The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  To complete a miserable month for the Resistance, Claude Bourdet, Frenay’s right-hand man in Combat, was arrested on 23 March. A liaison agent had been arrested on the Swiss border, carrying papers that eventually led the Gestapo to one of the Parisian offices of the Resistance, where Bourdet was waiting for a meeting. Bourdet was interrogated, then deported, finally ending up in Buchenwald. Shortly afterwards, Frenay, now ensconced in Algiers as Commissar for Prisoners, Deportees and Refugees, received a belated letter from his comrade. Bourdet described the bloody offensive by the Nazis and the Milice, little imagining that he would soon be a victim:

  Forain, our top man in Toulouse, was nabbed a few months ago. We found him in a wood with his head blown off by a grenade . . . People of varying importance are being arrested everywhere. The Milice has assassinated Dr Valois, whom I wanted to make a regional chief, as well as his assistant, Bistozzi, a university professor. At the same time they murdered Professor Gosse.698

  In the space of a year, the shape of the Resistance had changed completely. The leadership had been shattered – Frenay and d’Astier were abroad; Berty Albrecht, Moulin, Manouchian, Brossolette and Médéric were dead; Pineau, Renouvin, Delestraint and Bourdet had all been deported; Jean-Pierre Levy was in a Parisian jail, his cover still intact – while repeated waves of repression and betrayal had condemned hundreds of rank-and-file résistants to death or deportation. More important, however, by spring 1944 a decisive step towards the unification of the Resistance and its consolidation as an independent fighting force had been taken.

  *

  Having failed to gain control of the Resistance through Brossolette’s attempt to destabilize the Parisian leadership, the Free French tried another tack. De Gaulle appointed fourteen men to act as Délégués Militaires (DM – Military Delegates) to the various regions, supposedly to help the Resistance. Under orders from Passy, they were in fact to assert control over the Secret Army and the maquis. They would do this by ‘decentralizing’ command from the centre to the regions, where they would be able to dominate local Resistance leaders and would monopolize contact with the vital supply lines from London. But the choice of men was catastrophic, and their behaviour soon aroused the scorn of the Resistance. In January 1944 Pascal Copeau, a young leader of Libération, wrote of one of the DMs, an ambitious man who apparently desired to be the ‘French Tito’:

  . . . he is a complete lightweight and his activity is quite insufficient. After spending a whole month in Switzerland, a few weeks after he arrived, he then spent a ‘holiday’ at the end of the year with his wife in Switzerland and has now – God knows why – decided to go to Spain and then on to Algiers, leaving behind him a well-meaning but completely inadequate replacement. These military men are not much more serious than their BCRA.699

  To resolve the issue, Jacques Bingen suggested that the Resistance Central Committee set up a Commission Militaire d’Action (‘COMAC’) to unite – not control – all the armed organizations, from the Communist FTP to what later became known as the Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée (ORA – Resistance Organization of the Army) – those turncoat sections of the Vichy army that had put their faith first in Pétain then in Giraud and now realized that the time had come to ally themselves once and for all with the Resistance.700 At the beginning of February COMAC created a common command structure for all the armed Resistance organizations in France, called the Forces Françaises de l’Interieur (FFI – French Forces of the Interior). FFI soon became synonymous with the Resistance as a whole, and the initials were seen all over the country – on armbands, on flags and on commandeered vehicles, as well as scrawled on walls and stamped on leaflets.

  The inclusion of the Communist-led FTP in the FFI was particularly important. The FTP was the largest military organization in the Resistance. As Corsica had shown, the French Communists would be loyal participants in the liberation of the country, so long as they were accorded some recognition and positions of power. The leadership of the Communist Party, following Moscow’s strategic calculations, accepted that its ambitions should be limited to the creation of a national army, the strengthening of the FTP and a purge of traitors and collaborators within the state apparatus.701 Communist leader Maurice Thorez made this clear in January 1944, when he stated ‘the Communists are not thinking of taking power, either now, or after the liberation’.702 Revolution might have still been the dream of rank-and-file Communist Party members and the nightmare of the right wing of the Resistance, but Stalin and his loyal followers would have none of it.703

  De Gaulle took more than six weeks to react to the creation of COMAC, but when he did, on 10 March 1944, his attitude could not have been plainer. COMAC, he declared, ‘is not a command structure’ but instead would carry out ‘inspection and supervision’.704 In other words, the armed action of the Resistance was to be controlled from Algiers, not Paris. The Resistance simply carried on as before, focused on taking action against the Nazis. So total was the rejection of de Gaulle’s attempt to take control that on 13 May 1944 the CNR took COMAC under its direct authority and proclaimed quite simply: ‘It is the supreme command structure of the FFI.’705 The whole of the Resistance – the movements, the parties and even Moulin’s CNR – was taking a stand against de Gaulle’s attempt to control it.

  The fact that two of the three voting members of COMAC were Communists (Pierre Villon and Maurice Kriegel) has led some résistants and historians to suggest that this represented a Communist coup over the Resistance. But not only did COMAC have the full support of the CNR – an organization set up by Moulin and entirely within the Gaullist mould – the third member of COMAC was right-winger Jean de Vogüé, and it also included as non-voting members General Revers of the ORA and a young Military Delegate, Jacques Chaban-Delmas.706 The truth is, COMAC and the CNR represented the views of the vast majority of résistants – who, after all, did not have to obey COMAC if they did not want to. They wanted to take immediate action and were deeply distrustful of the attempts by London and Algiers to hold the Resistance back. The conflict between the Resistance and de Gaulle, which had been rumbling on for years, had finally come into the open.

  Even the most committed Gaullists found their allegiances shifting. In August 1943 Jacques Bingen had left London full of hope and excitement. As he wrote to his mother shortly beforehand:

  My departure, which is a completely unexpected opportunity, may help France as much as many soldiers. I hope that before my end, I will have rendered many of these services. Finally there is the additional desire to avenge so many Jewish friends who have been tortured or assassinated by a barbarism such as we have not seen for centuries. One more Jew (there are so many of us, if only you knew) will have taken his part – and more than his part – in the Liberation of France. There you have it, dear Mother, that’s why I’m leaving, fully aware of the danger, and having weighed the risks.707

  But there were dangers in France that he could not have imagined, which threatened not only his life but also his loyalties and his political convictions. A friend who was with him the day before he climbed into the Lysander that would take him home later recalled:

  I will never forget his last afternoon in London, full of humour and nervous excitement. Vitia Hessel and I walked with him under a radiant blue August sky, from St James’s Park to the little house in Dorset Square that was the departure point for flights out. It was here that he received SOE’s ‘Holy Communion’ – a rubber-coated cyanide pill. He was great company and a charming man, this Jew who did not believe in God but who believed in de Gaulle; this brother-in-law of the boss of Citroën who believed that the Liberation would lead to the construction of a mass Labour Party that would unite the socialists of Léon Blum and Daniel Mayer and the new forces of the Resistance. He appeared to be a dilettante who hid his anxiety under a nonchalant lightness of being and found his fulfilment in action.708

  Bingen’s enthusiasm, and his political commitment to de Gaulle’s strategies, were soon underm
ined by the cruel realities of underground life. By April 1944 he felt completely isolated and abandoned by the Free French. Bitterly aware that Passy and the BCRA were still spreading rumours about his alleged security breaches, at loggerheads with his masters and ‘for the first time feeling my life is really threatened’, he wrote a final despairing testament, addressed both to his friends and to de Gaulle. He described his treatment as ‘scandalous’, and advised de Gaulle to take more care with the men he appointed.709

  Less than a month later Bingen travelled to Clermont-Ferrand, where he was met by a liaison agent who was unwittingly accompanied by a Gestapo spy. Early the next morning Bingen was arrested by the Nazis but managed to escape. He ran through the town and hid in a doorway, but a French woman hailed a passing German lorry and pointed out where he was hiding. Recaptured, Bingen swallowed his cyanide pill and died shortly afterwards. The whereabouts of his body are still unknown.710

  *

  As part of their preparations for the eventual invasion of France, the Allies needed to find out how strong the maquis really was. In mid-October 1943, six months before his arrest, Yeo-Thomas had visited the maquis near Cahors and in the Ain and was extremely impressed – the men were far more organized and disciplined than he had imagined. As he explained to London: ‘These organized maquis can, properly supported and armed, provide us with formidable and efficient support on D-Day.’711 At a meeting of the six regional maquis leaders in the southern zone that took place in November 1943, Yeo-Thomas heard repeated complaints from the maquis that they did not receive sufficient weapons, that they were poorly armed.

  In truth, without proper Allied logistical support the maquis could not fight. The leader of Region 6 said: ‘we can scare people, that’s all . . . our maquis do not yet have machine guns . . . in the town of Clermont-Ferrand we have 3,000 men, but only 35 machine guns.’ Region 2 was slightly better off – they had 7 heavy machine guns (which they had stolen), 151 rifles, 2 machine guns which were used solely for demonstration purposes and 4 or 5 cases of grenades, while Region 3 had a few dozen rifles, around 40 machine guns that had been hauled out of the water and a heavy machine gun with no ammunition.712

  In reply, Yeo-Thomas could only repeat the classic British explanation: the bombing raids on Germany took valuable planes and pilots away from other missions, such as supplying the Resistance. He had been promised that the explosives that filled most parachuted containers would be replaced by weapons. This was a common request from the maquis, and reflected a difference in conception – the Allies wanted to use the maquis for sabotage purposes, which required explosives; the maquis wanted first to survive, and then to fight, which above all required guns. However, as Yeo-Thomas frankly admitted, ‘that is a promise – will it be kept? I have no idea.’713

  At the beginning of 1944, as planning for D-Day became intense, the Allied high command began to take the Resistance seriously for the first time. Meetings took place in North Africa between Henri Frenay and the American Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy, and between Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie and Winston Churchill. Frenay impressed McCloy with his arguments in favour of coordinating the actions of the Resistance and the Allies following D-Day, while d’Astier argued for a substantial increase in weapons drops to the maquis. Churchill swung behind d’Astier’s request, partly because of strategic considerations (a substantial growth in Resistance activity in south-eastern France would help the planned Allied landings on the Mediterranean coast), partly because of his own enthusiasm for guerrilla warfare and partly because of the personal impression made by d’Astier. As Churchill told Roosevelt:

  This is a remarkable man of the Scarlet Pimpernel type and fairly fresh from France, which he has revisited three or four times. He has made very strong appeals to me to drop more arms by air for their resistance movements. I hope to be able to do more in February. He says that in Haute Savoie, south of Geneva between Grenoble and the Italian frontier, he has over 20,000 men all desperate, but only one in five has any weapon. If more weapons were available, very large numbers more would take to the mountains. As you know, I am most anxious to see a guerrilla à la Tito started up in the Savoie and in the Alpes Maritimes . . . He is a fine fellow, very fierce and bitter but one of the best Frenchmen I have struck [sic] in these bleak times.714

  On 27 January Churchill invited d’Astier and leading figures from SOE to a meeting of the War Cabinet, and agreed to double the supplies to the Resistance – but only to the maquis in the south-east. Groups in central and northern France got nothing extra because their needs did not coincide with the immediate Allied strategic interest.715 At the same time, Emmanuel d’Astier’s brother, Free French Air Force General François d’Astier, discussed the role of the Resistance with General Eisenhower, who had recently been appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force for the invasion of Europe, in charge of OVERLOAD.716 After a complex series of negotiations between London, Washington and Algiers – including a man-to-man discussion with de Gaulle, in which Eisenhower did much to overcome the traditional US hostility to the French General – Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), took into account Resistance activity in its planning for D-Day (it also took over command of SOE). Unlike Churchill, Eisenhower’s interest in the Resistance was neither romantic nor limited to south-east France – he wanted a surge of Allied-controlled action to support his troops when they landed in Normandy.717

  The changing attitude of the Allies towards the Resistance was soon felt in the south-east corner that so interested Churchill. The Haute-Savoie region around Annecy was the focus of intense Resistance activity, largely inspired by Romans-Petit, head of the maquis in the neighbouring Ain département. By the beginning of 1944 the Haute-Savoie maquis was under the leadership of a young lieutenant, ‘Tom’ Morel, supported by SOE and BCRA agents.718 Faced with a huge rise in maquis activity in the region, Darnand decided to send the Milice to reimpose Vichy’s authority by destroying the ‘terrorists’. On 2 February the BBC broadcast a warning:

  Attention the maquis! Attention the Haute-Savoie! Calling the Haute-Savoie maquis, SOS, SOS. The Oberführer Joseph Darnard has decided to launch a massive attack, tomorrow 3 February, against the patriots hiding out in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie . . . Soldiers without uniform in the maquis of the Haute-Savoie, there is not a minute to spare – you must take up your defensive positions.719

  As the Allied invasion loomed closer, the Milice and the Vichy state were like rats in a trap – increasingly vicious and desperate, unable to find a way out.720 The Resistance and the Free French had made it quite clear that there would be no quarter, no amnesty, no pardons after the war. Pierre Pucheu, the Minister of the Interior, had left Vichy when he saw the way the wind was blowing, just after the Allied invasion of North Africa. He arrived in French North Africa in May 1943, just in time to see his supporter, General Giraud, lose out in the struggle with de Gaulle. In March 1944 Pucheu was tried for treason, found guilty and executed – de Gaulle refused to pardon him: saying ‘I owe it to France.’ Maurice Schumann, speaking on the BBC, had warned the collaborators in October 1943: ‘From now on, whatever you do, it is too late to buy your way to freedom.’721 The same approach was taken in the Haute-Savoie, as the BBC directly addressed the Vichy officials involved in the operation, using their names, threatening them with terrible retribution: ‘Each drop of blood that tomorrow, perhaps through your actions, runs in the ravines and gorges of our Haute-Savoie will fall on your heads.’722

  As the repression increased in the valleys, hundreds of résistants climbed up into the deep snow, to join the maquis on the Glières plateau, high above Annecy.723 In the shadow of the Haute-Savoie alps, the Glières is a vast region of about 70 square kilometres, situated at 1,500 metres above sea level, a region with no human habitation save a few chalets suited only for the summer months – an ‘icy desert’, as FTP leader Charles Tillon put it.724

  Soon there were up
to 600 men on the plateau – members of the FTP, Spanish immigrants who had fought in the Civil War, members of the Secret Army – all of whom needed to be fed, sheltered and supplied with clothes and weapons. Although four RAF planes parachuted fifty-four containers in the night of 13 February, and drops of around fifty tons arrived a month later, the men were doubly vulnerable: they were still poorly armed and, against all the rules of guerrilla warfare, they were now grouped together, isolated in a single place instead of being spread out and able to melt away into the countryside. London soon became alarmed, and the BBC urgently advised the maquis to disperse: ‘Today’s France already has too many martyrs. Tomorrow’s France will never have enough soldiers’ came the message.725

  Despite the dangers, the maquis felt confident that, with sufficient supplies, they could hold out until the Allied invasion, which surely could not be far off. The narrow paths leading up to the plateau were easily defendable and would be blocked with snow for weeks, impassable to any but the most determined groups of men. Morale was incredibly high, despite the cold and the lack of supplies. As one of the men later remembered: