The Resistance
Page 21
The attack was the work of a small group led by Georges Guingouin, a thirty-year-old teacher. Guingouin was a charismatic local Communist leader who from the very beginning of the Occupation had run into difficulties with the Party high-ups, because of his determination to fight the Nazis and his refusal to accept the ambiguous position that marked the PCF’s politics in the early phase of the war. Even when the Party leadership had swung behind the idea of resistance, Guingouin’s independence and his unorthodox methods continued to irritate his comrades. Thrown out of his job for being politically unreliable, harassed by the Vichy police, Guingouin found himself hiding in farmyard outhouses, duplicating leaflets in sheep pens and storing the paper and ink in haylofts.
In December 1942 Guingouin single-handedly blew up a hay-baler at Eymoutiers railway station. At that time the Resistance was centred on the cities, where it was easier to hide and where the large population provided a ready stream of recruits. Guingouin’s focus on the countryside seemed perverse, but in fact it was remarkably prescient. Although destroying a single hay-baler in an obscure rural town did not have the slightest effect on the Nazi occupation, it was a powerful symbol for the local farmers. The baler was a tiny part of the Nazis’ policy of stripping France of all its material wealth. Farmers had to bring their hay to the station, where it would be baled up and transported to Germany. In return, they received far less than its worth; if they needed hay to feed their animals, they had to buy it back – at a higher price, of course.
Guingouin’s symbolic act began the process of winning the rural communities over to the Resistance. As STO was extended to include farm workers, rural families were deeply affected as their sons and employees faced the choice of going to Germany or taking to the hills. Although only a small minority of the young men from rural communities joined the maquis (most either hid with friends and family or went to Germany), the Resistance in the countryside was not the anonymous action of faceless men as it was in the cities, but instead became the work of people who, directly or indirectly, were known to the community. Despite its deeply conservative traditions, the French countryside would play an important role in the development of the maquis, and in support of the Allied advance after D-Day.511
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By the end of summer 1943 the Resistance had changed substantially. Moulin was dead, Delestraint had disappeared into the hell of the concentration camps, while Frenay and d’Astier were out of the fray – first in London and then in Algiers, where de Gaulle’s new government-in-waiting, the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (CFLN), made its headquarters in the summer, and eventually set up a Provisional Constituent Assembly in September. At the same time, the headquarters of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR) moved to Paris.512 The absence of the early Resistance leaders removed poisonous personal antagonisms and gave the ‘second wave’ of leaders room to get on with the job.513
Meanwhile, the term ‘maquis’ had slipped into the language, and there were at least 13,000 maquisards scattered around the country, virtually all of them young men under twenty-five, most of them working class.514 The rapid expansion of the maquis, which took everyone by surprise, made nonsense of all the careful plans made by the Free French and the Allies. The diagrams of the internal organization of the Resistance, drawn up with typically French Cartesian precision, littered with acronyms and rigid structures, literally had to be torn up. With the appointment of Delestraint in spring 1943, London had gained control of the Secret Army, ensuring that there would be no widespread military activity without its approval. But now there was a far less disciplined set of men, with no military training or organization, threatening to take action outside de Gaulle’s control. The running conflict between London and the Resistance over the separation of military and political forces now looked completely irrelevant when there were thousands of bored young men in the hills, most of whom wanted to fight.
Furthermore, even in the southern zone, would-be résistants now had a choice about which Resistance group they wanted to be involved in – through the Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), the Communists had begun to extend their influence across the old demarcation line, challenging the influence of the Resistance groups of the MUR. Virtually all the maquis groups ended up aligning themselves either with the MUR or with the FTP. Although some maquisards made a strictly political choice, for most it was a question of tactics – some maquis even switched their allegiance overnight. The FTP were committed – at least on paper – to immediate action by small, highly mobile groups, while the MUR tended to follow Moulin’s original view of the maquis as a kind of fortress, a way of preserving troops for a future battle. As FTP leader Charles Tillon later put it, the choice was whether the maquis should be ‘drops of mercury or tin soldiers’.515
By the end of the summer the MUR, the Free French and the Allies all realized that they were in danger of losing the initiative to the Communists. There was no possibility of stopping the maquis from forming; all that could be done was to ensure that they were well supplied and did not act rashly. On 31 October 1943 a Resistance report concluded:
One of the best . . . ways of creating cohesion and a team spirit in the camps and of keeping morale high, is action. It trains the réfractaires [men fleeing STO], gives them experience, and helps stop individual actions, most of which are misguided. All those in charge of military action must be fully aware of this necessity: as a result, they must use as many maquis réfractaires as possible when they carry out missions. Winter is approaching: we will not keep our men unless they are sufficiently equipped, appropriately fed and unless they have weapons to defend themselves and have the impression that when they act they are useful to our cause. Otherwise we will see the camps dissolve.516
Georges Guingouin had sensed this several months earlier, and at the beginning of May 1943 he organized a more traditional piece of sabotage: the destruction of the Wattelez rubber recycling facility near Limoges. In April three RAF bombing raids had failed to put the plant out of action, and it continued to produce up to twenty tons of rubber per day, all of it used for German vehicles and weaponry. Members of Combat in Limoges had been commissioned to attack the factory, using information from a sympathetic worker in the plant, Henri Granger. But shortly before they were due to act, the Nazis smashed the local Combat group, so Granger contacted Guingouin instead.517 In January Guingouin’s maquisards stole 1.4 tons of explosive from a mine; some of this was used in the attack on the Wattelez plant. Guingouin played a key role in the Wattelez operation, cycling fifty kilometres with the explosives on his back. Using SOE pencil timers – slow-acting chemical fuses about the size of a pencil – a five-man squad led by Guingouin cut the phone wires leading to the factory, planted their bombs at two sites on either side of the buildings and left. Six hours later there was a huge explosion and the plant was put out of action for five months.518
At the time of the Wattelez operation, Guingouin’s group had grown from the handful of men who blew up the viaduct to over a hundred. By 1944 they were several thousand strong and controlled an extensive region of 2,500 square kilometres around Eymoutiers.519 They lived in a camp in the middle of around seventy square kilometres of dense forest near Châteauneuf. The location was a tightly controlled secret, known only to the maquisards and to two locals who provided food. Although the forest teemed with game, feeding all those men turned out to be difficult. Initially, they had to make do with a frugal diet of potatoes and water. This proved dangerous when their water source became polluted and the camp was struck with an outbreak of dysentery. Drinking fresh water was banned, and the maquis reverted to old rural habits, drinking wine as the only safe source of liquid. Supplies had to be brought into the camp at night: sacks of rye, potatoes and smoked ham would be left at the edge of the forest, and were then carried into the camp in the pitch dark, along rocky and winding paths.
These problems were faced by all the maquis that sprang up around the country, most of them in the remote and hi
lly areas of the Massif Central, in the foothills of the Pyrenees and in the mountains of the Jura in the east. In every case, survival required the aid of the local community. Without support, the maquis would collapse. In January 1944, near Puivert, south of Carcassonne, a group of young men was reduced to living on onions for eight days before finally dispersing, beaten by starvation.520 Guingouin’s group was luckier – and better organized. Like many of the maquis, they carried out raids on the camps of Vichy’s compulsory youth service, the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, which provided food, equipment and potential recruits, and on town halls, where thousands of ration tickets could be stolen. Guingouin was given sugar and cheese by Mme. Ribéras, a shopkeeper at Sussac, and was helped by two young women, Anna Coisac and Marcelle Legouteil, who rode their bikes around the region, acting as liaison agents. Above all, he and his comrades could rely on a network of farms to provide shelter during their missions.521 This was a risky business: although none of Guingouin’s maquisards were caught the night they blew up the viaduct, the police did raid the farm of M. Fermigier in the village of Bujaleuf, because he had sheltered two of Guingouin’s team the night before. Fermigier – ‘a notorious Communist,’ said the police – was arrested and deported to the Nazi camps. He never returned.522
Elsewhere, support for the maquis and the réfractaires drew in previously respectable members of the community. In spring 1943 Georges Gillier, a Protestant pastor in Mandagout, an isolated set of tiny villages that spill down a steeply wooded mountain in the Cévennes, found himself making fake ID cards. In a scene repeated in towns and villages all over France, Pastor Gillier was given a rubber stamp from a bank and got to work:
With a razor blade I lifted off the words without destroying the individual letters, and with other letters from other old rubber stamps I composed ‘Mairie de Nîmes – Gard’ and stuck them on with solution from a puncture repair outfit. It wasn’t perfect, but I was able to stamp over 100 false identity cards with it, several of which enabled people to get out of tight corners.523
Food and safety were vital concerns, but the key problem for the maquis – and for the Resistance as a whole – was how to get weapons. Although explosives could occasionally be stolen from quarries and mines, and there were caches of small arms that had been hidden after the debacle of June 1940, the only substantial source of weapons was London, and that required connections with either SOE or the BCRA. Even when London had approved the operation, the process of actually getting the supplies to France was surprisingly complex – it required twenty-three separate steps on the British side to organize a parachute drop, from agreeing the drop site with the RAF and arranging for the password to be broadcast on the BBC, through the complex logistics of finding, packing and loading the materiel, culminating in a parachute blossoming in the night sky somewhere over France. On the Resistance side, a reception committee had to be organized, securely transported to the drop site despite the curfew, and finally the materiel had to be found and then moved to a safe storage site. And everything depended on the weather. Cloud over the target could put an end to the operation at the last minute.524
Notwithstanding these difficulties, a substantial amount of materiel was sent to France – even if a large proportion of it ended up being captured by the gendarmes or German troops (SOE’s arbitrary assumption was that ten per cent of all materiel would be captured, ten per cent would be lost in transit, twenty per cent would be used for immediate purposes and the remainder would be stored by the Resistance).525 With the appearance of the maquis, the amount of materiel dropped in France increased sevenfold in the second quarter of 1943, rising to nearly 150 tons (1,361 containers and 236 packages). Those matt black containers were about the size of a man and carried up to 180 kilogrammes of weaponry, explosives and ammunition. Nine months later, in the run-up to D-Day, the figure had increased a further six times to nearly 1,000 tons.526 This was still nowhere near enough.
The Resistance sometimes used subterfuge to get the weapons they needed. Guingouin suspected that neither the British nor the Free French would want to arm a Communist-led maquis, so all his contacts with the local SOE circuit, HECTOR, went through a frontman, Charles Gaumondie. As a result ‘Hector’ (Maurice Southgate) thought the maquis was run by ‘Colonel Charles’ and had no idea that the monthly drops he organized were going to Guingouin. There seems to have been no ill feeling, however – after the war, the UK awarded Guingouin the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom.
Although most maquis groups carried out their operations independently, sometimes there had to be coordinated action with other Resistance groups. In the second half of January 1944 an attack involving the maquis, SOE, a BCRA intelligence circuit and the local MUR was launched against the Ratier aero-industry factory at Figeac, a small town of around 5,000 people 150 kilometres east of Bordeaux. The plant made sophisticated variable-pitch aircraft propellers – it was one of the largest such factories in the world, and each week it churned out enough airscrews to equip over fifty Heinkel bombers.527 A series of small-scale RAF raids had failed to damage the factory, which was only a kilometre from the town centre – sufficiently close for a carpet-bombing raid to produce substantial civilian losses and therefore to be out of the question. Yves Ouvrieu, a local teacher and member of the GALLIA intelligence circuit run by the BCRA, had the idea of destroying the plant from the ground.528
The attack was planned with the aid of SOE operatives and local MUR maquis leader Jean-Jacques Chapou. Once the explosives had been parachuted in, they were made into plastic charges in Jean Verlhac’s cheese shop near the town of Martel; they then had to be transported sixty kilometres to Figeac. Because of the German patrols, maquis member Dédé Saint-Chamant, disguised as a pastry chef, carried the explosives to the van in a basket covered with a white cloth. On the night of 19 January, with the help of the Figeac Resistance, the van was driven through the factory gate, using keys provided by a supervisor. The bombs, armed with SOE pencil timers, were positioned around the bulky presses, and the group fled. Shortly afterwards a series of huge explosions smashed the presses and machine tools, killing one résistant, blowing out windows in nearby houses and causing a huge fire. The plant was out of action until the end of the war. Infuriated by the attack, the Gestapo and the SS launched a series of raids in the region, arresting people they thought might have been involved and ordering all males aged sixteen to fifty-five to gather in the town square. They were all eventually released, and none of the group who carried out the attack was ever caught.529
The shattered Ratier plant became a local attraction: the day afterwards, fourteen-year-old Pierre Feigl wrote in his diary:
During the night of Wednesday to Thursday, members of the Maquis blew up the Ratier factory in Figeac after first stealing tobacco and gasoline. There was only one death. The most important machines were destroyed. (8 explosions). This afternoon I did not go out for a hike. I visited the Ratier factory buildings, then, after running some errands, I went to the dentist who told me that I had a good set of teeth.530
Given that the Gestapo were swarming all over the town, young Pierre would have done better to stay out of sight. His name was in fact Klaus Peter Feigl, and he was a German Jew, armed with false identity papers. His family had fled Germany to escape the persecution of the Jews, baptizing Peter a Catholic on the way in order to protect him, and finally arriving in France in 1939. In the summer of 1942, as Vichy began to organize mass round-ups and deportations, Peter’s mother arranged for him to travel south, where he became one of thousands of Jews who were hidden in the Protestant enclave of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the hills between Lyons and Nîmes. In September 1943 Peter and four other young refugees were sent a hundred and fifty kilometres to Figeac, to attend the College Champillon boarding school. Throughout this period, Peter wrote a diary addressed to his parents – he did not know that they had both been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and would never return. As the situation in Figeac took a turn for the wor
st, Peter was moved first to Clermont-Ferrand before eventually being smuggled over the Swiss border in May 1944.531
The bravery and humanity shown by the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon were other forms of resistance. Their actions did not involve blowing things up, shooting Germans or producing underground newspapers, nor were they intended to kick the Nazis out of France; they were simply about saving people from humiliation, victimization and deportation. In Le Chambon this kind of resistance was inspired by a somewhat dour Protestant pastor, André Trocmé. Even before the round-ups of Jews had begun in the summer of 1942, Trocmé and his fellow Protestants were hiding hundreds of young Jews, simply because, as he put it, ‘We do not know what a Jew is. We know only men.’532 When the Vichy police came to Le Chambon to arrest Jews, Trocmé sent messengers to the outlying farms where the refugees were hiding, ordering them to flee into the woods until the danger had passed. For three weeks the police remained in Le Chambon, managing to arrest only two people, one of whom was later released because he was not Jewish enough. But for Trocmé, rightly, losing even one of his charges was a tragedy. As he said in a sermon at the time: ‘It is humiliating to Europe that such things can happen, and that we the French cannot act against such barbaric deeds that come from a time we once believed was past.’533 Trocmé and his parishioners did act, and saved up to 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust.
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For the young maquisards, hiding out in the woods might have been fun at the height of summer, but in the cold and wet of winter it became more difficult, and far more dangerous. The maquis needed to be safe – bare trees and snow made the men more visible – and they needed to be warm. To avoid being tracked in the snow, Guingouin broke his maquis up into several groups, each small enough to move down the valleys and stay in farm buildings. In a series of raids on warehouses and on the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, Guingouin equipped his men with a winter uniform – leather jacket, sheepskin gilet, green trousers, thick socks, white scarf and helmet.534 Like all the maquis leaders, Guingouin wanted his men to be disciplined – giving them a uniform not only strengthened their feelings of comradeship, it also reinforced the popular impression of the maquis as a serious military force. In July 1944, shortly before the liberation of the Cévennes, Janet Teissier du Cros saw a parade of maquisards pass through her village: