The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  So why did I have to write it? Telling the powerful personal stories of the résistants, describing their successes and failures, focusing on their courage and sacrifice, feels like a duty. By keeping their stories alive, the résistants themselves can be brought back to life in our memories. I have wanted to write this book since the mid-1980s, when I was living in Paris. One evening, I was watching TV and bumped into a documentary about the Occupation. It was like getting an electric shock: there was my adopted home city, draped in Nazi swastikas. Instantly, my vague knowledge of what happened during the war turned into something much more visceral: I felt a glimmer of the outrage, the fury and the desire to fight back that motivated so many during the war years. After the documentary was over, there was a debate between various historians and old résistants. At one point, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a résistant who had subsequently been a right-wing Prime Minister from 1969–1972, and was not at all on my political wave length – turned to the camera and said: ‘I want to say to all the young people watching, who do not know what it was like to be in the Resistance: it was one of the greatest times to be alive.’

  That phrase, and my shock at the image of Occupied Paris, have remained with me over the years. In the pages that follow I have tried to transmit the emotions that were experienced by the members of the Resistance – the moments of joy and the times of terrible depression; the euphoria of victory, the bitterness of betrayal and the sorrow of sacrifice. There are moments that inspire, others that make you think long and hard, and there are points at which I had to stop to wipe away the tears. That is why this book had to be written, and why it has to be read.

  Manchester, January 2009

  1

  France Falls

  June 1940. In six short weeks, the French army – widely considered to be the most professional and powerful force in the world – had been swept aside by a lightning German offensive. France was crushed under Hitler’s iron heel. Its territory was occupied, its population was humiliated, its mood was cynical and introspective. Dramatically, and against all expectations, France had fallen.1

  The war had begun in September 1939, with the Nazi invasion of Poland. Without great enthusiasm, Britain and France declared war on Germany. But so little happened over the first seven months that it was called the ‘phoney war’. For young René Balbaud, a French-Canadian soldier with a wife and baby daughter, the beginning of the war was almost like a holiday. Shortly after the call-up, he was skinny-dipping with ninety comrades in the river Moselle, splashing and joking. Once they had dried off, they collected ripe yellow plums from the nearby orchards.2 As the autumn wore on, Balbaud spent his time decorating a local village hall for a marriage, rustling geese for the regimental pot and complaining to his diary that only two shells had been aimed at him in the space of three weeks.3 Although the winter was particularly hard and morale suffered accordingly, by the time spring came things were starting to look up again, and Balbaud was able to make the most of his leave in Paris, flirting with a young woman at the Gare de l’Est. Within a few weeks, however, Balbaud’s world, and that of the whole French population, changed in ways that no one expected.4

  Throughout the 1930s the French had been preparing for the war. At a cost of 7 billion francs, they had built the Maginot Line – a vast array of armed fortresses, linked by an underground railway, and housing tens of thousands of soldiers – along the north-eastern border with Germany. The Maginot Line discouraged any offensive and defended the vital Lorraine coalfields and steel-producing regions. The French were certain that, as in 1914, the Germans would attack through Belgium, so they positioned their crack regiments on the northern border, ready to meet the worst that the Nazis could throw at them.

  On 10 May Hitler finally launched his long-expected attack on Belgium and Holland. Nazi tank battalions surged westwards, backed by wave after wave of bomber support. Despite the vigour and the ferocity of the offensive, the French generals were confident; the Germans were doing exactly what had been predicted. But the German attack had another aspect, which the French command initially paid little attention to. In the hilly and heavily wooded Ardennes region, at the point where the Maginot Line ended, the Germans launched a massive tank attack, sending 134,000 men and 1,222 tanks weaving along the winding country roads, then crashing through the undefended countryside. In 1938 the French had carried out an exercise based on this possibility; they had calculated that it would take the Germans sixty hours to get through the mountains, and the invaders would then have to deal with the problem of crossing the river Meuse. This, thought the French, would provide enough time for them to reinforce the troops defending the crossing points around Sedan.

  The French strategists were not entirely wrong. It did indeed take the Germans sixty hours to get to the Meuse. But the French high command completely underestimated the size and density of the armoured attack through the Ardennes, and the impact of German air support. After the Allies had got wind of the Germans’ original battle plans at the beginning of the year, the Nazis had completely changed their strategy. Hitler had been swayed by the vision of General Heinz Guderian, a fifty-two-year-old Prussian who in the 1930s had argued for the large-scale use of tanks backed up by air power. Under Guderian’s plan, the attack on the Netherlands and northern Belgium was merely a feint, designed to draw the French away from the central Nazi thrust, which would take place where the French least expected it – through the Ardennes and across the Meuse.

  In terms of men and equipment, the two sides seemed evenly matched. They had around the same number of men on the Western Front (144 Allied divisions, as against 141 German divisions), and each was armed with about 2,900 tanks. But the forces were deployed in completely different ways. The Germans grouped their tanks into 10 divisions of around 270 each, while most French tanks were scattered along the line – only 960 were grouped in armoured divisions, each of around 160 tanks. This meant that when the Germans attacked, they had far more machines on the battlefield than the French. Furthermore, the German tanks were linked by two-way radios, giving them a flexibility that far outstripped the French vehicles, many of which lacked any kind of communications.

  It was in the air, however, that the Germans had a decisive advantage. Although France had as many serviceable planes as the Germans when the invasion began, these were scattered all over the empire, many of them far from the front line. As for the British, their bases were far away; to be fully operational, planes had to refuel at French or Belgian aerodromes. When it came to putting planes into the sky over north-eastern France and Belgium, the Nazis had the upper hand, with around twice as many aircraft.5 This air superiority was used by the Germans to back their armoured offensive, with the aim of weakening and demoralizing enemy ground forces even when the number of casualties inflicted from the air was relatively small. It was devastatingly effective. On 16 May René Balbaud found himself on the Belgian border, the terrified victim of an attack by Stuka dive-bombers. These two-seater, single-engine planes had first been used to support Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. With their strikingly arched wings, they looked particularly predatory, adding to their psychological impact. During an attack, the Stukas came hurtling out of the sky, the sirens under their wings screaming, terrifying people on the ground, then released their deadly payload of bombs.

  At noon on the 16th, Balbaud heard the deep roar of aeroplane engines and dived for cover. He wrote in his diary:

  One hundred and fifty planes! It’s staggering. The noise of the motors is already overwhelming . . . and then there is this terrible whistling that sets your nerves jangling . . . And then suddenly it’s raining bombs. Trees fall and burn, the earth bucks, stones fly, smoke and dust form a blinding cloud, while there is a choking stench of gunpowder . . . And it goes on and on! . . . Not a single French plane, not a single British plane, not a single round of anti-aircraft fire . . . Finally, they leave. We look at each other. Our uniforms are red with the red soil, damp. Few of us are injured
, but our faces are drawn, exhaustion rings our eyes. Our morale is shattered.6

  The troops that were subjected to this relentless, terrifying attack at Sedan – it involved a thousand planes and lasted around eight hours – were some of the weakest and most poorly equipped of the whole French army. Composed almost entirely of reservists, they had been called up in September and were not young – the average age was thirty-one. Above all, they were not equipped with anti-aircraft or anti-tank weapons, nor had they been given any decent training during the phoney war. Despite valiant actions by the doomed French reservists, the Germans were able to cross the Meuse with relative ease; Rommel, commanding troops to the north, was also able to penetrate deep into French territory, even without the scale of air support that had been used near Sedan.

  As soon as the Germans broke through, the French collapse began. Rumours of German tanks being sighted miles behind French lines spread panic among the untrained and poorly armed men. This panic was fuelled by a series of major tactical mistakes by the leadership on the ground, coupled with a catastrophic lack of communication, so that neither the head nor the body of the army knew what was happening. For example, faced with the collapse of his 71st Infantry Division and a corresponding German advance, General Poncelet moved his command post away from the purpose-built, heavily defended bunker near Sedan with its dedicated telephone line. Taking his staff officers with him, he retreated to a house in the forest, which had no communication system at all.7 As a result, Poncelet had no idea what was happening at the front – or even where the front was. And when the men at the front tried to obtain orders by telephone, they got no reply. The phone rang unanswered in Poncelet’s deserted bunker. This further undermined morale: if the leaders had apparently deserted the fight, why should the rank and file stay?

  Elsewhere, resistance was more substantial. On the morning of 12 May a massive tank battle began near Hannut in central Belgium. Far from being a walkover for the Nazis, the battle showed that French armour could effectively take on the Germans. On that beautiful May morning, the 35th Panzer Regiment suddenly encountered the French along the banks of the river Petite Gette. Tank commander Ernst von Jungenfeld wrote: ‘. . . enemy tanks popped up at every corner . . . the situation grew hot, and on occasion the enemy grew so strong that he took the offensive.’ Von Jungenfeld summed up the first day’s fighting as ‘hard and bloody, many a brave Panzermann had to lay down his life for the Fatherland, many were wounded, and a large number of tanks was lost’.8

  Modern tank warfare was also accompanied by bloody episodes of close combat. As the Germans renewed their westward drive, French Lieutenant Le Bel’s tiny Hotchkiss tank, riddled with bullets and anti-tank rounds, was retreating. As it drove past a Panzer tank, apparently abandoned by the side of the road, a German soldier leaped up onto the front of the Hotchkiss, waving a hammer and took a swipe at the driver. Unable to hold on, the German fell to the ground and disappeared. Le Bel ordered the tank to stop, then clambered down. To his horror, the left track was covered with bloody human remains and tattered bits of uniform. The Hotchkiss had simply crushed the desperate and foolhardy German to a pulp.9

  The war in the air was far more dispersed, with death delivered at a distance in vast volumes of space. As reconnaissance pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put it: ‘The density of aerial warfare? Specks of dust in a cathedral.’10 Nonetheless, in the cathedral of air that hung over northern France, men died every day. Saint-Exupéry’s unit contained twenty-three of the French air force’s fifty reconnaissance crews. ‘In three weeks,’ he wrote, ‘seventeen of the twenty-three had vanished. Our group had melted like a lump of wax.’11 On 10 May, when the Germans launched their offensive, the RAF had 135 bombers in France. Two days later, only seventy-two were still in service. On 14 May, when the French launched a counter-attack against the invaders, the RAF sent out seventy-one bombers to destroy bridges and disrupt the German supply lines. Only forty-one returned – one of the highest operational loss rates ever experienced by the RAF.

  In less than a week the German bridgehead in France had become ninety-five kilometres wide, representing a huge problem for the Allied armies. Nevertheless, the French strategists were not downhearted. They were convinced that the Nazis would now turn sharply south and east and attack the Maginot Line with its thousands of well-armed men. At the same time, crack French forces could be brought down from Belgium to catch the Germans from the rear. But that was not what the Nazis had in mind. Guderian’s bold plan was simply to ignore the Maginot Line, leaving its troops stuck inside their eastern bunkers, far away from the fighting. Instead he would cut France in two by continuing westwards and racing his tanks to the Channel. This would isolate the Allied forces in Belgium from their supply lines, surrounding them from the south with the Panzer forces that had come storming through the Ardennes and from the north with the divisions that had crashed through the Netherlands.

  By the time the French general staff realized what was happening, it was too late. Indeed, Guderian’s progress towards the sea was so rapid that the Germans became suspicious, and on 17 May Guderian was ordered to stop his advance. Furious, he threatened to resign unless he was allowed to continue, and his commanders relented the following day. Two days later the Germans reached the Channel at the mouth of the Somme. The French armies and troops of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) were trapped. Arthur Koestler, watching in horror from Paris, described the German advance as ‘a narrow wedge of steel which pierced right through the body of France until it came out the other side, twisting round in the wound, enlarging the hole, crushing the country’s flesh’.12

  By 25 May the British realized that there was no possibility of breaking through the encircling German forces; nor did the French have the strength to weaken the Nazi stranglehold by counter-attacking from the south. With London’s agreement, General Gort, the commander of the 200,000-strong BEF, headed for Dunkirk, the last major Channel port not under German control. Ironically, he was able to do this only because, on 24 May, Hitler once again hesitated and halted the German advance. This three-day pause imposed by Berlin allowed the British to save an important part of their armed forces.13

  French troops were not immediately given the order to evacuate – this finally came through on 29 May. At this point, although 120,000 troops had been transported to Britain, only 6,000 of them were French. This apparent discrimination reinforced traditional anti-British sentiment among the French, even though it was a consequence of the decision by the French military leadership to keep their men on French soil.14 In the final phase of the evacuation, which ended on 4 June when the Germans broke through the French lines, thousands of British sailors and airmen died, while French soldiers sacrificed themselves in a rearguard action. As a result, a further 140,000 French and Belgian soldiers escaped to safety through Dunkirk.

  One of those French soldiers was René Balbaud. In the two weeks of fighting, his unit had been completely destroyed. The last straw came on 28 May. After retreating 250 kilometres along the Belgian frontier, the group was finally encircled by Nazi tanks, repeatedly bombed and strafed from the air. The men were hungry, tired, terrified. The commanding officer of Balbaud’s unit received the order not to hinder anyone who wanted to get to the coast. Most chose to stay and surrendered to the advancing Nazis. Balbaud and a friend decided to take their chance and trudged towards the coast, hiding from the Germans. Eventually they bumped into a group of British soldiers and were told to head for Dunkirk. After wading through miles of flooded fields, surrounded by distressed livestock, they saw, far off, endless clouds of black smoke piling high into the air. The sky above the port was swarming with German bombers, and the town was in flames.

  At the same moment another French soldier, Lieutenant Barlone, was also retreating towards Dunkirk, struggling through the thousands of French civilians fleeing the fighting. When he finally arrived at the port he saw a vision from hell:

  The westerly wind beats down the immense
columns of grim, black smoke from the flaming oil tanks. Truly this is the suffocating breath of the last judgement. Long sheaves of bright flames shoot up from the huge burning buildings. Broken bricks and mortar, windows, paving stones dislodged by shells strew the ground. Immense open spaces stretch farther than the eye can see with only a fragment of wall standing here and there, and the carcasses of the monster cranes in the docks despairingly hold up their great black arms towards a ghastly sky, rent unceasingly by the explosions of whining shells. Squadrons of planes circle above us, dropping sticks of bombs in quick succession. The men flatten out on the ground, making use of stacks of coal or trucks, or anything, for protection.15

  Even then the ordeal was not over. Evacuated soldiers waded out into the sea and scrambled on to vessels of all sizes, many of them commandeered or captained by volunteers. They then had to run the gauntlet of Nazi bombardment and aerial attack, defended only by the incessant buzzing of British fighters. When the Nazis finally took Dunkirk, on 4 June, the beach was strewn with abandoned guns, uniforms and equipment. Overall, 350,000 Allied soldiers escaped, including Balbaud and Barlone.

  *

  Dunkirk was not the end of the Battle of France, but it demonstrated that the Nazis had the upper hand and that the Allies would have to show bold military and political initiative if the Germans were to be beaten back. Neither Britain nor France was in ideal shape for such a turnaround. In the weeks before the German attack, both countries had been in political turmoil – Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain at the head of the British government on the day Hitler attacked, while Paul Reynaud took over as French Prime Minister from Édouard Daladier. Neither of the new leaders had a particularly secure position. Churchill’s fellow Conservatives were deeply suspicious of him: Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary wrote that the ‘kind of people surrounding Winston are the scum’.16 For the French (and for many in Britain), Churchill was a reckless adventurer.17 As for Reynaud, he presided over the seventeenth French government in seven years. Most of his predecessors had simply reshuffled the same tired political cards in the increasingly forlorn hope of finding a winning hand. There was little reason to believe that Reynaud would be any different, and his slogan – ‘We will win, because we are the strongest’ – rang hollow when the German offensive began.