by Matthew Cobb
As Darlan took over in Algiers, Hitler acted rapidly to meet the potential threat from the south. On 11 November the Wehrmacht swept towards the Mediterranean, smashing through the demarcation line, completing their occupation of the whole country and destroying Vichy’s pathetic claims to independence. Many people expected the Vichy army to react. In Lyons eighteen-year-old Denise Domenach was sent home from school early because the headmistress feared there would be a battle in the city when the Germans arrived. Denise and her friends took this as an invitation to go and watch. They made their way to the centre of Lyons, Place Bellecour, the largest square in Europe:
. . . we bumped into a load of gardes mobiles who were blocking the Rue Victor-Hugo and parallel streets. It was impossible to get to [Place] Bellecour, but we sensed that’s where it was all happening. We argued with them, but had no luck. Finally, Jacques Benon and I took our chance when the cops weren’t looking (although God knows there were plenty of them) and we got to the end of the Rue Victor-Hugo and there we saw with amazement that the Place Bellecour was full of German vehicles. I don’t know what we expected, but we felt suffocated . . . After wandering around town, our heads blazing, we decided to go home. Beforehand, we went through a traboule right to Place Bellecour and walked dignifiedly through the German sentries, all the time fearing that we would be pistol-whipped for our disobedience.419
There was no battle in Lyons, or anywhere else. All the hopes that the Allies – and some parts of the Resistance – had put in the Vichy armed forces came to nothing. The absurd claims of Carte that 300,000 soldiers were ready to fight were revealed to be a pipedream. Even when there were real forces on the ground, nothing happened. Ever since the fall of France, sections of the army had been stockpiling arms out of sight of the Nazi weapons inspectors who were supposed to ensure that Vichy abided by the armistice agreements. Sixty-five thousand firearms, four hundred pieces of artillery and tons of ammunition had been hidden all over the Non-Occupied Zone, while hundreds of armoured vehicles had been ingeniously constructed in tractor factories.420 Like King Arthur’s army, these weapons were supposed to be used when the time came. But when the time did come, and the Nazis were storming towards the sea, the Vichy army did nothing. The sole exception was General de Lattre, whose brief and small-scale rebellion ended in a cell. Worse, the army rejected the pleas of Combat and Libération to give them the weapons. Frenay wrote a furious letter to General Picquendar of the Vichy army:
The army’s weapons belong to the nation and not to you alone. It is your duty to give them to those who will use them for the liberation of our homeland. If through your stubbornness they fall into the enemy’s hands, you shall answer before the courts of our liberated land, and I myself shall be your accuser.421
There was no reply. When Laval ordered that all clandestine arms should be handed over to the Nazis, the lions of the military meekly complied, with virtually no exceptions.422 The most ignominious symbol of this spinelessness came in Toulon, where the French navy refused to sail out of the clutches of the Nazis and instead scuttled itself at the dockside, going down without a fight. Only one vessel escaped: the submarine Casablanca and her crew made for Algiers to join the Free French.
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The determination of the Allies to short-circuit de Gaulle during Operation TORCH showed the Free French that they could expect few favours when it came to the liberation of France. On 20 November André Philip – de Gaulle’s new Interior Minister – met President Roosevelt in Washington. The President stoutly defended his support for Darlan and conjured up a stark vision of what he intended to do when the Allies arrived in Europe:
I did the right thing to support Darlan – I saved American lives . . . what’s important for me is to get to Berlin. I don’t care about anything else. If Darlan gives me Algiers, long live Darlan! If Laval gives me Paris, long live Laval! . . . When we get to France, we will have the power of an occupying force. I cannot recognize de Gaulle, because that would undermine the rights of the French by imposing a government on them . . . By right of occupation, the Americans will remain in France until free elections are organized.423
When Philip pointed out that the French would not tolerate an American occupation any more than a German one, Roosevelt grew impatient: ‘I will speak to the French people on the radio and they will do what I wish,’ he snapped.424
The American attitude caused massive consternation in France. On 15 November Jean Moulin sent a furious telegram to London:
INFORM AMERICAN AND BRITISH GOVERNMENTS IN NAME OF RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS IMPOSSIBLE TO EXPLAIN TO FRENCH WHY ALGIERS LANDING NOT IMMEDIATELY ACCOMPANIED BY RESTORATION OF REPUBLIC . . . WHY FRENCH NATIONAL COMMITTEE NOT YET INSTALLED IN ALGIERS WHY ALLIED RADIO FRIENDLY TO PETAIN . . . VERY BAD IMPRESSION WILL SOON BECOME SCANDAL425
In turn, SOE sent the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, an alarming report, warning him that the Darlan deal had ‘produced violent reactions on all our subterranean organizations in enemy-occupied countries, particularly in France where it has had a blasting and withering effect’.426 For the Resistance, there must have seemed little point in fighting for liberation if the Allies were simply going to put the enemy back in charge. Eden alerted the Cabinet that ‘the present regime [in Algiers], even though it fights the Axis, is rooted in falsehood. Darlan is Vichy, and Vichy is the rule of those same wealthy and selfish interests which ruined France’.427 By mid-December Churchill and Roosevelt began to get cold feet as they were repeatedly attacked in the press for their collusion with Darlan and his Vichy cronies.
Then, on 24 December, the Allies got an unexpected Christmas present. Bonnier de la Chapelle, a monarchist résistant, burst into Darlan’s office and shot him in the stomach.428 Two hours later, Darlan was dead. The next day, SOE and BCRA toasted his passing with champagne,429 while Churchill later admitted that the assassination ‘relieved the Allies of an embarrassment’.430 But the Allies simply replaced one embarrassment with another: determined to keep de Gaulle at arm’s length, they put Giraud in charge of French North Africa. Giraud soon proved to be as much a Vichy man as Darlan had been. Despite promises to repeal anti-Semitic legislation and to get rid of the Vichy administrators who had put it in place, Giraud did nothing. Indeed, it took three months and tremendous pressure before he could bring himself to repudiate Vichy and declare that he was a democrat.431
Eventually, after several months of manoeuvring and politicking in Algiers, London and Washington, the Allies grudgingly accepted that de Gaulle and the Free French were the legitimate political representatives of the vast majority of the French population, and from autumn 1943 Giraud gradually slipped from the stage of history. De Gaulle won this struggle not simply because he was more wily, arrogant and plain stubborn than the naive and deluded Giraud, but because he was backed by the Resistance and a growing section of the French population.432
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After the German invasion of the Non-Occupied Zone on 11 November 1942, life got far more difficult for the Resistance. The relatively lax security procedures employed by the groups in the southern zone had previously been merely a cause of irritation for the more experienced résistants from the north. Now they had become literally lethal. There was virtually no chance of sympathetic treatment from the Vichy police or counter-intelligence services – anyone within the Vichy state apparatus who retained even the slightest shred of self-respect realized they had to resign their post.433 As in the northern zone, the Vichy police generally obeyed their new masters, while the army proved spineless. The Vichy state was completely rotten, its human components utterly corrupted by collaboration with the Nazis.
Although the Allies still did not fully appreciate the true nature of Vichy, ordinary people – even those not involved in the Resistance – understood the reality of collaboration only too well. In June 1942 Janet Teissier du Cros, a Scot living in the Non-Occupied Zone, gave birth to a boy, Nicolas. Shortly afterwards she was overwhelmed by an apocalyptic vision of the worl
d her son would grow up in:
Never, it seemed, would we emerge from the mists of gloom and despair. I saw the Nazi occupation spreading like a pool of filthy oil on a lovely patchwork counterpane. One after another the patches of beautiful faded cretonne that represented in my mind the countries of Europe had been stained and had lost their character . . . Even if Germany should end by losing the war, the harm done would be lasting. Traces would persist of the anti-Semitism, cruelty and corruption they brought wherever they went; the dishonesty that had become a part of patriotism would linger on as a habit. What sort of gift had I given Nicolas?434
Nevertheless, for a few days after the Nazi invasion, there was a period of uncertainty that helped some résistants. In August 1942 Christian Pineau had been arrested on the beach near Narbonne, as he was about to leave for London.435 While the Nazis marched southwards, Pineau was moved in the opposite direction, transferred from a military prison in Montpellier to an internment camp near Limoges. Just before Pineau left the prison, news came through of the invasion; the governor said to him: ‘Well, you’ll just have to escape.’ Which is exactly what he did, jumping from the train.436 Six weeks later, exhausted and at the end of his tether, Pineau had a hurried meeting with his wife, who had recently given birth to their son. Then he left for London. He had not been able to see his baby, nor did he know if he ever would. Shortly after he returned to France, Pineau was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo. By the end of the year he was in Buchenwald concentration camp.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who had been arrested following the exfiltration of Giraud, was lucky enough to be dealt with by some of the few Vichy policemen who were opposed to the Nazi invasion. Thrown into the l’Evêché prison in Marseilles, Fourcade was eventually taken to her house for further detailed questioning. There, without their Gestapo minders, the police officers agreed that she could make fake versions of her radio transmission documents, in order to deceive the Nazis who were now demanding to take over the investigation. The three policemen then drove her to Avignon and freedom – boldly stopping at the prison on the way to pick up her jewellery. Yet Fourcade was under no illusions. Far from being a sign of the future, the bravery of those three men represented the past. As she later recalled:
Gone was the illusory unoccupied zone and its relative oases. Farewell, Vichy policemen, with your easy-going instincts. Now operating over the whole territory, the Abwehr and the Gestapo had suspended their rivalry to advance like a steamroller of deadly efficiency. The Abwehr with its subtle infiltration methods was the demoniacal intelligence. The Gestapo with its arrests, tortures and killings was the blind, bestial force. We should have to brave them with our poor weapons and on our forefathers’ soil for a very long time yet. The terrible year was about to begin.437
Despite the real threat posed by the Nazi occupation of the south, the Resistance was in relatively good shape. A few months earlier, in London, a huge step towards unifying the Resistance had been taken at a meeting of the groups in the Non-Occupied Zone. Jean Moulin, Jean-Pierre Levy of Franc-Tireur, Frenay and d’Astier were all invited, but not all of them arrived. Frenay and d’Astier managed to leave France from Port-miou, one of the stunning Mediterranean fjords or calanques that line the coast between Marseilles and Cassis.438 Things did not go so straightforwardly for Moulin and Levy. They stayed overnight in a hotel near Macon, cycled for six kilometres, crossed the Saône in a small boat and then waited by the side of the MARGUERITE landing field. But thick fog prevented the Lysander from landing. Levy wrote: ‘Thus began a week of waiting, in which the same scene was played out night after night: mist, rain, no plane.’439 With the moon waning, the air pickup was eventually cancelled, and Moulin and Levy went south to Anthéor, near Cannes, where a submarine was to deliver a load of weapons as well as pick up Moulin, Levy and a number of other leading Resistance members. Once again, nothing went right. Léon Morandat was in charge of security:
The submarine surfaced in the wrong bay, so we spent the whole night under the viaduct at Anthéor. I was up to my chest in the water, flashing signals with an electric torch every quarter of an hour. When day broke, we had to disperse.440
Moulin and Levy’s journey was eventually abandoned.
Despite the absence of Moulin and Levy, the London summit set up a Coordinating Committee that would meet in France with a delegate each from Libération, Combat and Franc-Tireur; the chair – Moulin – would have the casting vote. But although the committee strengthened the scattered forces of the Resistance, it also became yet another way of reinforcing London’s domination: ‘in military terms the Coordinating Committee is under the orders of General de Gaulle, within the framework of the Allied strategic plan’ it was agreed.441
London’s determination to control all military action in France was made even clearer in the discussions about the need for a unified command of the embryonic armed wing of the Resistance in the Non-Occupied Zone, the Armée Secrète (Secret Army). The Secret Army was Frenay’s brainchild, and he understandably wanted to be its leader. Equally understandably, this met with outright opposition from d’Astier and the Free French who were suspicious of Frenay’s ambitions. Frenay therefore proposed that General Delestraint, a sixty-three-year-old retired officer, should lead the Secret Army.442 This was agreed unanimously: d’Astier was relieved that the new leader was not Frenay, de Gaulle was content to have a military man in charge, while Frenay thought that he could manipulate the naive Delestraint, who had no experience of clandestine work, nor any links with the Resistance.
The instructions de Gaulle issued to the Secret Army were a continuation of the orders he had given to Moulin nearly a year earlier. Large-scale military activity was forbidden except in conjunction with an Allied invasion, and it would be approved only ‘at an appropriate moment’. The only immediate action that was permitted was sabotage, and even here London did not give the Resistance a free hand. ‘Orders will be sent,’ said de Gaulle, while generously allowing the Resistance to attack power stations in the meantime.443 De Gaulle wanted complete control over the Resistance’s military action and, for the moment, the Resistance leaders were happy with that.
What they were not happy about, however, was Moulin. D’Astier complained to de Gaulle that Moulin behaved like ‘a petty civil servant’, while Frenay bridled so much at Moulin’s role as the voice and hand of de Gaulle that he threatened to split the movement. ‘What will happen if we cannot agree with Rex [Moulin]?’ asked Frenay. De Gaulle replied: ‘You will come here, and we will try and find a solution.’ ‘And if that proves impossible?’ pursued Frenay. ‘Well,’ said de Gaulle, ‘in that case, France will have to choose between you and me!’444
In every respect, Moulin stood above the Resistance leaders. He was General de Gaulle’s personal representative, he had a vision that was broader and more far-reaching than those of Frenay, d’Astier and the others, and he had a top civil servant’s irritating habit of getting his own way. All these things caused clashes. The most consistent source of conflict was the question of money and resources, over which Moulin had sole control. London was now sending large sums of cash to the Resistance, but it was Moulin who decided how much should be allotted to each group. He even controlled radio contact between the Resistance and London – throughout the war, Frenay did not have his own radio operator, but instead had to go through Moulin. All these problems inevitably led to jealousy and spiteful recriminations, making Moulin the focus of the fears and frustrations felt by the whole Resistance. These squabbles with Moulin – organizational, political and personal – were amplified by the terrible strains of life under Nazi Occupation and provided a pathetic and poisonous backdrop to the tragic events that soon unfolded.
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In the middle of January 1943, BCRA agent Rémy and a tall, gaunt man got into a fishing boat at Pont-Aven in Brittany and hid under a false floor. The gaunt man had been told to bring nothing, not even a toothbrush. Rémy, however, cluttered their cramped hiding place wit
h New Year presents for de Gaulle – a box of soil from Lorraine, an 1816 vintage bottle of cognac which had allegedly belonged to a Russian general who had fought Napoleon and a metre-high azalea bush covered in pink flowers, bought in Paris for Mme. de Gaulle. After transferring to a British ship off the Isles of Scilly, the two men and their unlikely baggage were taken to London.445
Rémy had risked everything to bring his passenger across the Channel. He had repeatedly disobeyed orders from his BCRA superior, Colonel Passy, to stay in France. Not only had Rémy ignored Passy’s threats (‘IN CASE OF DISOBEDIENCE ON YOUR PART I WILL TAKE ALL NECESSARY STEPS’ telegrammed Passy), he had even demanded that de Gaulle change his travel plans as a result (‘INSIST GENERAL AWAITS ARRIVAL BEFORE LEAVING FOR WASHINGTON STOP MY PRESENCE NECESSARY FOR CERTAIN MEASURES STOP AM CERTAIN OF YOUR APPROVAL’).446 Rémy was both right and wrong. His passenger was indeed of enormous importance, but Passy never forgave him, and ensured that Rémy did not carry out any further missions in France.
The gaunt man was Fernand Grenier, a Communist Party deputy who had been a hostage in the Chateaubriant prison camp and was now the Communist Party’s delegate to the Free French in London. As Grenier explained on the BBC in a classic piece of hyperbole, his mission was to bring to de Gaulle ‘the support of tens of thousands of our comrades . . . who each day risk their life in the unceasing struggle against the hated Nazi invader’.447 Grenier was also instructed to secure more arms and money for the Communist FTP and, on a more strategic level, to pressurize de Gaulle into making a compromise with Giraud. Not only did the PCF feel there was little to choose between two reactionary generals, Moscow wanted to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, to hasten the Allied invasion of Western Europe. And as always, the French Communists followed Moscow’s lead. But whatever the manoeuvres that lay behind Grenier’s arrival in London, the Gaullists seemed genuinely enthusiastic at the prospect of working with the Communists. As Grenier put it in a message to his comrades:
