by Matthew Cobb
Even worse was to come. On 10 June a regiment of the Das Reich was ordered to deal with an alleged maquis group that was supposedly holding a German officer captive in Oradour-sur-Glane, around twenty kilometres north-west of Limoges. Early in the afternoon the armoured column arrived in the sleepy village and the entire male population was ordered into the central marketplace, while the women and children were herded into the church. There was no maquis group, and there was no captured German officer. Nevertheless, over the next three hours an appalling massacre took place. The men were machine-gunned and the village was set on fire. Marguerite Rouffanche, aged forty-seven at the time, had hidden behind the church altar with her two daughters and her grandson. The only woman survivor of the day’s events, she later recalled the horror:
I gathered up my children and took shelter behind the sacristy. The Germans burst in and began machine-gunning the interior of the church . . . There were screams of terror and pain and women and children fell where they were. My daughter was killed at my side.
More Germans came in carrying straw trusses, chairs and benches and logs of wood. These caught fire from flames coming up from the basement. My hair and dress began to burn. I ran through the flames to get behind a high altar. By luck there was a small ladder there. I climbed up and got out of the church through a small window. I fell to the ground on a heap of brambles. At the same instant a woman who had been near me sought to escape as I did, and she had a seven-month-old baby with her. She threw the baby out of the window, shouting to me to catch it. As she shouted, the Germans opened fire and killed her. Her name was Mme. Joyeux.
I don’t know what happened to the baby. I was too far away to catch it. The Germans saw me and started to shoot. I was hit. A bullet fractured my shoulder blade, another pierced my thigh. My two legs were badly burned, and then I was hit again in my right side. I fell down and played dead. I lay there for hours . . . At about five o’clock, people from a neighbouring village, who had heard what happened, came by to look for any survivors and found me. Seven members of my family were killed in the massacre of Oradour.760
In total, 642 inhabitants of Oradour were murdered, including 205 children. It was the worst massacre of civilians to take place during the Occupation.761
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The extent of uncoordinated popular action in the wake of D-Day, and the risks run by ill-armed and ill-prepared résistants, led the Free French to try to stop the wave of action. BBC broadcasts called on the population to prepare for a long struggle and to temper their efforts, while on 10 June General Koenig – the nominal Free French head of the FFI – sent an urgent message to all Resistance forces:
PUT MAXIMUM BRAKE ON GUERRILLA ACTION STOP CURRENTLY IMPOSSIBLE TO SUPPLY ARMS AND AMMUNITION IN SUFFICIENT QUANTITIES STOP WHEREVER POSSIBLE BREAK OFF ATTACKS TO ALLOW REORGANIZATION STOP AVOID LARGE GROUPINGS FORM SMALL ISOLATED GROUPS762
This decision resolved the argument that had raged between the Free French and the Communists over whether the maquis should be composed of guerrilla groups or were simply a kind of parking lot for the future French army. The Free French had apparently accepted that the Communists were right. The news came too late for the two largest maquis in the country, both of which would pay an appalling price.
From April 1944 the Secret Army had been gathering its forces at Mont Mouchet in the Auvergne, to the growing irritation and alarm of the Nazis. On 10 June around 2,500 maquisards were attacked by German troops. Outnumbered and above all outgunned, the maquis fell back to a reserve position, but this, too, was attacked, and by dawn of 12 June the Nazis were in control of the whole forest area that had been the realm of the maquis. A hundred and twenty-five maquisards died in the fighting.763 Far to the east, in the region of Grenoble, similarly tragic events were unfolding in the mountainous region known as the Vercors, a huge 1,700-square-kilometre plateau composed of a series of villages and hamlets, protected by high chalk cliffs.
Since the beginning of 1943 there had been a maquis in the Vercors that, like the maquis of the far smaller Glières region to the north, was dominated by military officers. In Jean Moulin’s first plan for the maquis, the Vercors played an important role because of its size, proximity to Grenoble and the main north–south communications routes, and the existence of a suitable area that could be used as an airstrip. By 1944 regular radio transmissions and exchanges of personnel led to a high level of contact between the maquisards, the Allies and the Free French in Algiers. And yet, somewhere along the line, wires got crossed, messages were forgotten and the Vercors maquis drifted off the Free French radar, with disastrous consequences.
On the night of 8 June Colonel Marcel Descour, the commander of the maquis, ordered the plateau into ‘lockdown’ as part of what he thought were his orders from Algiers. All roads to the plateau were blocked as the Vercors became the first part of France outside the Allied beachhead in Normandy to be liberated.764 Over the next month thousands of young men and women from the surrounding area joined the maquis, which swelled from nearly 400 strong on 6 June to over 4,000.765 Under the combined leadership of military officers and local socialist politicians, the Vercors became a liberated zone, declaring itself a republic.766 To increase the impression – and the reality – of a new state, maquisards were given uniforms, and all the apparatus of a mini state was created – an official newspaper, a functioning legal system and even a prison camp for collaborators and German prisoners. At one point the Free French sent a Commissar of the Republic – veteran résistant Yves Farge – to visit the liberated territory. In a particularly bold – even provocative – gesture, every morning a large tricolour flag was raised at Saint-Nizier, clearly visible to the German garrison that occupied Grenoble in the flat valley below. Even more so than in the Glières four months earlier, the atmosphere was infectious: for maquisard Yves Perotin, ‘The life of liberty in the tiny Republic was like nothing else . . . For the first time, the air was cleansed of all traces of treason, and yet the virtual state of siege made the situation stifling.’767
Although morale was high, something was wrong. Weapons and ammunition were in worryingly short supply – increasingly so as new maquisards flocked to join the original group. With no sign of the hoped-for Allied landings in the Mediterranean, it became apparent that there might be little difference between a fortress and a trap. Colonel Descour claimed that ‘our aim is to free as much of the country as possible by slowly enlarging our “free zones” by slow and patient progress’, but nothing of the sort was happening.768 The Nazis and their Vichy stooges were locked out of the Vercors, but the maquisards were locked in.
Radio calls to Algiers demanding reinforcements led to the arrival of a small group of thirteen American commandos, who trained the maquisards in the use of mortars and bazookas, and helped them attack two German armoured convoys. French officers were also parachuted in, together with a number of SOE agents, some of whom could not speak a word of French.769 Finally, on 14 July – Bastille Day – 107 USAAF B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers dropped 1,000 containers of vital supplies on to the plateau, with the parachutes touchingly coloured in the red, white and blue of the French flag. But the Luftwaffe, well aware of the operation, repeatedly strafed and bombed the drop site and fire-bombed the neighbouring village, preventing the maquisards from collecting even half the containers. As a result, although the Vercors maquis now possessed around 1,400 Sten guns and 1,700 rifles, plus nearly 80 anti-tank weapons as well as machine guns and revolvers, around half the maquisards were still unarmed and, crucially, there were no heavy weapons and no artillery. Increasingly desperate messages from the Vercors demanded more weaponry, more troop reinforcements and a raid on the nearby Nazi aerodrome that served as a base for German reconnaissance and attack operations. There was no response.770 On the evening of 20 July the political leader of the maquis, Eugène Chavant, sent a final, furious message to Algiers: ‘IF NO AID WE AND POPULATION WILL CONSIDER ALGIERS CRIMINAL AND COWARDLY REPEAT CRIMINAL AND COWARDLY’.771<
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For reasons that remain unclear, no action was taken.
The end began the next morning, when 10,000 Nazi troops attacked the plateau. The scale of the operation – the largest German attack on the Resistance in the whole of Western Europe – indicates how worried the Germans were about the maquis. At first the defenders held their own, but on 24 July 200 crack SS troops landed in gliders, right in the heart of the plateau. The tide of battle soon turned, and within two days the order was given to evacuate the plateau. Maquisards and civilians fled as best they could, but the fury of the Nazis was terrifying. The civilian population of Vassieux-en-Vercors was massacred and the town was almost completely destroyed. On 27 June thirty-six wounded maquisards, hiding in a cave that doubled as a hospital, were coldly assassinated. Only one man – an American – was spared, while the nurses were deported to the concentration camps. Nazi atrocities knew no limits – there were appalling gang rapes, and one woman who had helped SOE was disembowelled and left to die.772 For days, maquisards hid out in the hills, desperate to escape, while the Nazis hunted them down like animals. In total, 326 résistants and 130 civilians were killed in the assault. The tragedy of Vassieux was eventually added to a list of Nazi atrocities that formed the French case in the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war crimes, along with the massacres at Ascq, Tulle and Oradour.773
The reasons why the Vercors maquis did not receive the support it needed have been repeatedly debated over the last sixty years, with explanations that vary from military stupidity on the part of the local leaders, squabbles between rival Free French services to simple forgetfulness in Algiers. Behind these alternatives lurks a bitter but real truth: the local maquis leaders launched their ‘republic’ because they mistakenly thought that military support was imminent, either in the form of Allied landings in the south or of substantial supplies and reinforcements. The Allies could have supplied the maquis with the artillery they required, and the men with the skills needed to operate it. But the Vercors was not an immediate Allied priority, and above all the Allied and Free French commanders remained deeply suspicious of the Resistance and consistently refused to supply the maquis with heavy weapons. Giving handguns to potentially undisciplined forces was bad enough; there could be no question of providing them with artillery.
The terrible events of June and July 1944 showed the limits of the military power of the Resistance. The résistants could not defend themselves against the might of the German army, and, even worse, they were unable to guarantee the safety of the civilian population when the Nazis decided to inflict horrendous repression. The tragically unequal struggle between the Nazis and the Resistance, in which underground newspapers and minor sabotage actions were wielded against the murderous terror of the Nazi machine, had turned into something unimaginably nightmarish.
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The Allied commanders knew that the Liberation of France would not be straightforward. Total air superiority meant they were able to construct their bridgehead on the beaches, including the massive artificial ‘Mulberry’ harbours, which were towed across the Channel. But after an initial hesitation caused by the absence of the German commander Rommel (who was on holiday) and by Berlin’s continued conviction that the real Allied invasion would take place near Calais, the Nazis threw everything into holding the Allied advance in Normandy. For over a month they succeeded, and the Allies were unable to break out of the Cotentin peninsula, despite the heroic sacrifice of thousands of soldiers.
Behind the front line, in liberated territory, a semblance of normality broke out, despite the endless eastward stream of troops, armoured vehicles and aeroplanes. The Allies had assumed they would have to impose a military government, but virtually immediately, the Free French showed that they enjoyed at least the acquiescence of the local population. In the run-up to D-Day the Allies had again displayed their scorn for de Gaulle – they told him of the imminent invasion only on the evening of 4 June (the first warning messages to the Resistance had been broadcast four days earlier!) – and they still refused to recognize the recently declared French Provisional Government.774 But on 14 June they allowed de Gaulle to visit Normandy for the day. He went on a brief walkabout in Bayeux, which had been liberated a week before, and got an enthusiastic, if not overwhelming, reception. After the Free French leader returned to Britain, his Commissaire de la République took over as the civil authority without a whisper of opposition. As the London head of OSS Research and Analysis, Crane Brinton, put it in a report written from Normandy at the beginning of September:
The transition from the Vichy government to what I shall call for convenience the Provisional Government has been effected in Normandy, and indeed throughout the West, with great smoothness . . . Vichy has faded away, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, but not even the leer has remained.775
The relative ease with which the Free French were able to take over was not primarily due to massive popular support for de Gaulle. The Free French had carefully prepared an alternative administration that could take the place of local Vichy personnel. These new local leaders – Commissaires de la République – were supported by Comités Départementaux de la Libération (Departmental Committees of Liberation), which had been set up in every region. Their job was to control local Resistance groups and ensure that the decisions of the new administration were implemented.776 Faced with military reality, the Vichy personnel accepted the new situation. As the American historian Robert Paxton put it:
When the Vichyite local authorities were dispossessed or vanished, de Gaulle wanted them replaced neither by anarchy, Communist francs-tireurs partisans from the hills, nor an American military government . . . In retrospect a certain harmony of interest in an orderly transition appears in both Algiers and Vichy, a harmony drowned out at the time by more conspicuous discords.777
Eisenhower and Montgomery enthusiastically embraced the possibility of handing over power to effective and – in their eyes – reliable French personnel rather than using their precious troops to police a whole country. The real obstacle, however, was Roosevelt, who hated and mistrusted de Gaulle, wary of his personal politics and his ambition for a renewed and strengthened France. Public opinion in both Britain and the US was pressing for official recognition of de Gaulle and the Free French, but Roosevelt was obdurate. Churchill, unwilling to do anything to upset his powerful ally, obediently followed suit. After his successful visit to Bayeux, de Gaulle travelled to the USA, where, after four years of continual conflict, the Provisional Government was grudgingly and only partially recognized as ‘the working authority for civilian administration in the liberated areas of France’.778
The reality of public and Resistance acceptance of de Gaulle’s power did not mean that the job of the Resistance was over, or that the rumbling tensions between the Resistance and the Free French had entirely evaporated. In the heat of the action after D-Day, the differences over who controlled the military action of the Resistance – was it Algiers or was it the Resistance itself? – had largely been forgotten. But as the summer went on, the question threatened to undo the fragile French unity. Paradoxically, the immediate source of these conflicts was the success of the Allied advance. In those areas of Normandy that were liberated by the Allied armies, power was neatly handed over to the Free French representatives. But at the end of July the military situation began to change. First, the Allies finally broke out of the Cotentin peninsula. Then, on 15 August, they defeated a German counter-attack in the ‘Falaise pocket’, south of Caen, opening the road eastwards. On the same day the long-awaited Allied Mediterranean landings took place, as 150,000 troops disembarked on the coast around St-Tropez.779 Hitler described it as ‘the worst day of my life’, and immediately gave secret orders to his commanders to withdraw all German troops to the east of Paris, beginning a retreat that ended nine months later in Berlin.780
The collapse of Nazi rule in France came incredibly quickly. For four short weeks in August and September there was an ecstatic summer of liberation,
as the whole of the country, with the exception of the northeastern region around Alsace-Lorraine, was freed. The full story of these tumultuous events is extremely complex, and can only be fully told in a series of detailed ‘micro-histories’.781 Put simply, in the wake of the Nazi withdrawal, the Resistance took power, often without any intervention of Allied troops. The Allied invasion forces headed eastwards from Normandy and north from Provence; the whole southern and western part of France – around half the surface area of the country south of the line Nantes–Dijon–Avignon, including major cities like Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Perpignan, Clermont-Ferrand and Limoges – was left to its own devices. Of 212 major French towns, eighty-four per cent were liberated without much fighting by the Resistance, either because the Allied armies did the job for them or because the Germans simply left.782 In over thirty major cities, however, there were insurrections that threatened to destroy the unity of the Resistance, and to lead to a very different outcome from that hoped for by the Allies. The most symbolic of these events took place in Paris.783
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A month after D-Day, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was finally transported back into southern France to continue her intelligence work with the ALLIANCE circuit.784 Within a few days she was encoding information from a high-ranking Nazi officer explaining that there was a plot to kill Hitler and demanding to negotiate with General Koenig of the Free French. Fourcade was bemused – ‘The Nazis were all going mad,’ she thought.785 Shortly afterwards, she was arrested by the Germans and found herself in a prison cell in Aix, waiting for the Gestapo interrogation she deeply feared. Fourcade then remembered how, according to a fanciful tale told by her father, Indo-Chinese burglars supposedly oiled their bodies and then stripped naked so they could escape from the clutches of their would-be captors. At around midnight she slipped off her silk dress, rolled it into a ball and gripped it with her teeth, then took off the rest of her clothes and managed to get her head through the bars of her ground-floor cell:
