by Douglas Boyd
On 30 January Darnand’s SOL became the Milice, backed by the Catholic credentials of politician Philippe Henriot, who proclaimed that recruitment was open to physically suitable men ‘of good will who wish to serve their country’. In a broadcast on 30 March over Vichy radio, he announced that the Milice was to be ‘an order of knighthood implementing the Marshal’s national revolution to give France back her soul’. Defying the open disapproval of cardinals Gerlier and Suhard, the abbé Bouillon appointed himself its national chaplain. Honoured with the rank of SS-Obersturmführer, Darnand now had his own army equipped by the Germans training alongside men of the LVF. By the end of the year, it numbered 10,000 men and women with their own training school and newspaper called Combats.
On 11 February, 210 young Alsatians of both sexes gathered by the calvary outside the village of Riespach. Twenty-three lost their nerve and returned home but the others, armed with two hunting rifles and two revolvers, made it safely through 15km of broken country to safety in Switzerland. The following night another group from Ballersdorf – 12km further from the frontier – was not so lucky. Surrounded by German troops, the eighteen boys returned fire with four rifles. Only one escaped to Switzerland; the others were shot in the sandpit above the entrance of the nearby concentration camp of Natzwiller and incinerated there.8 On 13 February two police officers arrived in Chambon to arrest pastors Trocmé and Theis, escorting them to the concentration camp at St-Paul-d’Eyjeaux near Limoges. After five weeks’ confinement, they were released a few days before all the other prisoners were deported. It is thought that none returned.
On 15 February men coming of age in 1940, 1941 and 1942 were called up for the STO. In the southern zone, one third of them were serving in the Chantiers de Jeunesse, where de la Porte du Theil issued them with fifteen-day leave passes and written instruction to report for STO at the end of their leave. Roughly half of them interpreted this as tacit permission to desert. Resistance tracts proclaimed that going to work in Germany meant living under Allied bombs and that leaving France was treachery. For once the communists and the Church were on the same side. On 21 March Cardinal Liénart announced in Lyon that turning up for the STO was not a duty of conscience, while in the streets posters of the Feldcommandantur threatened ‘pitiless sanctions’ for those who did not present themselves at the recruitment centres and railways stations to catch their trains. One alternative was to find a job with a German agency in France, so 2,000 joined the Kriegsmarine as fitters and guards and 1,982 donned German uniform as drivers in NSKK Motorgruppen, freeing Germans for more military tasks. The Todt Organisation employed 3,000 more in uniform as armed guards for construction sites, where the labour was a mixture of local requis, who were paid a reasonable wage, and slave labourers from the east. On 7 October that year, Laval did another deal with Speer, under which 10,000 factories were designated ‘S’ and their workers exempted from the STO.
At Vesoul in Franche-Comté only three of 400 STO conscripts reported for duty; in the Jura twenty-five out of 850; in Seine-et-Loire only thirty-one from 3,700.9 The attitude of many police officers towards arresting defaulters was summed up by Lieutenant Theret, head of the detachment at Paris Gare d’Orsay. He warned his men on 9 March 1943 that he ‘would not find a single STO dodger and counted on them to do likewise as good Frenchmen’.10
The word maquis means simply ‘scrubland’, and STO runaways were said to prendre le maquis as in the report by Gendarmerie chef d’escadron Calvayrac in Haute-Savoie dated 22 March 1943: ‘No-shows for STO are so numerous that only fifty of 340 reported in. Many men have abandoned their homes, their work and their family to take to the maquis instead.’11 From there, Maquis came to mean collectively ‘those hiding in rough country’ and maquisard was coined to mean ‘a man hiding in remote country’.
Another expression achieving legitimacy in the Petit Larousse dictionary was ‘black market’, defined for the first time after the law of 15 March 1943 detailed severe penalties for illicit trafficking. As an example of inflation, an egg had cost 1.75 francs in 1941; now it cost as much as 11 francs in Paris – more than a skilled worker earned in an hour. When the two neologisms collided, the result was bloodshed. PCF member Georges Gingouin now effectively governed a remote area of the Limousin, where his printed communiqués, signed in his own name as ‘Prefect of the Maquis’, fixed agricultural prices and banned black marketeering. The penalty for transgression was not a fine, but a bullet. He also used traditional trade unionist methods to slow down industrial and agricultural production in the area, rather than open sabotage which invited reprisals.12
On 20 March Italian Inspector-General for Racial Policy Guido Lospinoso arrived in Nice, backed up by the debonair Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, former ambassador to the Court of St James Giuseppe Bastianini. The latter had arranged the escape of 17,000 Jews from Dalmatia when he was Governor-General of the occupied province. Lospinoso and Bastianini informed the Germans in Nice that Italy was going to take responsibility for the Jewish question in the south-east because the French were dragging their feet. The truth was quite different. On 21 March the Italian army of occupation received the following instruction: ‘The Number One priority is to save Jews living in French territory occupied by our troops, whether they be Italians, French or foreigners.’
A first convoy of 2,500 Jewish refugees was bussed from the coast to Megève, St-Gervais and other Alpine resorts, where the Italian authorities accommodated them and provided new identity cards. Italian-German relations deteriorated after Lospinoso ignored several protests from Knochen in Paris, and SS-officer Heinz Röthke planned to kidnap banker Angelo Donati, a central figure in the Italian rescue operation. André Chaigneau, the newly appointed prefect in Nice, declared his willingness to work with the Italians, but not the Germans or his own master Bousquet.
On 5 April Vichy handed Daladier, Blum, Reynaud, Mandel and Gamelin over to the Germans as VIP hostages. On 11 April the Vel d’Hiv was packed with thousands of uniformed PPF members reaffirming their loyalty to the party with Hitler salutes in protest at Allied bombing raids. On 15 April, to combat the rise in the prices of goods wanted by the German purchasing agencies, all German offices closed at midday, cancelling all pending deals. Although that day was a Thursday, to get around a ban imposed by the Feldkommandantur of Dunkirk, a memorial mass was celebrated there for René Bonpain, who had been the parish priest in the suburb of Rosendaël. An enormous crowd of believers and unbelievers stood in and outside the church of St-Martin in silent tribute. Bonpain had been condemned for his intelligence-gathering activities. After prolonged torture by the Gestapo in neighbouring Malo-les-Bains, he had been shot with three other members of the Alliance network the previous month.13
In Paris on 16 April 1943 a second agreement was signed between Bousquet and Oberg, with Article 5 stipulating that the Feldgendarmerie would henceforward deal only with discipline and protection of German personnel, while the French police services would take over repression in both zones. Whilst the agreement was being signed, at 4.08 p.m. British bombs rained down again on Nantes. Whatever had been the theoretical target, 600 civilians were sufficiently injured to be taken to the main hospital, where thirty-six doctors and nurses lay dead in the ruins. The total number of deaths rose to 1,150, plus injured who had lost limbs, eyesight or otherwise had their lives blighted.
Also in April the daily ration of bread was reduced to 120g per adult – the quality can be judged by the requirement that bakers produce 134kg of bread from 100kg of flour, with additives that include sawdust. By early summer 1943 green vegetables were rationed, meat was unobtainable except on the black market and 1kg of butter cost 350 francs, as against 250 in May 1942. With salaries frozen at the 1940 level, 71 per cent of Parisians’ income was devoted to food, if one can believe the statistics produced at the time. The Institut Dourdin published its survey of incomes on 5 July: of 2,600 sample households totalling 6,729 people, 83 per cent had more than one wage-earner and m
ore than 30 per cent had supplementary pensions or allowances. The most telling statistic was that the average monthly income was 876 francs, the equivalent of just 2kg of butter on the black market! Deaths from malnutrition, hypothermia and lack of medicine – pushing civil mortalities to 169 per cent of pre-war levels – so alarmed the Propaganda Staffel that it recommended a forced exodus to remove 1 million ‘useless mouths’ from the capital.14 Aperitifs, tobacco, bed linen, shoes, torch batteries and shaving cream had become unobtainable in shops. The money economy was failing; barter became the rule, with people rhyming, ‘The cobbler’s got some ribbon, the hairdresser’s got cheese. Everybody’s got to swap in times like these.’
On alcohol-banned days, known as les jours sans (‘days without’), regular patrons at a café or restaurant in Paris ordered ‘my usual coffee’ with a wink to the waiter and were served a black market digestif or apéritif. Cartoonist Aldebert drew a smirking waiter whispering in a client’s ear, ‘In the soup, Monsieur, you’ll find a whole chicken stuffed with two mutton chops’. People joked, ‘Save paper! Don’t throw away your used Metro ticket, but use it to wrap your weekly meat ration after sealing the perforations, so the meat doesn’t fall through.’15 Behind the jokes was a national propaganda campaign against the black market.
Nobody lucky enough to have cigarettes threw away the dog-ends, which were kept to re-roll for another smoke. Extraordinary ersatz tobacco mixtures were sold, the most bizarre being ‘Belgian tobacco’, a concoction of gossamer spider silk said to resemble ‘the pubic hair of Venitian blondes’!16 Real soap had disappeared, and the substitute blocks disintegrated to a gritty paste on contact with water. Workers in dirty jobs had the right to extra ‘soap’, but the repeated queuing to collect it took up a working day, which they could ill afford. No wonder that in July 1943 Captain Flouquet of the Lyon gendarmerie reported: ‘the mood of the population is very negative. People criticise every initiative of the government and listen favourably to English radio. They consider the Germans to be the main enemy.’17
An instant hit on the BBC French Service was The Partisans’ Song, which everyone thought had been written by a few maquisards around a hidden campfire, the chords being plucked out on a guitar. The truth is more prosaic. The BBC wanted a pompous signature tune for the programme Honneur et Patrie, but Emmanuel Astier de le Vigerie and a group of other Free French in London disagreed. On 30 May between midday and 4 p.m. somewhere in the London suburbs The Partisans’ Song was written by Maurice Druon and his uncle Joseph Kessel – who had escaped together from France at Christmas 1942 – with music by singer-songwriter Anna Marly. It was a call to arms: ‘Come up from the mines, comrades. Come down from the hills …’ There was no ambiguity about its message: ‘We break the bars of our brothers’ prisons … If you fall, a friend will take your place.’
In May, there were 1,284 Allied raids against 793 different towns, with Cambrai bombed eleven times and Douai nine times. In June, 2,307 raids hit 1,572 targets. By the end of August an estimated half-million high explosives and 35,317 incendiary bombs had dropped on French towns. In Le Havre all the water mains had burst leaving the fire service to lay hoses from canals and the sea, until they finally ran out of diesel fuel for the pump engines and had to beg some from passing Germans. Equipment was so worn out now that fire teams borrowed car batteries from garage-owners to feed emergency lighting. Civil Defence trucks toured the devastated areas with food, drinking water, clothing and fuel for heating and cooking. The Red Cross and the Refugee Service also did what they could. Central government could do little except despatch special crisis trains to the worst-hit areas, each with its own operating theatre, a thirty-bed emergency ward, a midwifery section, a kitchen able to provide 14,000 meals and supplies of clothing and bedding for the homeless.
NOTES
1. Amouroux, La Vie, Vol. 1, pp. 144–7. Released on probation, the prince joined the maquis, was wounded and finished the war as a lieutenant in the Chasseurs Alpins.
2. Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 155–6.
3. E. Paris, Unhealed Wounds (NewYork: Grove Press, 1985), pp. 93–7.
4. Krivopissko (ed.), La Vie à en Mourir, pp. 223–4.
5. Letter of Simone Weill dated 4 February 1943 in Lettres de Drancy, ed. A. Sabbagh (Paris: Tallandier, 2002), pp. 297–9.
6. L. Chabrun et al., L’Express, 10 October 2005.
7. Diamond, Women and the Second World War, p. 83.
8. There is a commemorative plaque in the firing range outside the camp.
9. Amouroux, La Vie, Vol. 2, p. 39.
10. Quoted by L. Chabrun et al, L’Express, 10 October 2005.
11. Ibid.
12. Obituary notice in The Guardian, 3 December 2005.
13. Krivopissko (ed.), La Vie à en mourir, p. 219.
14. Le Boterf, La Vie Parisienne, Vol. 1, pp. 34, 36.
15. Ibid., p. 67.
16. Le Boterf, La Vie Parisienne, Vol. 1, p. 40.
17. L. Chabrun et al., L’Express, 6 October 2005.
18
CASUALTIES IN THE
GREAT GAME
In the northern zone, very little stockpiling of arms had been possible and the Resistance networks were in a desperate need of weapons, explosives and ammunition, which the RAF was ordered to deliver. Weighing 2.5 tonnes, a typical consignment included six Brens, twenty-seven Stens, thirty-six .303 rifles, five automatic pistols, 18,000 rounds of ammunition, Mills grenades and 8kg of plastic explosive with detonators, plus medical kits. Sometimes chocolate, money and cigarettes were stuffed into empty spaces.
Each mission required a reception party on the ground able to hide the materiel quickly. In May 1943 Rodolphe Faytout, a farmer in Pujols-sur-Dordogne persuaded Pierre Mignon and a dozen other friends that ‘it was time to do something’.1 None of them knew how he communicated with London, but all were exhilarated by the first drop. Transported in Faytout’s small van, the consignment was dispersed on several different properties. For each subsequent operation, a different small field was chosen in this area of woodland and mixed farming, only 10km from the nearest town where Germans were based. The group undertook no military action, but as the months went by, the hidden stocks mounted steadily, distribution helped by the relaxation of travel restrictions across the Demarcation Line after 2 March 1943.
The BBC’s coded personal messages confirming each ‘shipment’ were listened for by 17-year-old Cathérine Bouchou in the hamlet of St-Antoine-de-Queyret.2 Her father being the mayor’s part-time secretary, she helped him make false papers with genuine ID card blanks and the Mairie’s rubber stamps. Cathérine’s mother and younger sister knew nothing of this and, like many people unwilling to get personally involved, Mayor Chanut simply turned a blind eye.
On 21 August after the news from London, Cathérine heard, ‘Jacqueline a une robe rouge. Je répète. Jacqueline a une robe rouge.’ Jacqueline’s red dress was to be ‘Annette’, a radio operator arriving to replace an arrested predecessor working for SOE officer George Starr, code-name ‘Hilaire’, who was staying in the Bouchou house. ‘Annette’ was Yvonne Cormeau, widow of a Belgian RAF officer killed during the London Blitz when a bomb destroyed their house while he was home on leave. Mother of two young children, she joined the WAAF and volunteered to work for Maurice Buckmaster’s Section F as a way of avenging her husband.
The drop was to take place in the meadow behind the Bouchou home at 1 a.m. on 22 August. Cathérine recalls a full moon that night, and the aircraft flying in so low on its first pass that Faytout’s little group thought it was going to hit her house. Anxious not to drop ‘Annette’ in the surrounding woods, the RAF pilot over-corrected, landing her in the Bouchous’ vineyard, where she lost a shoe and tore her skirt on the stakes before recovering the transmitter and a suitcase of money dropped with her. Beneath each of nine other parachutes blossoming in the moonlight swung a man-size container. With their contents hidden in the Bouchous’ barn, Faytout’s group split up and returned home. The original intention
to disperse the weapons next day was prevented by repeated over-flights of an ancient Heinkel HE 46 biplane used as a spotter plane.
Determining the position of a transmitter requires only two direction-finding vans: spaced apart: their bearings intersect at the source of the transmissions. In an alarming lapse of security, ‘Hilaire’ kept ‘Annette’ transmitting his backlog of messages from Cathérine’s bedroom for five days. Her SOE set was so large and cumbersome that on one occasion when stopped at a German checkpoint, ‘Annette’ convinced the bored soldiers that it was X-ray equipment, in keeping with her cover identity as a district nurse. With a combination of nerve and luck, she went on to make a record 400 transmissions over thirteen months without being caught, not seeing Cathérine again until they met during a This is Your Life programme devoted to Yvonne Cormeau’s life on 8 November 1989.
Faytout’s group received several other drops, unaware that SS-Officer Helmut Demetrio, based in the former savings bank adjacent to the Hôtel des Voyageurs in Castillon, had them in his sights. Slender build, spectacles and habitual slight smile did nothing to soften Demetrio’s face, marred by duelling-type scars on upper lip and chin. With his interpreter Heinrich – called ‘Cosh’ because of the way he punctuated questions – Demetrio had already tortured many suspects and would-be line-crossers.
The fatal drop took place on 20 October at the farm of Lucienne Beaupertuis and her husband near Pujols, after which the ammunition and weapons were hidden in a woodshed for dispersal when fog grounded the spotter-plane. The arrest next day of Faytout, followed by that of Pierre Mignon and several others, made it plain that Faytout had talked. As to how much he had given away, the answer came swiftly. Lucienne’s husband was arrested while she was out shopping. At his trial post-Liberation, Heinrich the Cosh said proudly, ‘That one I played with, like a cat plays with a mouse.’ Four days after his arrest, a black Citroën drove up to Lucienne’s farm. Faytout got out and indicated the shed where the arms had first been hidden. French-speaking SS men jumped down from the truck behind the Citroën and started hunting for them, but they had already been buried elsewhere, despite the spotter-plane. When Demetrio and ‘Cosh’ came into the farm kitchen, the latter’s first words to Lucienne were, ‘Your husband has spilled the beans. He said you would tell us where the arms now are.’
