–22 July 1944 the Gestapo, guided by the Vichy Milice, arrested seventy-one French Jews and imprisoned them at Bourges. In two groups, on 24 July and 8 August thirty-six of these men, women and children aged between sixteen and eighty-five were driven to the military zone at Guerry in Savigny en Septaine. There, they found horror and death, being thrown, mostly still alive, into the well shafts. Because they were Jews, they were the victims of Nazi barbarism. St-Amand-Montrond remembers them.

This plaque is dated 24 July 1994, which makes one wonder why it took half a century for the town to erect it. And why are there two misleading untruths in the 102 words of the French inscription? Firstly, the vast majority of the Jewish victims, if not all of them, were not legally French at the time of their deaths. Retroactive nationality was awarded post mortem as a gesture of guilt from the post-war government. Secondly, many of the men who killed them in a particularly barbaric manner were French.

Go to almost every place in France where the Resistance or Maquis was active, and you will find a Musée de la Résistance or a memorial to the fallen featured as one of the places of interest in tourist brochures and on the municipal website. Yet, the website of St-Amand-Montrond, while boasting of its goldworking and jewellery industries, remains mute about its experience of the Second World War. One does not need to be Hercule Poirot to surmise that this is a town hiding a great shame.

Note

1
Guide du Routard – Berry
, Paris, Hachette, 2011, pp. 61–2.

A RECIPE FOR DISASTER

The texts of Churchill’s and Eisenhower’s early morning broadcasts on D-Day were printed as leaflets airdropped all over northern France. Ever the realist, Eisenhower also had in a uniform pocket a personal apology he had drafted, to be transmitted if the invasion turned into a ghastly mistake with the troops involved wiped out or taken prisoner on the beaches, as had happened at Dieppe. In the broadcast messages both Allied leaders exhorted the civilian population to do everything possible to assist the invasion.

Two days before, Churchill learned that 200 Free French liaison officers, who had been attached to Allied units to go in with the first waves, were being unilaterally withdrawn by de Gaulle because no agreement had been reached with the Allied command on their duties and functions once ashore. In the event only seventy-seven French marines, who were embedded in other units, did land on D-Day – a fact commemorated in 1984 when President François Mitterrand unveiled a monument at Ouistreham in their honour.
¹

Relations between the Anglo-American leaders and de Gaulle were so fraught that, at one point that morning, Churchill dictated a deportation order and gave orders for the leader of the Free French to be arrested and flown back to North Africa, in chains if necessary, so that he might never set foot in France again. Mid-morning on 6 June brought cautious confirmation of the first landings. To enlist the support of the French population, the British War Cabinet considered it imperative that de Gaulle should add his voice to those addressing the people of his country at this critical moment. De Gaulle agreed, but the Foreign Office insisted on vetting what it feared might be a denunciation of the Allies in general and Britain’s prime minister in particular. In the face of de Gaulle’s intransigence, a compromise was reached, with the BBC authorised to record the general’s speech, which could afterwards be suppressed if too inflammatory. By noon it was being recorded. De Gaulle opened with:

The supreme battle has begun. It is, of course, the battle of France and the battle for France. The sons of France, whoever and wherever they may be, have the simple and sacred duty to fight the enemy by whatever means they can … The instructions of the French government, and the French leaders which it has appointed, must be followed exactly. Behind the heavy cloud of our tears and blood, the sun of France’s true might is dawning …

When a transcript of the speech was read at the Foreign Office shortly afterwards, it was noted that de Gaulle had called the body of which he was leader ‘the French government’ and not the ‘provisional French government’. After brief reflection, the speech was reluctantly approved for transmission while, just around the corner, the War Cabinet was still discussing whether de Gaulle should be punished in some way for failing to dance to the American tune. President Roosevelt planned not to liberate France, but to occupy it and replace the Vichy regional prefects by ‘sixty-day wonders’ – US officers and civilians who had been given a two-month course in Virginia before shipping overseas that supposedly qualified them to take over the civilian administration of France as the occupation forces were driven out of each
département.

Had they been installed, it is more than probable that a second military occupation following immediately on the heels of the German occupation would have fuelled a nationwide resentment, giving the PCF exactly the leverage it needed to stage a coup d’état that wanted only a propitious moment. To short circuit this, de Gaulle intended to replace the Vichy prefects with his own regional commissioners in each area liberated.

Although furious at the way he had been sidelined throughout the planning of Operation Overlord and because neither Churchill’s speech nor Eisenhower’s acknowledged his role as military leader of Free France and political head of the provisional government constituted in Algiers to replace the totally discredited collaborationist government in Vichy, de Gaulle was not a man to let his personal feelings interfere with the main priority, which was to drive the German armies out of France.

Much oil was poured on the troubled water between Downing Street and his headquarters in Carlton Gardens so that the hastily composed message could be transmitted by the BBC at 1730hrs on 6 June. It included the instruction that the civilian population should take orders only from Gaullist officers. This was his attempt to cut the ground from beneath the feet of other Resistance factions with their own agendas, especially the Moscow-line communists.

Unfortunately, the haste with which the message had been drafted left a great ambiguity. The phrase ‘The sons of France … have the … duty to fight the enemy by whatever means they can’
was about to be taken as authorisation for the hideous game played out in many places, including Tulle and the little-known market town in the plumb centre of France. St-Amand-Montrond lay some 250 miles from the landing beaches, but only 30 miles by road from the major city of Bourges, where large Wehrmacht, Gestapo and Milice units were stationed. Before dawn on 6 June, while the alarm sirens were still wailing on the Atlantic Wall at the first sight of the enormous invasion armada off-shore and the first wave of landing ships was heading shoreward, four local FFI commanders met at the home of 37-year-old René van Gaver in Coust, a village 5 miles south-east of St-Amand. Two of the other men present at van Gaver’s house were 25-year-old Parisian Daniel Blanchard from the right-wing COMBAT network and Hubert Lalonnier, the 37-year-old commander of the local FTP. He was a hard-line Marxist who had served in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War
.

Before undertaking any military action, all Resistance and Maquis commanders were supposed to clear their plans with COMAC, the Comité d’Action Militaire of Jean Moulin’s Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (which became in December 1943 the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN)). COMAC for the area in which lay St-Amand was controlled by PCF members Pierre Vrillon, Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont and Alfred Malleret-Joinville. The confusion of initials and code names they used was deliberate, to obscure the long arm of the Comintern in Moscow, which had ordered the PCF to conceal its preparations for a coup d’état to take place in the power vacuum after the liberation by operating under the cover of ostensibly popular front organisations. If their actions succeeded, the party could emerge from the shadows and claim the credit; if they failed, the other political parties in the umbrella organisations could be blamed.

COMAC had already called upon all member groups to support plans agreed with London in the run-up to D-Day. Plan Green was the sabotage of railways, which was already very effective, slowing down by days or even weeks the arrival of much-needed German reinforcements and deliveries of materiel, like the spare parts for Lammerding’s tanks. Plan Slowcoach was the blockage of roads, more difficult to make permanent because a road usually has alternative routes and can be more easily repaired. COMAC’s Directive No. 10 dated 29 May 1944 included the words:

In the coming weeks, each of us must prove that he is worthy of the post he occupies by loyally obeying the orders of COMAC … [and] by the way in which, during the operations against the enemy in connection with the landings and the Allied offensive, he demonstrated his initiative, daring, spirit of sacrifice and devotion to the nation.
²

As the independently minded FFI boss of the Limousin region Georges Guingouin later wrote:

The Gestapo had decapitated the military leadership of LIBERATION-SUD in the spring of
1944
, after which its current leadership on
6
June was really the clandestine secretariat of the PCF, giving orders without taking any account of the military realities. To declare an insurrection is one thing. To ‘liberate’ towns and hold them against reprisal (by regular forces) is quite another.
³

On 6 June even de Gaulle’s BCRA in London was unaware of the extent to which local commanders were about to take unauthorised initiatives that would expose uninvolved civilians to the terror of German reprisals.

Two days previously, on 4 June, there had been a village fête in nearby Châteaumeillant, where Blanchard and his fellow
résistant
and
brother-in-law André Sagnelonge got stinking drunk. When Blanchard’s disgusted wife told the men it was time to stop drinking, he told her to get lost because ‘It’s the last piss-up we’re ever going to have’.
⁴

The senior military officer in the FFI of the Cher
département
was Colonel Bertrand, a career soldier who had been underground with the OAS since the Armée de l’Armistice was disbanded. He had not been invited to the early morning meeting on 6 June, and had been deliberately excluded from a preparatory meeting held on 29 May – this on the instructions of the fourth man present at van Gaver’s house while the first wave was fighting its way ashore in Normandy. Fernand Sochet was a militant PCF member posing as the politically neutral regional organiser of the multi-party Front National, and had cut Bertrand out of the chain of command to prevent the colonel’s professional appreciation of the military situation from acting as a brake on what Sochet was planning. That was nothing less than exploiting the local
maquisards
’
pent-up frustrations after four years of humiliation during the occupation. In a metaphor used by one communist
résistant
involved: ‘We were driving the latest model Citroën
traction avant
car, while [Bertrand] was riding a bicycle.’
⁵

In those first hours of the invasion, when even Eisenhower was uncertain that the Allied bridgeheads could be held, they should all have been on metaphorical bicycles and keeping well off the main roads. However, between the two meetings in St-Amand, van Gaver and Blanchard did contact Colonel Bertrand and gave him a vague outline of their idea for a ‘spontaneous’ liberation of the town. Bertrand was horrified: a single glance at the map was enough to show that any local uprising in St-Amand would call down immediate reprisals long before any Allied troops could fight their way through from the beaches of Normandy to support it. After the savage reprisals on the Maquis and uninvolved civilians in the Glières and Vercors and many other regions of France, there was no doubt that this would result in considerable bloodshed.

In addition, Bertrand had received from Free French HQ in London an order dated 16 May to the effect that no confrontation was to be sought by the FFI in the early stages of the invasion because ‘an unplanned uprising by diverse factions of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur risks breaking the impetus [sic] of the French Resistance and causing considerable harm to the general population, without any compensating gain’.
⁶