by Matthew Cobb
Shortly before nine in the morning on 28 September 1943 a four-man hit squad was waiting outside Ritter’s apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement. The first shots were fired as Ritter got into the car but missed; as he tried to flee, he was shot twice in the stomach. At the same time, the chauffeur and the bodyguard were shot dead. Ritter, still alive, tried to get up, so one of the MOI members came over and pulled the trigger again. But the gun did not go off, so he pulled out a knife and stabbed the Nazi in the chest. The four men then walked calmly off, leaving their victims in the street, covered in blood.566
In June 1943 Holban was replaced as military leader of the FTP-MOI.567 His successor was a man who has become synonymous with the whole history of the MOI: Missak Manouchian, a thirty-seven-year-old Armenian. Within five months of his appointment, Manouchian and virtually all the FTP-MOI members in Paris were arrested. The police, who had been tailing Manouchian for nearly twelve weeks,568 got their lead from an MOI member, Joseph Davidovitch, who agreed to betray his comrades. Betrayed in turn by a policeman who was a member of the Resistance, on 28 December Davidovitch was lured to a meeting in a Resistance safe house south of Paris, where an MOI squad led by Holban confronted him with the allegations. Davidovitch confessed everything and was shot. Over forty years afterwards, Holban recalled the events:
One of us read our conclusions to him before he was executed. Once this grisly and sad encounter was over, we had to act to ensure that the safe house was not compromised and that the tenants were not exposed to any consequences – a safe house was particularly valuable to the Party. What happened next was a nightmare. In the middle of the night, under curfew (it was around three in the morning), six armed men dragged the body. If we had met a routine patrol, we would have been done for. Exhausted, we arrived at a piece of wasteland, dumped the body and did our best to cover it. At six in the morning, with curfew over, we finally left. Only the gun remained in the house. In pairs, we got on the train back to Paris.569
This might seem callous and brutally unjust, but this was a war. As Holban later pointed out, ‘We must not judge [Davidovitch] with today’s eyes and with today’s attitudes. At the time, it would have been simply inconceivable to have let him live.’570
The fruits of Davidovitch’s betrayal were soon plastered on the walls of Paris, in one of the most notorious pieces of Nazi propaganda. To drive home their victory over the MOI, the Nazis published a poster with a lurid red background – hence the name by which it is known, ‘L’Affiche rouge’ – featuring photos of ten MOI members, each carefully described as ‘Polish Jew’, ‘Hungarian Jew’ or simply ‘Armenian’, together with pictures of derailed trains and bodies riddled with bullets. ‘Liberators?’ ran the text, ‘Liberation by the army of crime!’ In February 1944 Manouchian and twenty-two of his comrades were subjected to a show trial in Paris and were executed (the one woman, Olga Bancic, was denied the chance of dying with her comrades, and instead was deported to Germany, where she was beheaded in May). In total, Davidovitch’s betrayal led to the capture and execution of sixty-eight résistants. As a result, the FTP–MOI was effectively wound up, merged into the broader Parisian FTP, which had a less audacious – or foolhardy – guerrilla orientation.
Although the Affiche rouge’s portrayal of the Resistance as foreign Jewish criminals satisfied the Nazis and comforted the Vichy collaborationists in their anti-Semitism and xenophobia, it had the opposite effect on the general population. The sacrifice made by these immigrants touched and shamed the French, and even Vichy’s police intelligence service noted that there was a growth in sympathy for the Resistance after the appearance of the Affiche rouge.571 The French did not consider the MOI as terrorists, but instead agreed with Manouchian, who in his farewell letter to his wife, written the day before his execution, proclaimed that he was ‘a volunteer soldier in the Army of Liberation’.572
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When the Germans invaded the southern zone in November 1942, the Italians invaded Corsica and the region south-east of the Rhône. The Vichy administration on Corsica simply handed over power, in a political and military collapse that the islanders found deeply shocking. The Italian occupation of the island was one of the densest of the whole war: 80,000 soldiers were sent to dominate a population of around 180,000 – a ratio of nearly 1:2. Around ninety per cent of Corsica is mountainous and unpopulated scrubland: the original maquis. Ironically, there was no maquis on Corsica, in the sense of semi-permanent camps of résistants, but the inaccessible regions of the island did play a vital role in the rapid development of the Resistance, as a result of which Corsica was the first part of France to be liberated.
In January 1943 the Free French made their first serious attempt to coordinate the Corsican Resistance. On 7 January, shortly after midnight, a British submarine surfaced off the coast of Corsica and dropped an inflatable dinghy containing a twenty-eight-year-old Corsican BCRA agent called Fred Scamaroni, accompanied by a radio operator and a sabotage expert.573 The operation was doomed from the start. Local peasants stole the radio crystals, arms and the substantial sum of money the three men had brought with them. The radio operator, Hellier, was unreliable: he said it was impossible to make contact with London, drank too much and proclaimed he was going to give himself up.
Worse still, Scamaroni was not the only operative on the island: a month earlier, General Giraud’s intelligence bureau in Algiers had set up Operation PEARL HARBOR, and had made contact with the local Resistance, which was dominated by the Communist-led Front National, and claimed to have 3,000 members organized in 115 villages. Scamaroni had a series of discussions with the FN leaders, but, reasonably enough, they were not prepared to hand over the command of their men.
Thanks to lax security, Scamaroni’s presence on the island soon became known, and in March 1943 Hellier was arrested in a bar in Ajaccio by the Italian secret police, the OVRA. Scamaroni was warned of the arrest – he had time to send a cable to London – but refused to take to the hills. ‘A captain does not abandon his army in the moment of greatest danger,’ he said.574 After intensive interrogation, Hellier broke down and took his captors to where Scamaroni was hiding. The young man was arrested, dreadfully tortured and then, in the night of 19 March, he committed suicide by severing an artery in his neck with a thin piece of wire.575 The Gaullist Resistance in Corsica was in tatters, leaving only the Front National, supported by Giraud’s Operation PEARL HARBOR.
The FN’s strong clandestine structure – no group had more than five members – and its mobilization around national and social issues gave it a depth of support that Scamaroni could only have dreamed of. As on mainland France, the FN and the PCF organized housewives’ demonstrations to protest against food shortages – the Italian occupation had increased the population by over forty per cent.576 At the same time, the Italians inadvertently handed over leadership of the Corsican people to the FN when they arrested 110 elected representatives and deported them to Elba. With the traditional parties decapitated, the population – and the tiny Gaullist Resistance forces – rallied to the FN. To support the movement, Giraud sent an agent from Algiers, the gendarme Paul Colonna d’Istria, who was soon joined by several other Giraudist agents. Backed up by substantial support from the British – there were over sixty arms drops, either by parachute or by sea, containing tens of thousands of weapons – the FN and its ‘military adviser’, Colonna d’Istria, created a huge network of armed partisans, based in the scattered villages and hamlets of the gorgeous Corsican mountains, but sometimes living in caves, their weapons stashed in the maquis.577 All this was hidden from de Gaulle and the Free French, who were focused on their politicking in Algiers.
On 10 July the Allies invaded Sicily. Mussolini was overthrown and imprisoned (he was subsequently rescued by the Nazis, and was eventually killed in April 1944). Although the Italian forces on Corsica began to waver, they showed no respite in their campaign against the Resistance. Paradoxically, OVRA repression became even worse after the fall of M
ussolini – several leading FN members were arrested, tortured and executed during the summer, even as some Italian officers, such as Colonel Gianni Cagnoni, secretly joined the Resistance. But Cagnoni’s courage was rare. During the summer, General Magli, the Italian commanding officer who would go over to the Resistance at the very last minute, continued with business as usual, refusing to commute the death sentences of FN members such as the schoolteacher Jean Nicoli, who was shot in the back at 7.30 a.m. on 30 August in a particularly brutal execution, together with two of his comrades.578
In response to the OVRA offensive, Colonna d’Istria insisted on a complete overhaul of all security measures – codes, addresses, pseudonyms – and introduced a highly decentralized command system which made the Resistance less susceptible to OVRA attacks, and also made its activity richer and more flexible. In his memoirs, Giraud ungenerously – but not untruthfully – contrasted the organizational abilities of his agent, Colonna d’Istria, with those of the martyred BCRA operative:
If the unfortunate Scamaroni had been more professional, if he had been as discreet as Colonna d’Istria, he would have lived to see the liberation of his little country.579
Towards the end of August 1943 it became clear that the Italian army was about to be defeated by the Allies. At a secret meeting held in the night of 27 August, the Corsican Front National decided that when the Italians surrendered, they would launch an insurrection. The FN’s PCF leaders wanted to seize the opportunity to liberate the island and to put pressure on the Allies to open a second front in Europe that would directly confront the Germans, relieving the pressure on the USSR. To put the final finishing touches to the plan, the FN leader, Arthur Giovoni, was taken by the Free French submarine Casablanca to Algiers, where he met Giraud on 4 September, returning to Corsica two days later. Neither de Gaulle nor his entourage knew of this – any more than they knew that the Allies and the Italians had already agreed peace terms. On 8 September the Allied-Italian peace treaty was made public; contacted by Colonna d’Istria, General Magli let it be known that he would support the Resistance.580
The next day the Allies landed near Naples; in response, the Wehrmacht occupied Rome and the north of Italy. In Corsica fighting broke out between anti-fascist Italian soldiers and German troops, and the Resistance launched an insurrection in Ajaccio. There was an enormous demonstration, in which the leaders of the Front National stood on the roof of a van, while the crowd waved flags, threw rice and chanted: ‘Corsican patriots, take arms against Hitler! Italian soldiers, join us against the enemy of Europe!’581 As the revolutionary carnival came to a close, Colonna d’Istria sent a frantic message to Giraud in Algiers: ‘REBELS MASTERS OF AJACCIO STOP ITALIANS PASSIVE STOP FIGHTING IN BASTIA STOP CORSICA CALLS FOR HELP FROM THE ARMY’.582
At this point Giraud finally informed de Gaulle and the Free French leadership what was happening. De Gaulle was furious at having been kept in the dark, but eventually agreed to Giraud’s proposal to send troops to the island, despite his fears that there would be a bloodbath, and his irritation that Giraud had allowed the Communists to play such a dominant role. As the Resistance fought the Germans and some hardline fascist Italian units, a small force of around 6,000 Free French soldiers left Algiers for Corsica, one hundred and nine of them crammed into the claustrophobic space of the submarine Casablanca, which arrived on 13 September. The next day two Free French ships, the Fantasque and the Terrible, arrived in the port of Ajaccio, to be greeted by huge celebrating crowds. The liberation of Corsica was in full swing.
The German high command, alarmed by the developments in the Mediterranean, soon decided that their troops would be better employed on the Italian mainland, and gave the order to evacuate both Sardinia and Corsica. On 12 September General von Senger und Etterlin of the 90th Panzer Division, stationed in Sardinia, took his 20,000-strong division across the Strait of Bonifacio and headed for Bastia and for the Luftwaffe aerodromes on Corsica, from where they would be evacuated. The French rebels now had to deal with tens of thousands of German soldiers and hundreds of tanks.583 But within three weeks, Corsica was free. In scores of small-scale operations, the Free French soldiers – spearheaded by the commandos of the Bataillon de Choc, commanded by General Gambiez, and by Moroccan and African troops from the French Empire – supported by Resistance fighters based in the maquis and by anti-fascist Italian units, harried the Germans northwards through the island. The Nazis were eventually chased to their bridgehead at Bastia, where, with air support and far superior numbers, they were able to embark for Italy. In total, the liberation of Corsica left 75 French soldiers dead, 245 Italians and around 1,000 Germans.584
De Gaulle’s fears about the role of the Communist Party in the Corsican events proved unfounded. Although the Front National declared itself the sole police force on the island, and effectively took civilian power, this revolutionary fervour was short-lived.585 De Gaulle insisted that one of his loyal staff members, Charles Luizet, should be installed as Prefect, and the Front National made no complaint. Far from launching a purge of the Corsican state, the FN allowed many of the old Vichy staff to remain in office.586 With elections deemed impossible by de Gaulle, a Comité de la Libération was formed, a coalition of Resistance forces which ran the island until the end of the war.
For the Communists the Corsican events were a huge propaganda coup. They had shown their legitimacy as a key force in the Resistance, and their loyalty to the Gaullist project. Their task now was to build on that position in the struggle to liberate mainland France. For Giraud, the liberation of Corsica was a pyrrhic victory. He took the credit, but he also paid the price. De Gaulle was convinced that Giraud’s self-proclaimed political naivety was a terrible liability, and his secrecy had shown that even in military matters he could not be trusted. With the keen support of the Free French leadership, the CFLN, which Giraud had also kept out of the loop, de Gaulle was soon able to remove his rival from power, barely a month after the French tricolour flapped in the Mediterranean sky.587
The liberation of Corsica, desired by the population, but not by the Free French or by the Allies, was a kind of dress rehearsal for what could happen on the Continent if the French were left to their own affairs. For the Allies, still suspicious of both the Communists and de Gaulle, it also represented a situation they did not want to see repeated. The outcome was not so far from what they – and de Gaulle – wanted, but the danger had been substantial. A population in arms, mass meetings and demonstrations, Communists in power – this was not how Churchill, Roosevelt or de Gaulle saw the Liberation of France.
8
Hopes and Fears
The liberation of Corsica convinced many people in mainland France that the Allies would soon be launching an all-out invasion. There was no such plan, but the Allies deliberately fuelled speculation as part of an elaborate deception. In April 1943, when it became apparent to London and Washington that for logistical and military reasons there could be no invasion of Northern Europe before 1944, the Allies decided, in Churchill’s words, ‘to pin down the enemy in the west by keeping alive the expectation of invasion’.588 This operation, code-named COCKADE, fooled the Germans into expecting attacks on Boulogne, Brest and Norway. Men and machines were sent on pointless manoeuvres in the British countryside, carefully constructed dummy aeroplanes and landing craft were deployed in strategic sites, while double agents fed the Nazis misinformation about the size, location and destination of Allied forces.589
The Resistance was soon caught up in the general excitement. Between July and September 1943 there were 327 parachute drops of arms and money by the RAF, twice as many as in April to June.590 While these operations were mainly intended to support the growing number of men in the maquis, they also suggested that the invasion was close. One of the many people who became convinced that D-Day was not far off was SOE agent Francis Suttill, who ran a sprawling intelligence and sabotage circuit (PROSPER),591 which had about a thousand French members, including a substantial number
of Communists. In May 1943 Suttill returned from London certain the invasion would take place in the coming weeks and put the whole circuit on alert.592 But in a little over a month PROSPER was in ruins, blown apart by a series of indiscretions and bad luck, with still no sign of D-Day on the horizon.
On 21 June 1943 the Nazis arrested two Canadian SOE agents shortly after they arrived in France. The two men carried uncoded messages and new radio instructions for Suttill’s radio operator, Gilbert Norman. Within two days Norman was arrested, followed by Suttill – they had been tailed by the Gestapo for weeks. In the period that followed, between 400 and 1,500 French members of the circuit were arrested. In terms of résistants deported and executed, the collapse of the PROSPER circuit was the biggest single blow suffered by the Resistance.593 From the outset, much of the circuit had been built on sand – many of the early members were linked to the CARTE circuit, whose files had been seized by the Nazis at the end of 1942, while the SOE operatives themselves seem to have been careless about security. Worse, at the beginning of January 1943 SOE sent Suttill a new air drops supervisor, Henri Déricourt. Déricourt was in fact working for the Nazis; all of the information that went through his hands, from the details of the landing drops to the personal letters sent by SOE agents, was handed over to the Germans.594 Although Déricourt was not directly responsible for the collapse of PROSPER, he gave the Nazis a route to the heart of SOE’s operations, weakening the work of the Resistance.595
The story of PROSPER came to an ignominious conclusion when, after a series of interrogations by the Nazis, Norman, or perhaps Suttill, apparently made a ‘pact’ with their captors, and agreed to reveal the location of the circuit’s weapons dumps in return for a promise that no other members of the circuit would be executed. As might have been expected, the Nazis did not keep their promise, and in 1944 and 1945 all the key members of PROSPER were killed.596
