The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (24 page)

This was all very well for most units of the Résistance, although bitterly disappointing, but almost impossible for the Vercors Maquis, which had been encouraged to adopt a stronghold strategy. The regional Résistance commander appealed to the Free French under de Gaulle in Algiers: ‘Vercors, two thousand volunteers to be armed. Initial enthusiasm undermined by failure to send promised arms. Extremely urgent. Need men, weapons, tobacco here within forty-eight hours maximum. Full-strength attack possible. Under present conditions, impossible to resist. Failure to comply will entail merciless reprisals. Would be disastrous for regional Résistance.’

An even more desperate message was sent the following day: ‘For Vercors, I repeat, urgent need for Maquis-type arms for eighteen light companies, heavy weapons for six companies. Once armed, these forces will prove absolutely indispensable to Vercors. They will then be ready for offensive operations in all directions. Mobilisation has been ordered on strength of formal assurances we would receive weapons. Failure to keep promise immediately will create tragic situation.’

The concept of a mountain guerrilla redoubt, known as Operation Montagnards, had originally been mooted early in 1943. It was the brainchild of Pierre Dalloz, an architect with a passion for mountaineering who retired with his wife to live on an isolated farm in the Vercors region. Dalloz had proposed an impregnable mountain fortress in the Vercors where the passes could easily be held by a small number of men, and the plateau itself could be prepared to receive a regular army airborne force, complete with trucks and heavy artillery. Once the Allies invaded the south of France, the Résistance of Vercors could be unleashed - a bomb that would explode in the midst of an enemy already under attack and on the defensive.

The final plan for putting the Vercors plateau to military use was ambitious. It called for seven thousand, five hundred men under fifteen commands with four hundred and fifty scouts. Weaponry was to include almost a thousand machine guns, a thousand automatic rifles, six thousand pistols, five anti-tank cannon and fifteen mortars, with ammunition amounting to ten times the total weight of the weaponry. The strategy was for the Maquis to install themselves in the mountains by stealth with the object of staging hit-and-run operations against the enemy to create maximum disorder. The Résistance would push forward in every direction, and only fall back when enemy forces proved too great.

The plan was supported by Jean Moulin, president of the National Council of the Résistance, and the general in charge of the Secret Army, who personally proposed it to de Gaulle’s staff in London. The Vercors Maquis knew that the plan had been accepted when the BBC broadcast the coded message ‘The Montagnards must climb to the top’, and believed they had been allotted a specific and important role in the strategy of the Allied invasion.

At the beginning of 1943 there were only eighty-five
résistants
in the Vercors in a single camp on a remote farm. There had been hope of invasion in the summer, but instead it brought the arrest, torture and death of Jean Moulin, and the capture of the head of the Secret Army - both operations masterminded by Barbie.
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Another local disaster that summer was the capture of fifteen
résistants
after a failed attack on a gasoline dump. They were tortured and somebody talked, resulting in the arrest of several of the leading Vercors Maquis.

The Résistance was reorganised with separate military commands for the northern and southern sections of the plateau. Active commandos were separated from reserves and stationed in groups of various sizes in new camps. The reserves only took up arms for specific missions and then returned to their daily lives. An elaborate warning system was set up using foresters and Résistance sympathisers within the Road and Bridges Department and the gendarmerie. In one recruitment drive that was particularly daring and innovative, the Résistance liberated Senegalese prisoners working as orderlies in Lyon for German officers, and took them back to Vercors.

Supply drops from the Allies began at the end of the year when a hundred containers filled with weapons, ammunition and equipment were parachuted in. The head of the Secret Army had hoped the Vercors Maquis would refrain from unnecessary risk until Allied operations were concentrated on the western front. But it was not easy to hold back the young, who became bored and edgy in inactivity, and failed to believe France would be liberated by endless sessions of unarmed combat.

When the Special Operations Executive (SOE) - an independent British secret service set up to conduct clandestine war against the Germans in Europe - made contact with the Vercors Maquis early in 1944 they found three thousand
résistants
, five hundred of whom were already lightly armed and organised into ten-man commando groups. But there were also men trained in heavy weapons who could make an HQ company if supplied with machine guns and mortars. ‘A very effective, organised army,’ was the SOE verdict, ‘but their supplies are not what they need; they need long distance weapons and anti-tank weapons.’

An attack on a German military police unit attracted enemy attention to the area, and the Germans responded with severely repressive measures. A German column of thirty trucks containing three hundred troops, spearheaded by an armoured car and backed up by two thirty-seven-millimetre cannon, forced its way into the terrain, and the Maquis proved unable to stop it.

Although the Maquis operated well militarily - holding up convoys, attacking soldiers and then disappearing into the forests and mountains - there was no defence from retribution against the civilian population. Fifty men were surrounded and twenty
résistants
killed, including eight who were burned alive in a farmhouse. A presbytery which served as a command post was dynamited, while in one area five hundred Milice instigated house searches and checkups, interrogating and torturing inhabitants. Houses were torched, there were summary executions, and young men were handed over to the Germans for deportation. The myth of Vercors’ impregnability was severely dented. Yet, despite the clear demonstration that the Germans could penetrate the stronghold at will, the Résistance refused to learn the lesson. It responded by making plans to reinforce the plateau’s defences.

The SOE Résistance organiser for the area told London that the Vercors operation made no military sense at all unless there was an invasion within three weeks. He also made repeated requests for heavy weapons as it was apparent that in any direct confrontation with the Germans the Résistance needed better weapons, particularly heavy machine guns and mortars, even artillery. London replied, ‘There are scarcely enough mortars for the regular army.’

In reality, the Maquis of the Vercors, and the plan for Operation Montagnards, had never been given much serious thought in London. Although it had initially been received with enthusiasm, and fed a romantic and unrealistic view of the Résistance’s military capabilities, the irregular warfare experts were opposed. The concentration of large numbers of Maquis forces in a fixed place broke all the rules of guerrilla warfare, inviting attack. In London the plan had been filed and forgotten, and it never became explicit Allied policy.

There had always been conflict between the regular army officers of the Free French and the British special warfare people. The Free French wanted to see France liberated by Résistance forces, in reality an impossibility. The FFI had formulated a plan where instead of the Maquis harrying the enemy’s passage across French territory, large groups would move on to the offensive, seize control of set positions and hold them. Forgotten completely was the fundamental proviso of the originator of Operation Montagnards: it could only work as a supplementary mission to an Allied invasion of the south. Vercors was a disaster waiting to happen.

In the absence of arms and food drops the Résistance was encouraged to improvise, and they set out to steal what they could from the Germans. Michel’s commando group gathered on the outskirts of a village awaiting the arrival of a truck that they were going to take on a raid to seize food supplies. As the time came for the rendezvous they found themselves surrounded by German troops. Michel immediately ordered his men to disperse, which was the only course of action possible on being directly confronted by regular German troops. The commandos scattered in every direction, and Michel moved up a small road into the mountains.

The Germans pursued him along parallel roads and shot at him across the fields. Michel was wearing a hat, trench coat, horn-rimmed glasses and a beard fashioned from one of Thérèse Mathieu’s hairpieces. As he turned a curve in the road, he quickly abandoned his gun and the disguise. He then walked further up the lane, turned sharp right and made directly towards a German roadblock. He was taken for a local and allowed through.

The commandos regrouped in the late afternoon, but three of their number were missing. They returned cautiously to the site of the ambush in an attempt to discover the fate of their comrades. ‘The Germans did not take the Maquis prisoners but treated them as terrorists. They had executed the wounded and left them where they lay.’ Two of the men were dead, but one - André Valat, Michel’s adjutant - somehow survived four bullets, three of which were fired into him at point-blank range. In the skirmish he had been wounded in the chest and leg and had been unable to walk. The Germans had found him, fired two more bullets into his neck to finish him off, and left him for dead. The bullet that had hit him in the chest actually displaced his heart without touching it. The two bullets fired into the neck exited through his cheek, leaving gaping wounds. Despite a gruelling journey to the Résistance field hospital in the mountains, which offered primitive care at best, he survived. We had to stage a mock funeral and bury an empty coffin in the Biviers cemetery to protect his family from interrogation.’
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Michel returned to join the St Marie du Mont Maquis, and reported to the regional commander, Dax. He then went to sleep, exhausted. At dawn he was woken up by Maquis guards who said that a large force of Alpine SS troops was on the way. The entire Maquis of some two hundred men retreated into a mountain position which involved scaling a steep cliff to reach a plateau. ‘Dax assumed the Germans would not pursue us. In this he was completely wrong. We took up military positions and put machine guns in place.’

At the top of the cliff Michel could hear German voices drifting up from below and reported to Dax that he believed the Alpine troops were going to attack
en masse
. The commander suggested taking the one road out, but Michel advised dispersing individually into the wooded mountain terrain the men knew so well. Dax agreed, and by the time the SS troops reached the plateau the Maquis had disappeared.

‘I climbed further into the mountains. On the following day I experienced the most unforgettable dawn of my life. The mist hung over the boulders, and the trees were moist with morning dew. I could hear cow bells tinkling in some distant meadow. It was a pastoral idyll, so far from the war. I felt for a brief moment that I was in a different world, away from everything. The beauty of that dawn in the mountains was an incredible moment of calm and peace in the midst of war.’

The Germans now launched a strong offensive on the village of St Nizier, situated at the northern tip of the plateau at the top of a road winding up from Grenoble. The village was both the heavily defended gatehouse to Vercors and its Achilles’ heel. A force of fifteen hundred regular troops attacked two hundred and fifty
maquisards
who, in spite of being armed with only light weapons, held them off. The Germans brought in reinforcements and there was hand-to-hand fighting, but the day was saved when a section of Chasseurs Alpines - French Armistice Army troops disbanded by the Germans - arrived in a bus and strengthened the defence. The enemy retreated under a rain of grenades, leaving sixty dead. The Résistance had lost ten men and their bodies were laid out in the rear of the local church. That night triumphant
résistants
were able to look down from the heights of St Nizier on to Grenoble as it slept. One wrote in his diary how peaceful the town looked.

In the early hours of the morning Allied planes from Algiers made a parachute drop. This comprised of only light weapons and ammunition, but it raised morale. It remained high throughout the day when the Germans stayed in Grenoble, content to lob forty-five heavy artillery shells into the village without result. They renewed their attack at dawn the following day when three thousand troops stormed the village following an artillery barrage, and this time they were better armed, with heavy weapons. Mortars might have saved the day for the Maquis but there were none. The Milice, unshaven and raggedly dressed to look like
maquisards
, infiltrated the defence, calling, ‘Don’t shoot, comrades!’ They then opened fire with automatic weapons.

The Germans stormed the defences and set the village alight. The bodies of the dead were taken from the church and thrown into the flames. Although heavy losses were inflicted on the enemy, the Résistance lost a further twenty-four men. Another message was sent to Algiers: ‘We’ve been attacked in force. We urge you to hurry. You are putting us in a catastrophic position. We’ve run out of ammunition. You bear full responsibility for our Résistance.’

The Maquis had lost control of St Nizier, the gate to Vercors, but the Germans had been confronted with far heavier fighting than expected. They did not launch another offensive for more than a month. The respite was a heady, unreal time for the Maquis, who now lived under the illusion of victory and imminent liberation. The Republic of Vercors became famous throughout the country and struck a chord in the heart of every loyal Frenchman. Newspapers all over the world talked of the magnificent heroism of the tiny republic, and volunteers flocked to the plateau. A series of parachute drops helped the command rearm and resupply its forces. The Maquis of the Vercors now became a regular military force, with staff officers, a quartermaster corps, medical service, military courts and a stockade for captured collaborators and Milice. Life took on the quality it had before the war, and the tricolour flew brazenly from houses in every hamlet and village.