Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  The Germans’ brutality, already extreme, escalated further. “They burned, pillaged, and killed,” Philippe de Vomécourt noted in writing about the German terror campaign in eastern France. “They slaughtered the innocent and the guilty (those belonging to the Resistance) alike. They shot a man working on a hedge. They murdered seven woodcutters going home after a morning’s work on the forest.”

  Das Reich, for its part, took out its rage on an entire village. On June 10, SS troops from the division marched into Oradour-sur-Glane, set in the woods and fields near Limoges, about 150 miles north of Toulouse. On that beautiful Saturday afternoon, Oradour, which had been an oasis of peace throughout the war, was bustling with people out for a leisurely lunch or doing their weekly shopping. Their normal Saturday routine was suddenly interrupted when the town crier beat his drum to summon all the village’s inhabitants to its small central square.

  Once all were assembled, the women and children were separated from the men and herded into a church, which was set ablaze. As the flames shot high, SS troops opened fire on the screaming villagers trapped inside, while soldiers formed a cordon outside the church to make sure no one got out alive. The men of Oradour, meanwhile, were shoved into nearby garages and barns, where they were mowed down by machine-gun fire. More than 600 people died that day, including 190 children and babies.

  The wholesale killings in Oradour were followed a month later by another spasm of German savagery, this time aimed at more than three thousand resistance fighters who had established themselves on a mountainous plateau called Vercors, near the city of Grenoble in the French Alps. On July 3, the maquis at Vercors had declared the plateau a free republic, with its own laws, currency, and flag—“a foolish but very understandable act, given their passionate need to erase the shame of 1940,” noted Francis Cammaerts, who by then had been appointed head of all Allied sabotage missions in southeastern France. The Vercors maquis, convinced that the Allies would send them supplies and arms and would soon reinforce them with regular troops, planned to make a stand against the Germans on the plateau. But they had neither the training nor the artillery or other heavy weapons needed to act as a conventional fighting force. Their job was to harass the enemy and stay on the move, not to pin him down. In a pitched battle with the Germans, there was no way they could win.

  Cammaerts, foreseeing imminent disaster, frantically urged London to dispatch men and heavy weapons to Vercors, predicting a bloodbath if they were not sent. Both SOE and de Gaulle’s Algiers headquarters dropped several hundred containers of rifles and other light weapons, none of which could hold off a concerted German attack.

  On July 20, dozens of gliders appeared in the sky over Vercors. The maquis were overjoyed, thinking the Allies had finally come to save them. Then they saw that the gliders were German. Thousands of crack SS troops had been sent to crush the rebellion, and crush it they did. Over the next three days, more than 650 resistance fighters were killed. The Germans also raped, tortured, and murdered more than 250 inhabitants of a nearby village.

  Like Oradour and Lidice in Czechoslovakia, Vercors would take its place in history as an unforgettable symbol of Nazi barbarity.

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  IF ONLY THE MEN of Vercors had waited until August to launch their republic, they and their dreams of freedom might have survived. On August 15, ten Allied divisions, made up of U.S. and French forces, landed on the beaches of southern France in a campaign called Operation Dragoon. Within seven days, the troops had stormed up the Rhône Valley and reached Grenoble, 180 miles to the north. As the military historian Rick Atkinson observed, the enemy in southern France “never had a chance.” One reason was the aid given by local resistance forces.

  Thanks to intelligence provided by underground groups, the invaders knew beforehand “the underwater obstacles, we knew everything about that beach and where every German was, and we clobbered them!” said Colonel William Quinn, the chief intelligence officer of the U.S. Seventh Army. The French, Quinn added, “told us everything we wanted to know.”

  CBS’s Eric Sevareid, who accompanied the Dragoon forces, said that “the Allies had never before had such precise information about the German defenses and the location, numbers, and condition of their troops. When we landed, all our officers carried maps indicating not only the location of every farmhouse but the name of the farmer living there, over an area of hundreds of square miles. Within two days, all our invading forces, including airborne men in the back country, were linked in one solid front.”

  Having received coded alerts from the BBC about the landings, resistance fighters in several coastal towns and cities rose up against their occupiers as the Allies invaded. In Saint-Raphaël, “the shopkeepers were upon the Germans’ backs” as the first troops hit the beaches, Sevareid noted. By the time troops reached nearby Saint-Tropez, they found that local Frenchmen had already captured or killed more than a hundred Germans and that the German garrison there had been surrounded. When Allied forces arrived in Marseille, much of that city, too, was in the hands of its inhabitants. According to Field Marshal Henry Maitland Wilson, the supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean, “the resistance reduced the fighting efficiency of the Wehrmacht in southern France to 40 percent at the moment of the landings.”

  As German troops retreated up the Rhône Valley, members of Francis Cammaerts’s Jockey network were “yapping at their heels like angry terriers closing in on a fox” and helping clear the way for the French and American infantry following closely behind. When an American tank unit reached the town of Gap, about seventy miles from Grenoble, it expected to have to fight its way in. But it found the Germans already gone, and, instead of a battle, it took part in a victory parade.

  “What the resistance achieved in the Alps of France is quite straightforward,” Cammaerts declared after the war. “The troops that landed on August 15 got through to Grenoble in seven days…because there was no fighting. The Alps had already been taken over by the resistance. That to my mind is an enormous achievement, which saved tens of thousands of lives.”

  French resistance fighters guarding captured German soldiers.

  As it happened, Cammaerts almost didn’t live to see that day. Two days before Operation Dragoon began, he and two other SOE officers were arrested at a German roadblock. They were taken to the nearest Gestapo headquarters and interrogated. Although his interrogators had no idea that they had caught the notorious “Roger,” they decided that Cammaerts and his colleagues were indeed spies and ordered them shot.

  When Christine Granville, Cammaerts’s SOE courier, found out about the arrests, she headed immediately to the jail where the three men were being held. Granville, a twenty-six-year-old native of Poland whose real name was Krystyna Skarbeka, was well-known in SOE circles for her beauty, charm, and extraordinary audacity. Confronting the official in charge, she told him that the U.S. troops’ arrival was imminent and that he would be tracked down and killed if Cammaerts and the others were shot. He agreed to release them but demanded a ransom of 2 million French francs in return. Two days later, after a courier from Algiers had brought her the money, she handed it over, and the three SOE officers were freed, just two hours before their scheduled execution.

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  PRIOR TO D-DAY, the Allied military commanders had been highly skeptical about the effectiveness of the French underground once the landings occurred. Some generals thought that the resistance fighters would be more of a hindrance than a help, while others expected that any support they provided would last only a few days at best. “It is probable,” according to one report from Eisenhower’s headquarters, “that action…will be taken for only a few days, after which stores and enthusiasm will begin to run low.”

  In fact, as Eisenhower himself acknowledged in his memoirs, the resistance was “of inestimable value in the [French] campaign. Without their great assistance, the liberation of France would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves.” In a letter to SOE hea
d Colin Gubbins in May 1945, Eisenhower elaborated on the importance of the wartime accomplishments of resistance movements throughout occupied Europe. “In no previous war, and in no other theater during this war, have resistance forces been so closely harnessed to the main military effort,” he wrote. “I consider that the disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road movements, and the continual strain placed on the German war economy and internal security services throughout occupied Europe by the organized forces of resistance played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.”

  OSS director William Donovan also gave high marks to the French underground’s contributions. In a letter to President Harry S. Truman, Donovan, whose intelligence and sabotage agents played an active role in the fighting in France, wrote that the battle for that country “showed as never before the extent of the assistance that an oppressed people, given supplies and leadership, can render its allies in the course of its liberation.”

  Yet despite these encomiums, considerable controversy remains about the value of the work of the resistance in France and elsewhere in Europe. “One may ask if an enterprise in which around 75,000 French men and women, some of whom were résistants while others were mere innocents caught up in savage German reprisals, perished in German concentration camps, and another 20,000 died in France, often after horrible torture, was worth the fairly trifling return in intelligence and ‘action,’ ” the American military historian Douglas Porch has written. Porch maintained that “in the end, the Allies achieved victory by outproducing German factories and defeating German armies in the field. Sadly, one is driven toward the conclusion that the contribution of the Resistance to that victory…was minimal…[the effort] weighed little in the war’s strategic balance.”

  Porch is hardly the only historian to contend that the impact of the resistance in France and elsewhere was greatly exaggerated. The skeptics’ reaction was in part a response to the tidal wave of books published since the war celebrating the exploits of SOE, its officers, and the resistance as a whole and in some cases minimizing the enormous errors made by SOE.

  Even more, however, such questioning was meant as a corrective to General de Gaulle’s contention that French resistance had been widespread and had been largely responsible for the country’s liberation. Though that claim was clearly false, de Gaulle persisted in making it after the war—a “necessary myth” that he hoped would heal the divisions in the nation and erase the shameful stain of its capitulation and official collaboration with Germany. In the view of one French historian, “de Gaulle had to convince the French that they had resisted. It was necessary that they disguise the truth from themselves.”

  Yet even though it’s obviously true that the Allied armies were primarily responsible for liberating France, it’s also true that the resistance movement, admittedly made up of only a small minority of French men and women, played an important contributing role when it was needed most: during and after the Allied invasion. As Julian Jackson has rightly noted, “If there had been no Resistance, France would still have been liberated, [but] if there were no Resistance, the Liberation would have cost the Allies significantly higher casualties.” In Jackson’s view, there was indeed “a Resistance myth which needed to be punctured, but that does not mean that the Resistance was a myth.”

  For those like Airey Neave, who actually had dealings with the resistance movements of occupied Europe during the war, the idea of historians examining their efforts as if they were figures on a balance sheet was distinctly offensive. “In recent years, attempts by professional historians in Britain to describe the actions and errors of men and women who fought the Nazis underground have assumed an unpleasant air of disdain,” Neave wrote two decades after the conflict. “Academic writers have attempted to belittle their contribution to the war. That they would not have written in this vein had they taken part themselves is self-evident. No one who saw secret agents actually leave for occupied territory could afford such arrogance.”

  Others, such as Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, the deputy commander of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), have argued that the debate about the military contribution of the French resistance was beside the point. “While its military successes were undoubtedly worthwhile,” Tedder wrote, “I believe that we ought to judge the Resistance in France on quite a different basis….Its greatest victory was that it kept the flame of the French spirit burning throughout the dark years of the Occupation.” In joining the resistance, French men and women were able to shed their sense of isolation and shame and gain a feeling of community and self-respect. In working to reclaim their country, they reclaimed themselves as well.

  Eric Sevareid, one of the most astute and eloquent writers about the French wartime experience, made this point in his excellent autobiography Not So Wild a Dream. “A man whose army and country have suffered defeat is not a complete man afterwards; no matter how healthy his body, he is always a little sick,” he wrote. “The conditions of defeat do not count. No matter if he fought bravely himself, no matter if his army never had a chance, no matter if he was betrayed by treasonable leaders—he remains a cripple….It does not suffice that others restore his country. He must act again himself if he would recover.

  “And this is, at bottom, why Frenchmen acted. This is why they never waited until invading troops insured their lives, but rose up in every village and city before we arrived, sometimes days before, and did things that were reckless, sometimes useless, but always magnificent and of imperishable memory. An Allied soldier would shake his head with incredulity to see a French farmer assault a German machine gun with a single grenade and a pistol. He would say, ‘These Frogs are crazy,’ not understanding why the farmer had to do this, even if he died in its doing.”

  In midsummer 1944, Allied forces were fast approaching two occupied capitals: Paris and Warsaw. For the one, the summer would end in the joy of liberation; for the other, it would end in a firestorm of death and destruction.

  In late July, the people of Poland would have given anything to see the U.S. and British armies, now closing in on Paris, “standing at Warsaw’s gates,” a Polish resistance fighter observed. Instead, their centuries-old enemies, the Russians, were nearing the city.

  Several weeks earlier, the Red Army, advancing along a thousand-mile front, had swept German troops out of eastern Poland, now claimed by Stalin. The Soviet troops had then pushed westward into territory that no one, not even Stalin, could contend was anything but Polish. Yet on July 22, the Kremlin announced the formation of the Committee of National Liberation—a small group of Polish communists handpicked by Stalin—and proclaimed it the legitimate interim civil government in Polish territories that the Soviets had captured from the Germans. The committee would set up shop in Lublin, the first major city in Poland to be freed from German control. It was possible, Stalin said, that in time it might become the nucleus of a new Polish government.

  For members of the Polish Home Army, this was calamitous news. As they saw it, they had two options: do nothing and let Stalin take over all of Poland through his puppet government, or rise up against the Nazis and try to establish control themselves.

  Since 1939, the Polish underground’s primary goal had been to launch a national uprising when the moment was right. And in late July 1944, the Home Army’s leaders believed that the time had finally arrived. The swift Soviet advance across Poland had made a nationwide uprising impossible, but there was still hope that the Home Army could at least drive the Germans out of Warsaw and take control of the capital before the Russians got there. Some 35,000 officers and troops of the Home Army were based in Warsaw, all eager to fight for Poland in this critical hour. “National dignity and pride required that the capital should be liberated by the Poles themselves,” said a top underground official. “What kind of an army would it be, what sort of government, that, being in the capital, failed to take part in the battle for the liberation of the city?”
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  The Home Army’s plans were based, however, on the assumption that Allied airlifts would bring in reinforcements. Living, as one underground official later put it, “in a world of illusion,” the Home Army’s leaders believed that Britain and the United States would rush arms and men to support the uprising once it broke out. Furthermore, they were convinced that their Western allies would pressure the Soviets to do the same.

  In the last week of July, the situation grew increasingly urgent. Red Army patrols were spotted a few miles from Warsaw, and panicked German troops began to stream out of the city. On July 26, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, the commander of the Home Army, radioed the Polish government in exile in London that “we are ready to fight for Warsaw at any moment. I will report the date and hour of the beginning of the fight.” He asked that Polish fighter and bomber squadrons and the Polish 1st Parachute Brigade, which had been created and trained in Britain for precisely this moment, be sent to Warsaw as soon as possible. He also requested Allied bombing attacks on German airfields near the capital and the immediate dispatch of arms, ammunition, and other equipment.

  Up to that point, neither the British chiefs of staff nor SOE had definitively informed the Home Army that it would not receive Allied aid in the event of an uprising. Only now did the British military make it clear that the hopes of the Polish resistance hadn’t the slightest chance of being fulfilled. Focused as they were on postinvasion operations in Normandy, British commanders told the Polish government in exile that the Home Army’s requests were “completely impossible.” The Polish bomber squadrons in the RAF were currently engaged in raids over Germany, while Polish fighters were providing support for Allied troops in Normandy, as well as making strafing and bombing runs against enemy ground targets and escorting bombers and ship convoys. The Polish parachute brigade, meanwhile, had been put under the command of General Bernard Law Montgomery for deployment in western Europe.