by Clare Mulley
Good communications were vital, not only to coordinate operations, but because resistance circuits were networks ‘irrigated by personal trust’.45 It was not just about personal security; it was about staying sensitive to the various political allegiances of the different groups: Communists; Socialists; Gaullists who like their general felt that nobody should operate in France without their knowledge and consent; regular soldiers ‘who were the best of them’; those Francis called the ‘Dynamic Active’ who were attracted by pure patriotism and the need for action; and the natural outlaw element whom he described as ‘Marseilles gangsters in port-loafers with a taste for adventure’.46 The Communists were criticized for taking overt actions that might lead to civilian reprisals, but when it came to getting things done they were generally considered the most effective, and not above hijacking an operation, stealing the explosives and equipment for the job, and doing it first.
Above all, Christine had to keep the men motivated while continually reinforcing Francis’s policy of sticking to targeted hit-and-run operations and deferring any overt uprising until the Allies had landed in the south, when their combined work would have maximum impact. It helped that she made friends everywhere, partly because she was brave and reliable, and always willing to stop and listen, but also because she was an outsider. Christine’s motives were clear: she was, like the French, working with the English voluntarily to defeat a common enemy, but she remained, to Francis’s deep admiration, ‘a completely independent human being, answerable to nobody’.47 In addition, she was more experienced than just about anyone there, a professional among amateurs. Francis soon noticed that ‘any society Christine moved in, a group of formidable orthodox French officers, or a group of extremely simple peasants working under Communist leadership, the same reaction would be felt: here is someone we can rely on without asking a single question, with no hesitation … she was admired by people who’d only met her for two or three minutes, as being someone quite out of the ordinary’.48 Christine was able to talk to anyone, from any walk of life, with neither false humility nor haughty self-satisfaction. In fact she seemed to disregard herself entirely, always giving her full, flattering, attention to those she was with, and fixing them with her ‘searchlight’ gaze as effectively as she had the officers in Cairo.
As well as the active groups, Francis believed that the great majority of the French population were passive resisters. SNCF railway staff provided overalls, spanners and travel passes, actively sabotaged tracks and locomotives, drained engine oil, and misrouted German troops and supplies. Large numbers of the Gendarmerie supported the resistance, too, and would occasionally arrest members of the Jockey circuit on one side of Nazi checkpoints only to release them safely unsearched on the other. Only a tiny proportion of the population, ‘a very bad type indeed’, Francis wrote bitterly, actively collaborated.49 These ranged from barbers, barmen or brothel-keepers paid to inform on their clients, to the Milice, the uniformed paramilitary police force created by the Vichy government – possibly the most loathed of all Free France’s enemies.
On a hillside overlooking Guillestre, a few days after de Gaulle had issued instructions to the resistance to execute every member of the Milice, a Jockey team brought a milicien to Francis. The man’s hands were tied at the wrists. A few questions elicited his name, that he was just twenty years old, had joined the Milice of his own accord, and did not know what this meant for him now. Francis told him it meant execution. Then he shot him in the back of the head. The young collaborator was buried on the spot. ‘I had to do that because I couldn’t ask someone else to do it’, Francis later said with obvious difficulty about the execution.50 With no facility to keep the man a prisoner, and the names and addresses of the circuit compromised, the principled pacifist had had no other option.
Over time, the Jockey cells had become cleverer and more daring in their operations. It was far more effective to put a train out of action inside a tunnel, requiring the engine to be pulled out before repairs could be made, and if the crane coming to the scene could be hit too, so much the better. Christine supported certain sabotage attacks, helping to disrupt most of the roads and the main railway lines along which the Germans were sending reinforcements north, including the Route Hannibal and the Route Napoléon. As well as trains, the circuit was now attacking aircraft, bridges and oil and petrol depots, and increasing their ambushes on Wehrmacht troops. Smaller ‘mosquito bite’ operations, involving ripping down phone lines, pouring sand into oil containers, and changing the destination labels on German supply trains, kept up the groups’ spirits while they waited for the delivery of munitions. By midsummer even a tree across a road could cause the enemy hours of delay as they searched the surrounding woods, firing into the undergrowth. An excellent shot, Francis always carried a Mauser. He had been issued with a Colt .45 both times he left for the field, only to watch one thrown into a river the night he arrived, and report the second as ‘lost’. Christine, whose revolver had smashed on arrival, preferred not to carry a gun.*
All in all, the Jockey circuit was proving a ‘serious menace to the enemy’, and Francis’s personal leadership in both organizing and carrying out the actions was endearing him greatly to his men, and to Christine.51 Delighted to be in the field again, with a renewed sense of purpose and a regular rush of adrenalin, Christine was thoroughly enjoying herself and, Francis noticed with a hint of pride, even ‘in the most difficult situations, she would sometimes be shaking with laughter’.52
Christine and Francis were the perfect partners in crime. Needing next to no direction, she was soon in effect acting as his second-in-command, usually on her own initiative, and becoming notably cooler the tighter the situation. ‘Christine is magnificent’, Francis signalled Brooks Richards in Algiers a few weeks after her arrival. ‘What couldn’t I have done if she had been here three months ago!’53 His wire almost crossed with one from Christine filing her own, similar report. ‘Dear Brooks, “Roger” is a magnificent person. The unity of the whole of the south of France depends upon him’, she enthused before demanding, ‘you must support him and back up his prestige’.54 Brooks Richards didn’t mind the lecture; he trusted Christine’s judgement, and was delighted that this difficult but brilliant agent was so effectively employed.
Magnificent, magnificent. There was a strange symmetry to the partnership between Christine and Francis. Both were highly trained but essentially self-motivated, guided above all by a deeply held moral code. Both were superb at self-preservation, positive, popular, cool-headed in a crisis, but at the same time hugely vulnerable, being hunted by a Gestapo who not only had both of their photographs but were offering large sums for their arrest. And both were absolutely dedicated to their countries’ shared cause: the defeat of Nazi Germany. The British would later maintain that Francis was ‘one of the most successful agents we ever sent into France’, and his partnership with Christine would make SOE history.
11: THE BATTLE OF VERCORS
On the beautifully clear morning of 14 July 1944, less than a week after arriving in France, Christine and her new friend Sylviane Rey took part in a defiantly patriotic Bastille Day parade in medieval Die, in the Drôme valley. Although it was not yet half past nine, the air in the little mountain town was already warm and the tables outside the café-bar were busy, when the now familiar drone of engines made Christine glance up. Soon everyone was watching in awe. Seventy-two silver American ‘Flying Fortresses’, with a fighter escort circling round the heavier four-engine bombers, were coming in, very low, twelve in a line, bringing supplies to the Maquis camps up on the wooded plateau of the Vercors. The planes ejected their containers which separated, caught on their parachutes and drifted momentarily in the haze. The local curate estimated there were over a thousand red, white and blue chutes, the different colours indicating their contents but also making a powerful statement on the first Bastille Day since the Allied invasion of France. It was a historic moment. In June, thirty-six British-based American A
ir Force Liberators had brought a few hundred containers, but this was the largest daylight sortie of the war, and the Allies’ greatest effort to help the French Maquis. The seventy-two planes at Vercors were part of a force of 400 Flying Fortresses organized by Gubbins with authority from General Eisenhower. ‘The effect of these great planes flying in swarms low over the centre and south of France, dropping their loads to selected areas’, Gubbins wrote proudly, ‘was like an electric shock of stimulation.’1 Certainly Christine, Sylviane and half the village were galvanized to set off at once and help collect the supplies.
Up in the Vercors hills the maquisards were elated, literally shouting in joy. ‘The sky was filled with a hundred Allied planes glittering in the sunlight’, one recorded. The planes flew over the landing strip while fixing their positions, and then circled round again, flying low this time, and ‘sowing hundreds of parachutes which burst open in the blue sky like the corolla of white flowers, descending joyously … it was a magnificent fête!’ ‘A splendid spectacle!’ another wrote in his diary, ‘the noise filled the whole plateau and must have been heard in the plain of Valence.’2 Then the planes dipped their wings in salute, catching the sun one last time, and ‘vanished into the clouds’. More containers were dropped in this sortie than in all the preceding months, over a thousand altogether, and among the Sten guns, ammunition and clothes were boxes of cornflakes and packets of American cigarettes tied with tricolore bands and handwritten messages: ‘Bravo lads. Vive la France!’3
But the drop had taken place in daylight, the ‘parachutes clear as hell against the sky’, Francis commented bitterly.4 Within half an hour a German reconnaissance plane flew over and strafed the drop zone. Everyone ran for cover except Christine who, looking up at them with her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, ‘seemed so serene and unconcerned’, according to Sylviane, that those around her almost questioned their own reactions.5 Half an hour later two more fighters appeared, this time heading for the hills. ‘Les Amerlots!’ the cry went up.6 It was only when the planes’ swastikas were clearly visible that the maquisards realized these were not more Allies. The planes flew low, skimming the roofs of the Vercors towns to empty their machine guns. Seven hours of bombing followed. In Vassieux-en-Vercors the town’s schoolchildren were caught among incendiary bombs that sent flames thirty metres into the air, but most managed to hide in cellars and the local caves. When they dared to come out again, at eleven that night, ‘the town had been destroyed’, rubble and bodies lying in piles where houses, church and boulangerie had stood that morning, and the Vercors plateau was surrounded by Wehrmacht troops.7
The Vercors is an immense, blue-grey limestone plateau in the shape of an arrowhead, about forty miles long, eighteen wide, and in places reaching heights of 1,000 metres. Sitting between the departments of the Drôme and the Isère, this high plain marks the connection of four major communication routes from Grenoble to Aix, Marseille and Nice. Breathtakingly beautiful, on most sides the plateau is bounded by sheer chalk cliffs; elsewhere the landscape is almost Alpine. Its huge river gorges and dense beech and pine forests, full of wild chamois, protect several small villages with rich orchards and farmlands, and its many rocky outcrops hide extensive caves below. It is hard to imagine better territory in which to shelter a growing clandestine army.
By early 1943 Germany’s diminished labour force was straining to meet its production requirements. The Nazis had already brought over Polish workers, who were doing a good job of limiting their useful output while, wherever possible, sending supplies back to the Polish underground. On 15 February 1943 Germany put into action the Service du Travail Obligatoire, or STO, in France, to tap into French labour resources. The Vercors, which had already been used as a training base for local resistance groups, now became a magnet for thousands of young Frenchmen avoiding conscription for forced labour in Germany or even dispatch to the Russian front. Many set up camps among the dense forests on the Vercors plateau. They were not paid and had no false papers or ration cards, so they, and the families they had left behind, somehow had to be supported. Most were dressed in civilian clothes, with heavy-duty boots, baggy trousers and jumpers over open-necked shirts, and blue berets or flat caps on their heads. Others wore faded pinstripe suits, or a few bits of uniform kept from the last war. Some had no shoes and had to make moccasins out of tough parachute silk. At first they also had very few arms. Nevertheless they formed into units with strong chains of command and communications, arranged supplies of food, clothes and equipment through local farmers and existing resistance networks, and trained their dogs to bark at strangers from further down the slopes. The French Maquis had been born.
By May 1943 there were several hundred Maquis in the hills. ‘Vercors has a finely organised army,’ Francis reported to London, ‘but they need long-distance and anti-tank weapons.’8 The response was ambiguous. Experience in Yugoslavia had already demonstrated the Wehrmacht’s ability to deal effectively with guerrilla forces, and yet there were clearly the makings of a significant resistance army in the Vercors, one that could be hugely valuable in hampering Nazi communications and troop movement in the run-up to the Allied invasion. As a result, light arms were dropped, and carried into the camps by foot or in farm carts but, to intense French frustration, no heavy weapons followed.
Francis too had mixed feelings about the Maquis. On the one hand he recognized their potential as a guerrilla army which, if organized into small groups, armed and trained, could mount effective sabotage and ambush attacks. To this end he joined local leaders from the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, or FFI, the well-organized French resistance loyal to de Gaulle, to give advice, and instruction in the use of Sten sub-machine guns and revolvers. He even loaned them Albert and his radio. But Francis was also critical of this army-in-waiting, believing it was more useful, if more dangerous, to stay at home, derailing trains by night and returning to work as usual the next day, ‘than to sit in the woods and behave like a boy scout’.9 Nonetheless, by the end of 1943 there were eight large camps, each with eighty to a hundred men, sleeping in hastily constructed huts, lean-tos or tents made from parachute silk, and hundreds more living in shepherds’ huts, in the villages, or on local farms across the Vercors.
As far as possible Francis was determined to keep his Jockey sabotage network separate, while encouraging the Maquis to develop along similar lines. He felt that the value of the Vercors plateau lay mainly in its potential as an Allied landing site, and as a shelter for a shadow army able to attack German forces repeatedly in small ways, in a hundred different places, without ever showing where they could be attacked in turn. The basic tenet of guerrilla warfare was, after all, never to try to hold a position, but to do as much damage as possible and disappear. Furthermore, SOE agents had been directed to take ‘particular care … to avoid premature large-scale risings of patriots’.10 However, by the autumn of 1943 the French had started working on a grander plan. The Vercors plateau was now being referred to as ‘an impregnable citadel’, to be championed as free territory before Allied reinforcements arrived.11 In the spring of 1944 news came, via a BBC radio ‘personal message’, that General de Gaulle had personally approved the idea, and that up to 4,000 paratroops would be dropped into the Vercors.
Over a few optimistic weeks, dropping zones were prepared on the plateau, code-named, strangely, after articles of stationery. ‘Pencil sharpener’ was to serve parachute deliveries from Algiers, ‘dividers’ was to receive those from Britain, and ‘paper-weight’, ‘gummed paper’ and ‘paper-knife’ were all made generally available. At the same time, emboldened by the sanction of de Gaulle as much as by the sheer cliffs that formed a natural protective barrier between the Vercors interior and the surrounding countryside, the Maquis’s sabotage operations were becoming increasingly daring. Not only were consignments of food and fuel being captured, train tracks, bridges, telephone and telegraph cables were sabotaged, power pylons brought tumbling to their knees, and key roads blocked by felli
ng the most strategic of the thousands of trees planted by Napoleon to provide shade for his marching soldiers over a hundred years before.
Horrendous reprisals then began. After one attack on a convoy on the Route Nationale that left nearly sixty Wehrmacht soldiers dead, a captured maquisard was tied to a village post to be made an example of. He insisted that he was a regular soldier with an American unit, which saved the village, but then his eyes and tongue were torn out before he was bayoneted in front of the villagers. Despite such atrocities, by the early summer of 1944 the plateau was home to an irregular army of over 3,000 men, with more streaming in from across the region and some from as far as Paris.
FFI leaders, and Francis and his Jockey circuit, were now stockpiling supplies in preparation for the major push to support the Allied invasion, but there was still great confusion around the timing of that invasion. At the start of June, Colin Gubbins, his American counterpart Colonel David Bruce, and the French hero General Pierre Koenig, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of the FFI, were still in London discussing the plans. The original intention was to mount two concurrent assaults: a major invasion on the north-west coast and a secondary operation in the south. When the southern invasion was delayed Koenig assumed that the resistance rising in the south would be put back correspondingly. Now he reluctantly agreed that, to prevent warning the enemy where they should concentrate their battalions, the resistance should be called into action simultaneously across the country, at least for a few vital days.
