Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (9 page)

Time and again, he pressed home the dire need of deliveries to JOCKEY’s carefully selected seventy drop zones of arms and ammunition, but also soap, winter clothes, bicycle tyres and a host of other mundane things impossible to obtain in France.

If the days during his time in London were put to good use, the dream of spending time with his wife, their small daughter and the new baby turned rapidly sour. His wife Nan knew she could not ask him any questions and he could not tell her anything about what he had been doing. There was thus between them no bond of trust, natural between a couple:

All we could do was cling to each other wordlessly, as one does to relatives at a funeral. Our lovemaking was entirely desperate, due not only to the fact that I was physically incompetent, virtually impotent – partly the reward from hundreds of bruising miles on a racing saddle – but also, I think, mentally.
¹⁰

The anniversary on 11 November 1943 of the armistice that ended the First World War, which was the only armistice of which French patriots could feel proud, was celebrated in Oyonnax – a town in eastern France only 25 miles from the Swiss frontier at Geneva – by 150 men of the local Maquis parading openly, led by their commander Captain Henri Romans-Petit, with weapons carried openly and tricolor flags bearing the Cross of Lorraine. With the silent consent of the local gendarmes, they marched to the war memorial and laid a wreath bearing the legend ‘From the victors of tomorrow to those of 1914–18’. A drummer beat the step for the marching men led by their officers in uniform, and a bugler played the fanfare, after which the whole population joined in singing
La Marseillaise
, with many people weeping openly.

A short 8mm black-and-white home movie was even shot to record the occasion for posterity.
¹¹
It shows the small convoy of trucks, some crudely re-painted in camouflage colours to look more military, arriving in the town and the men deploying from them with the population watching. The parade had been planned by Romans-Petit partly out of bravado and partly to show the people that they were not outlaws as portrayed by Vichy propaganda, but disciplined soldiers. De Gaulle said afterwards that this one show of open resistance to the Germans was an eye-opener for the Allied command, seeming, as it did, to demonstrate at least a local superiority in arms.

The occupation forces could hardly let that go unpunished. According to the official report of the prefect, on 14 December at 0730hrs German Security Police and SS troops arrived in the station of Nantua (9 miles south of Oyonnax) in a special train. Part of this force immediately set off for Oyonnax, while the others stayed in Nantua, occupying the post office and throwing a cordon round the town, inside which a house-to-house search was conducted. Denounced by informers, the mayor – a doctor who looked after wounded and sick
maquisards
– and the Gendarmerie captain were locked up in the railway station and later shot with two others.

All able-bodied men aged between
18
and
40
found in the streets or in their homes were arrested, as also were twenty-one teachers and pupils from the town’s secondary school.

They were joined by men arrested in Oyonnax until eventually 150 men and youths were forced into an unscheduled train that left at 1300hrs for Bourg and the German-run concentration camp at Compiègne.

A number of the hostages jumped from the train and escaped. The only able-bodied men left in Nantua and Oyonnax were those who had slipped through the German dragnet or had been away from home on 14 December. The prefect of the
département
of Ain noted:

The population of Nantua and Oyonnax is deeply troubled and subversive elements in the arrondissement are likely to provoke incidents. I have therefore demanded police reinforcements to keep order during the funerals of the victims and on following days.

The official announcement posted outside the Kommandantur confirmed that 150 men from Nantua between the ages of
18
and 40 had been taken for the duration of the war to a work camp in Germany. Some work camp! Of the 116 hostages still on board the train when it arrived at Compiègne only eleven lived to return home.

Oyonnax was not the only town where patriotic feelings anticipated the liberation on 11 November 1943. A smaller wreath-laying took place at Montélimar in Burgundy. Three days afterwards fourteen
maquisards
were arrested by German troops. Twelve were imprisoned at the Fort Montluc in Lyon. Given a summary trial by a German military tribunal on 15 January, they were executed on 1 February at a suburban firing range near Villeurbanne. One of them, 23-year-old Georges Bernard, wrote a last letter to his family:

My dear parents, brothers and sisters,

I am writing you these few words to give you my last news. My morale is good, right up to the last minute. Dear Papa, dear Mama, please give a big kiss to my brothers and sisters for me. I shall love them always. You can put my photo on the sideboard. We are going to be shot at 4 p.m., but that has not stopped my appetite. I’ve just eaten a good soup and some bread. Thank you, Mama, for the parcel I received at Christmas. It was very kind. Please keep this letter as a souvenir for my dearest Monique and give her a big hug. I am leaving you for ever but my heart will always be with you. I leave you with a big kiss, dear Papa and Mama. A thousand kisses for you all.

The letter is signed ‘Lili’, his family nickname.
¹²

Notes

1
More details at
www.militarymuseum.org/Ortiz.html
.

2
Dalloz, P.,
Vérités sur le Drame du Vercors
, Paris, Editions Lanore, 1979.

3
See
www.militarymuseum.org/Ortiz.html
.

4
Ibid.

5
Jenkins, R.,
A Pacifist at War
, London, Arrow, 2010, p. 3.

6
Ibid., p. 52 (abridged).

7
Quoted in his Afterword to Masson, M.,
Christine
, London, Virago, 2005, p. 278.

8
Interview by Jeremy Clay reprinted in
Leicester Mercury
,
30 June 2009.

9
A short-range radio communication system for speech between the ground and incoming aircraft.

10
Jenkins, pp. 106–7 (abridged).

11
This can be seen at
http:www.maquisdelain.org/media/11-11-1943_01.avi
.

12
Krivopissko, G. (ed.),
La Vie à en mourir – Lettres de fusillés
, Paris, Tallandier, 2003, pp. 268–9 (abridged).

FIGHTING TO THE DEATH

LIVE FREE OR DIE!

After the Teheran Conference in November 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill needed to convalesce from pneumonia brought on partly by the stress of being humiliated by Roosevelt, who had excluded him from some discussions with Stalin, partly by physical exhaustion and partly by an excessive fondness for cigars. During the time he spent recovering in the mild winter climate of Morocco, he was approached by de Gaulle and other important figures in the Free French forces, who persuaded him that equipping the thousands of
maquisards
inside France with arms and ammunition could render Operation Anvil, the planned amphibious invasion of southern France, unnecessary.

Their argument fitted in with the British prime minister’s strategic view. Although having a limited talent as a military commander, he fatally overrated this on occasion. In this case, he thought it would be better to keep the troops allocated for Anvil in Italy, pressing General ‘Smiling Albert’ Kesselring’s well-managed forces further and further northwards. It was a view not compatible with the strategic vision of President Roosevelt, General George Marshall or the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff, who planned to relax the pressure on the Allied troops in Italy by opening a bridgehead in southern France, from which Allied troops could fight their way north up the Rhône valley and rendezvous somewhere in north-eastern France with troops landed in Normandy. This pincer manoeuvre would cut off hundreds of thousands of German soldiers in central, western and southern France, denying them any possibility of retreating into the Reich and ‘living to fight another day’.

To push his alternative strategy, on return to London Churchill summoned a representative of de Gaulle’s Free French forces to a meeting with Lord Selbourne, Minister for Economic Warfare, and representatives of SOE. The message that emerged from Downing Street was for SOE to step up by all means possible arms deliveries to Maquis groups in south-eastern France. It took Selbourne two weeks to provide a cautious report on the possibilities and a promise of six sorties to be flown in the following week. Churchill replied, ‘I want March deliveries to double those planned for February.’

That would have sounded hollowly in the ears of Captain Henri Romans-Petit, now commanding all Maquis bands in Region R1, who had been pestering Heslop and the other Allied liaison officers for drops – of which none were received in his zone of activity between August 1943 and February 1944. Even before the stepping up of these airdrops, Vichy’s forces of law and order in the region were increasingly uneasy about the number of ‘bandits’, as they were officially termed, hiding out in the hilly country and forests – and whose activities ranged from hold-ups to stealing funds, ration cards and identity documents, often with the complicity of the officials concerned, to the assassination of informers and collaborators.

On 30 January 1944 a Gendarmerie colonel named Georges Lelong was posted to Grenoble as overall boss of Vichy’s police and anti-terrorist forces in the Haute Savoie
département
. One of his first acts was to publish a warning that anyone found in possession of arms or explosives would be tried by court martial without right of appeal and shot within twenty-four hours, also that anyone harbouring a fugitive would be severely dealt with.

How difficult it was for many French people in and out of uniform to determine where their allegiance lay was clear when OAS officers Clair and Anjot went to visit Lelong and sound him out. Their meeting at his headquarters in the Villa Mary at Annecy lasted for a full hour, at the end of which they decided that although he was an honest Gendarmerie officer, he had never questioned an order in his life and could not make the moral judgement that this was exactly the time to take that course. On the contrary, he told the two OAS officers that they were still under military discipline and their duty was to obey the orders of their legitimate government in Vichy.

Lelong explained that he was a French patriot and bitterly anti-German, but had been given a mission to wipe out the Maquis in Haute Savoie, which he was determined to fulfil. Clair and Anjot suggested as a compromise that their men could help him to track down the bands of real bandits in the area who lived by robbery and extortion, if he would leave the patriotic Maquis alone. Lelong made a counter-offer, proposing that they deliver to him the FTP and other communists on the plateau, in return for which he would take no immediate action against the non-political
maquisards.
They took their leave in an atmosphere of icy truce.

Heslop and Rosenthal had already approved the plateau of Glières as being suitable for airdrops. It offered a number of drop zones that were (a) not too dangerous for aircraft to use and (b) difficult for German or Vichy ground forces to reach in time to prevent collection of the supplies dropped. At a meeting in Annecy early in February, Rosenthal ordered captains Clair and Anjot to take command of an operation that would prove to London how well-led Maquis groups on the plateau of Glières could mount a major operation against the German occupation forces. The regional MUR chief Jean Guidollet later summed this discussion up as follows:

[Rosenthal] kept hammering away at the idea of concentrating our forces. ‘Actions such as sabotage are not sufficient,’ he said. ‘We have to give London the proof that the Resistance is not just talk, but a considerable force, which the Germans will have to reckon with.’ With misgivings, we adopted [Rosenthal’s] position. For my part, with the advantage of hindsight, I realise that this fateful decision was indeed the only way to force the Allies to admit that the Resistance inside France was capable of fighting. Contrary to what some people think, it was not a decision lightly taken, nor was it inspired by personal ambition, rather by a realistic appreciation of the difficulties our representatives had to overcome in London.
¹