Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (6 page)

On 8 November 1942 the Allies opened the ‘second front’ by invading French-occupied North Africa, where they met such brief resistance from the Vichy troops confronting them that on 10 November Admiral Darlan, as senior French officer in North Africa, ordered all French forces to cease fire. Effectively occupying all strategically relevant parts of Morocco and Algeria, the Allied forces prepared to move eastwards into Tunisia, threatening the rear of the Axis forces south of the Mediterranean, which were being pushed back westwards by the British forces based in Egypt.

Even on a map in Berlin, it was obvious that the sick Desert Fox, General Erwin Rommel, commanding the German and Italian forces in North Africa, could not win the war on two fronts which had now overtaken him. Given the problems of re-supply and shipping reinforcements across an increasingly Allied-dominated Mediterranean, it was only a question of time before the Allies would occupy the entire North African littoral from Morocco to Egypt. The German High Command was thus obliged to secure the Mediterranean coast of France against an amphibious invasion from North Africa by driving into the Free Zone on 11 November, after which the whole of France was occupied. The former Occupied Zone was now designated ‘the northern zone’ and the former Free Zone became ‘the southern zone’.

The next step was Operation Lilac, which came on 17 November: the disarmament and demobilisation of the units in mainland France of Vichy’s puny Armée de l’Armistice. Ordered by their own government to comply with German demands, many individual officers and men decided to act according to their own consciences and formed the disciplined Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), separate from the political factions of the Resistance. Typical of these officers was Colonel Schlesser at Auch. Demobilising his 2nd Dragoons there, he told each man to keep in touch with comrades and hold himself ready for the call. Some demobilised men slipped away from their homes in darkness; others made gestures of open defiance, like Lieutenant Narcisse Geyer la Thivollet who rode out of 2nd Cuirassiers barracks in Lyon on horseback in full uniform and kept riding until contacting a Maquis unit in the bleak limestone uplands of the Vercors.

At the time of the armistice, Minister of War General Colson had penned a personal letter to the commander of each military region, ordering materiel and stores to be spirited away against the day when they could be used again, rather than tamely handed over to the Germans. The results were sometimes surprising. Within a few months, 65,000 rifles, 9,500 machine guns and automatic rifles, 200 mortars, fifty-five 75mm cannons and anti-tank guns had been administratively ‘lost’. Several thousand trucks were ‘leased’ to civilian transport contractors who agreed to maintain them ready for return to the army at six hours’ notice. The owner of one small trucking company in the south of France thus saw his fleet rise from five vehicles to 687! Sadly, when the Wehrmacht invaded the Free Zone in November 1942, all the secret arms dumps were useless to stop it. Based in Pau, Captain André Pommiès now created a network of arms dumps throughout the south-west. Yet, within a week of Operation Lilac many dumps had been betrayed by local informers.

The OAS reasoned that the Germans could not possibly afford sufficient manpower to police the whole of France, but would secure the Mediterranean littoral with a military presence and then rely on collaborators and informers to help them keep control of the rest of the southern zone. All it took to neutralise one of these traitors was a bullet, and there were plenty of those hidden away. Vichy’s reply to this ‘terrorism’ and that of the PCF hit squads was the formation on 31 January 1943 of a paramilitary anti-terrorist force called La Milice under its infamous hard-line secretary general, Joseph Darnand. The
miliciens
– as its members were called – were charged with rooting out, arresting, imprisoning, deporting and killing Jews and members of Resistance movements, especially the various PCF groups
.
The brutal methods and lack of scruple they used, especially torture and blackmail, soon earned them the hatred of most of the population, even those who still supported Pétain politically.

In February 1943 Sauckel’s unsated hunger for French labour forced Laval to introduce compulsory conscription of men of military age for labour service in the Reich. This was initially called Le Service Obligatoire du Travail until someone in Vichy with the vestige of a sense of humour pointed out that the initials SOT spelled the word
sot
,
meaning ‘stupid’.
The hastily re-baptised Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO) applied both to men and to women aged 18 to 45 with no children. In practice, although 200,000 Frenchwomen did volunteer to go and work in Germany for money while their children were looked after in specially established residential homes, there was no forcible conscription for females because the Catholic Church refused to sanction this and Pétain could not afford to alienate the French cardinals and bishops who were among his most influential supporters.

It is estimated that only 785,000 men actually left France under the STO, half of them deserting on their first home leave.
³
Even before British bombs started falling regularly on industrial targets all over the Reich, it was impossible to keep secret that the conditions of work in Germany were far from what had been promised. The French STO conscripts lived in poorly heated dormitories often adjacent to factories which had become strategic targets for the RAF; they worked alongside prisoners and forced labourers from a score of conquered territories with no common language; few German women would have anything to do with sex-hungry foreign men because that was a criminal offence; there was little wine and meals were
Eintopf
– a single dish of unidentifiable stew instead of the traditional five-course French meal of soup, entrée, meat course, cheese and dessert.

The summons from the STO arrived couched in elegant officialese:

I have the honour to inform you that the joint Franco-German Commission … has selected you for work with the Todt Organisation (or) to work in Germany. I invite you to present yourself at the German Labour Office on … to learn the date and time of your departure. Failure to comply with this posting is punishable under the provisions of the law.

On 15 February 1943 men who had reached their eighteenth birthdays in 1940, 1941 and 1942 received their STO call-up papers. However, Resistance tracts posted on walls and blowing along the streets of towns proclaimed that leaving France to go and work in Germany was treachery. Briefly, the communists and the Church were on the same side. On 21 March Cardinal Liénart defied the posters threatening ‘pitiless sanctions’ for those who did not present themselves at the recruitment centres and railway stations to catch their trains by announcing in Lyon that reporting for duty under the STO was not a duty of conscience for Catholics.

There were some legal alternatives to going to work in Germany. The Todt Organisation, charged with major construction projects like the bombproof submarine pens along the Channel and Atlantic coasts and the Westwall of anti-invasion fortifications that stretched from Norway to the Spanish border, was the biggest single employer in Europe with 2 million workers at its peak, including thousands of locally conscripted French labourers, who were paid a reasonable wage, and 3,000 men recruited as uniformed armed guards for construction sites. Working for it in France gained exemption from STO, as did employment in any French factory working for the Germans, which also paid twice the going rate elsewhere. The STO legislation caused severe rifts between the business community and Vichy because the only factories that could keep their labour forces intact were those fulfilling German orders.

The national police, Gendarmerie, Milice, fire services, railways and civil defence all offered shelter from the STO, and saw a rush of volunteers. A friend of the author signed up with Le Service de Surveillance des Voies. Wearing a blue-and-white armband, equipped with a torch and whistle and a bilingual
Ausweis
, he and a friend patrolled the rail tracks near his home town at night, ostensibly to prevent sabotage. In the event, when encountering saboteurs, they asked to be hit a few times in the face and then tied up, as their alibi for doing nothing.
⁴

Another legitimate escape from the STO was to find a job with one of the many German organisations in France, so 2,000 young men went to work as fitters on German navy ships in French ports and as armed guards of the port installations. Another 1,982 donned German uniform as drivers in NSKK Motorgruppe, freeing Germans for more military tasks. On 7 October that year, Laval did another deal with Speer, under which 10,000 factories were designated ‘S’ and their workers exempted from the STO.

It was one thing to enact a law, quite another to enforce it. The response to the STO summons was feeble. As one example of what increasingly happened, three neighbours of the author set out for their STO train in a
gazogène
wood-burning car driven by the owner of the local garage that conveniently ‘broke down’ in front of the village gendarme. The gas produced in the generator bolted on to the rear bumper being notoriously unreliable, he obligingly issued a signed and stamped
procès verbal
confirming the breakdown. They continued their journey to the railway station, being careful to arrive after the departure of their train. The
procès verbal
stamped a second time by the STO representatives there, the three young men returned home and were not called again, their names having slipped through some administrative loophole.

At Vesoul in Franche-Comté only three of 400 conscripts reported for duty; in the Jura twenty-five out of 850; in Seine-et-Loire only thirty-one from 3,700.
⁵
The attitude of many police officers towards arresting defaulters was summed up by Lieutenant Theret, head of the detachment at the Gare d’Orsay mainline station in Paris. He warned his men on 9 March 1943 that he ‘would not find a single STO dodger and counted on them to do likewise as good Frenchmen’.
⁶
The Milice, however, made the tracking down of STO no-shows one of its main priorities.

It was thus, and with no political intent, that tens of thousands of young men went on the run after receiving their STO call-up. The majority decided to live rough in wild country. Meaning ‘scrubland’ or wild country,
maquis
is the only Corsican word to make it into the French language. Thus these young men were said to
prendre le maquis.
The report by Gendarmerie
chef d’escadron
Calvayrac in Haute-Savoie dated 22 March 1943 said, ‘No-shows for STO are so numerous that only fifty of 340 reported in. Many men have abandoned their homes, their work and their family to take to the
maquis
instead’.
⁷
From there, the noun Maquis came to mean collectively ‘those hiding in rough country’ and
maquisard
was coined to mean a man hiding out on the run.

On 5 June 1943 Laval announced the departure of another 220,000 young men including agricultural labourers to Germany, resulting in widespread comments that the Germans were going to bleed France white by taking all its young men. One German administrator retorted to protesters that, whereas so far Germany had limited itself to taking only half of French production, it would in future take all. If a Frenchman wanted to eat well, his best plan would be to work in, or for, Germany. However, even Laval’s new move did not pacify Fritz Sauckel, who reported to Hitler on 9 August:

I have completely lost belief in the honest goodwill of the French Prime Minister. His refusal … to execute a further programme for recruiting 500,000 French workers to go to Germany before the end of 1943 … amounts to downright sabotage of the German struggle for life against Bolshevism.
⁸

Life was tough for the young men hiding out far from a town, or even a village, where someone might betray them or inadvertently give them away. In Maquis groups with a semblance of discipline, reveille was at 6.30 a.m., followed by ablutions and breakfast. The salute to the flag, if observed, was accompanied rarely by a bugle call, more often by accordion or mouth-organ. Cleaning camp and other chores occupied the rest of the morning; obtaining food took up much of the afternoon. Often, foraging turned to robbery. Another neighbour of the author recalls answering a knock on the door in the middle of the night, to find three young men outside. One waved a pistol at him and demanded clothes and food against a scribbled receipt which he alleged de Gaulle would redeem after the liberation. More enterprising
maquisards
in the Ardennes hi-jacked mail bags containing several villages’ food tickets and stole 150kg of government tobacco the next day.

The daily routine described by one
maquisard
with a band at La Plagne in the Alps, only 18 miles as the crow flies from the Italian frontier, was similar, but he mentioned the after-breakfast chore of packing up all personal belongings in case of need to evacuate the camp at a few minutes’ notice. Morning drill was conducted in squads of six, without weapons because the only weapon in the camp was one pistol. After lunch there was a forced march in mountainous terrain to toughen up those recruits who were unfit city-dwellers. In his camp, ‘lights out’ was at
10
p.m., with everyone fully dressed in case of need to decamp during night. Sleep was interrupted by guard duty in two-man shifts of two hours each. The diet in his camp consisted of plenty of locally produced cow and sheep cheese, but little bread. When the weather was bad in winter, it was impossible for the foraging parties to make it down to the valley to replenish the stores, so the band had to subsist on boiled beef for a week at a time. Interestingly, he noted that it was easy to tell who was there intending to fight when weapons were available, and who was simply on the run from the STO.