In the meanwhile, Obolensky met with the Maquis leaders to discuss how to attack and dislodge the Germans from the dam. They trekked to its base and recognized that the Germans had the high ground—it was impossible to take the dam without causing many casualties or risking its destruction. Obolensky sent a local Maquisard to contact Captain Clavel, the French officer in command of the Vichy regiment, and invite him to a meeting under the flag of truce. When the Frenchman arrived, he made it clear that he had orders to help the Germans defend the dam and that he planned to follow the orders. Obolensky told him that he was sent directly by General Koenig, the commander of the French Forces of the Interior. “I have orders to take and hold Eguzon for France,” Obolensky said. Having realized that the tide of the war had turned, Clavel replied with some wit, “I think our intentions are identical,” and agreed to switch sides.15
For good measure, Obolensky let Clavel believe that he had with him a large number of paratroopers standing by to attack and take Eguzon on his orders. Clavel informed Obolensky that the German commander was a young and determined officer who would not leave the area without a fight. Obolensky asked him to pass a message to the Germans that they had twelve hours to get out of Eguzon, leaving the facilities intact or else face annihilation. After the French officer left, Obolensky moved Team Patrick and about two hundred Maquisards about one mile from the dam and prepared to attack. To their delight, they saw the Germans depart the next morning toward Châteauroux in trucks and cars, leaving most of their equipment and personal items behind. Reminiscing of the operation almost a year later, Obolensky attributed the success to the fact that “They didn’t know how many we were … and paratroopers had a very definite reputation with the Germans.”16
* * *
Upon entering the Eguzon facility, Obolensky set up a series of concentric defensive rings to protect it from German counter-attacks. At the center, inside the facility itself, Obolensky positioned OGs from Team Patrick equipped with heavy weapons and mortars. Demolition experts from the team blew up bridges and viaducts on the roads leading to Eguzon. When they ran out of explosives and demolition equipment, they resorted to felling trees and laying them across the roads to block any German drive to retake the facility. Obolensky positioned Captain Clavel and his regiment to defend the perimeter near the dam, transformers, and turbine equipment. Maquisards set up two defensive perimeters, one at a mile and a half and the other at ten miles from Eguzon. Obolensky realized that he did not have enough troops to cover the entire area, but the Maquis put the word out for volunteers. During the next week, six hundred additional men arrived to protect the facility.
After a few days, when it became clear that the Germans had no interest in retaking Eguzon, Team Patrick moved back to Le Blanc. The area was crisscrossed with roads connecting two major highways the Germans were using to evacuate their troops from Bordeaux and points south toward Orleans and from there to Germany. The Germans often preferred these secondary roads to the major highways, which were under constant attack by the Allied air force. The French were happy to put to use the weapons and ammunition that Team Patrick had brought them. They set up small ambushes and skirmishes to slow down German movements in the area.
Medic Johnson wrote later, “The French captured very few of the enemy. There was no place to keep them and no reason to feed them. By and large, the French had had enough of the suppressive yoke of the Germans and were willing to offer a little retaliation of their own. Whatever information could be squeezed out was taken and then the captives were liquidated.” On one occasion, he and a squad of men headed by Captain J. E. Cook, Obolensky’s second-in-command, stopped by the Maquis headquarters during a reconnaissance patrol. There they saw a German officer whom the Maquisards had captured and questioned extensively. Johnson said, “The German was surprised to see us and when he did he pleaded for his life. Captain Cook did what he could to prevent the French from doing the very thing the German officer knew would happen. It wasn’t long before we heard a shot. War is such a crazy waste of everything!”17
Team Patrick joined the local Maquis in looking for opportunities to ambush the Germans on these roads. On August 29, the team received information that a large German force was going to pass through the area. They prepared to ambush the Germans two miles east of the town of Tournon-Saint-Martin. The German commander, finding his way blocked, took hostages in town and sent word to the Maquis that he would shoot the hostages if they did not open the road by 2100 hours. Obolensky replied with his own ultimatum that the local priest delivered:
SUBJECT: 1. Surrender of German Troops to US Army, Le Blanc Area Headquarters
2. Reprisals against civilian population
Sir:
1. I offer you the possibility to surrender to US Army troops as your position is hopeless.
2. I warn you that you are personally responsible for any reprisals or atrocities committed on the civilian population and so are officers of units under command who perpetrate same, and that you will be judged in accordance with the statements of President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill and tried by local courts.
3. I request an answer within 12 hours.18
When the priest returned with the Germans answer that they would fight their way out, Obolensky send word to all the Maquis groups in the area to join in setting up positions for the ambush. OGs were interspersed among the Maquisards to direct their fire and help them hold their positions. Around 2300 hours, they heard the rumble of trucks and other noises indicating that the Germans were approaching. “At this point a remarkable thing happened,” Johnson remembered later. “One man came into view riding a bicycle. He must have been the advance scout. It was obvious the Germans planned to sacrifice him to warn them of any resistance. I can still see it. The French underground had bazookas supplied by us and one of them must have thought it would be a good way to start things off. As soon as the shell hit the man on the bicycle, the Germans deployed.”19
What was initially thought to be a force of about one hundred Germans turned out to be the infantry vanguard of two divisions retreating through the area. They drove up in trucks, deployed in perfect formation, and attacked simultaneously from the front and the rear. They came up in great force around Obolensky’s right flank and closed in to within fifteen to twenty yards of his command post. Several OGs and Maquisards nearby were able to push the enemy back by throwing hand grenades. Taking advantage of the dark, Team Patrick and the Maquisards disengaged and avoided encirclement without losses. They returned to Tournon-Saint-Martin in the morning to find the Germans gone and the hostages released unharmed.
At this time, Team Patrick received orders from London to place themselves under the command of the FFI for the Indre department. They were responsible for patrolling a stretch of the road nearby with three Maquis companies, about 180 men total, under their control. It was the beginning of September, and the Germans had left the area, so all the team could find were large quantities of ammunition and equipment abandoned by the side of the road.
A few days later, the team received orders to return to London. They located a small airfield where a C-47 could land safely and radioed the coordinates to the headquarters. The pickup date was set for September 13. On that date, to their surprise, they found the field still manned by German personnel. With the help of the Maquis, the OGs quickly secured the field. Shortly after, they heard a plane’s engine, and a C-47 touched down. The French had brought many bottles of champagne to celebrate the Americans’ departure. Johnson remembered, “A jovial mood was in the air by the time we were ready to take off. Down the field we rumbled and became airborne in a state of rollicking laughter. The pilot, in a mood of generosity, gave us a bird’s-eye view of the bombed areas that the Eighth Air Force had given to many of the cities. We had a terrific trip back! The navigator was in no position to tell us where we were. Finally, Capt. Cook took our land map and directed us toward the coast of France.”20
As it was approaching
the coast of England, the plane dropped low, flying between one hundred and two hundred feet above water to avoid detection by the coastal radars. To protect the existence of the OSS, the flight was unscheduled, and the pilot was flying without a flight plan. The men snuck into England, taking the risk of being considered an unidentified plane or, worse, an enemy aircraft that had to be shot down. Fortunately, the radars did not detect the plane and fighters did not scramble to intercept it. Once over land, the pilot radioed Harrington Field, where the team landed safely about half an hour later, having completed successfully their month-long mission behind the German lines.21
CHAPTER 9
Americans in Vercors
The OSS Special Operations and Operational Groups teams were involved in supporting the Maquis of Vercors during one of the best-known and much discussed episodes of the French Resistance during World War II. Vercors is a plateau situated in the pre-Alps region between the cities of Valence and Grenoble, about one hundred miles south of Lyon. Thirty miles long from north to south and twelve miles wide east to west, Vercors is a formidable natural fortress. To get inside it, an enemy had to go through an outer ring of obstacles formed by the rivers Isère, Drôme, and Drar. Next, he had to cross mountain ranges up to six thousand feet high that formed a perimeter over one hundred miles long around the plateau. At that time only eight roads led into Vercors, each of them with hairpin turns and narrow passes carved into the sides of the mountain that a defender could easily keep under surveillance, control, and if necessary destroy to prevent the advance of the enemy.1
After the Franco-German armistice of June 25, 1940, Vercors remained in the area of France controlled by the Vichy government, although the Germans controlled Grenoble, the main city at the northern entrance of the plateau. Being at the boundary of German-occupied zone and due to the remoteness of its geography, Vercors became a place of refuge for people on the run, including political refugees, French Jews escaping arrest, and former French soldiers who did not want to serve under the Vichy regime. The plateau came under the influence of the movement Franc Tireurs, founded in Lyon in 1941 and one of several resistance organizations that arose in France at the time.2 Franc Tireurs, or “free shooters,” was a term used in France since the early 1800s to indicate irregular soldiers who fought behind enemy lines. In Vercors, their actions began with publishing and distributing leaflets against the Vichy policies and inciting passive resistance to the government directives.
The decision of Hitler and Mussolini to occupy the south of France after the Allied landings in North Africa on November 10, 1942, caused an influx of men to the Maquis of Vercors. The majority of them took to the mountains to evade the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), or Compulsory Work Service, the mandatory labor service instituted in France that sent hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen to work in Germany. The newly arrived were young, the majority between nineteen and twenty-three years of age, and without any combat experience. They came from all walks of life, had varied motivations, and were affiliated with movements across the French political spectrum. Some attempts to homogenize the members of the Maquis were made by equipes volantes, or roaming teams of political agitators, who were mostly socialist-leaning members of the Franc Tireurs movement interested in keeping other resistance factions from establishing a following in Vercors. The military preparation of the new arrivals was limited to studying a manual on guerrilla warfare assembled from instructions on the use of irregular troops issued by the French Ministry of Defense before the war. They also underwent physical training despite the winter conditions and the fact that most of them wore city clothes not appropriate for life in the mountains.3
By the end of winter 1942–1943, four to five hundred members of the Maquis had settled in a dozen camps around Vercors. Their main preoccupation at the time was to secure provisions, including bread, meat, and tobacco. Most of the veterans remembered the time in these camps as mostly spent in boredom, filled with the drudgery of fetching water, collecting firewood, and pulling kitchen duty. They launched some raids to secure arms and munitions, but those remained marginal and most of the actions were against Italian depots to secure provisions. Here is how Gilbert François remembered the life in one of the camps:
When it was sunny, you could see a small flock being taken to pasture in the morning and back to the stables in the evening, men lying in the shade, others toasting in the sun, in other words, a vacation colony for unemployed youth. This is what a solitary traveler would have seen venturing in that abandoned landscape. We did water duty, vegetable cleaning duty, cutting down trees, killing and preparing animals; and then there were alerts, raids in Jossaud [the nearby village], and so on.4
As long as the Maquisards remained in their camps and limited their actions to raids on supply depots, the Italians were happy to confine their actions to the discovery and collection of arms and ammunition dumps hidden in caves around the area. Occasional hits against Italian soldiers triggered raids on the Maquis camps or nearby villages, but no reprisals against civilians ever occurred. Both sides had developed an unspoken mutual warning system to signal each other’s presence and avoid head-on confrontations. For example, on March 18, 1943, two hundred Italian soldiers left Grenoble headed toward a Maquis camp. They sang all the way to ensure that there was no surprise whatsoever in their arrival. The outcome of the operation was four Maquisards arrested. One of the leaders of the Maquis of Vercors, Eugène Samuel, later wrote that this relaxed behavior of the Italian army created bad habits among the Resistance members. When the Germans took the place of the Italians, the Maquisards learned the hard way to be more disciplined and paid the price whenever they displayed reckless temerity.5
The fight against the Maquis was primarily the responsibility of the Fascist secret police, the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. Using a network of informers in the area, OVRA was able to arrest the original founders of the Maquis, which left the movement leaderless for a while and severed its connections with other Resistance groups in France and the Free French in London and Algiers.
At the end of June 1943, a new generation of leaders stepped up to reorganize the Maquis of Vercors. They embraced a strategic plan, known as Plan Montagnards, or Highlanders Plan, that envisioned two ways in which the Maquis could engage the Germans. In the first one, “Vercors would serve as a center of unrest and refuge for guerrilla fighters who, at the opportune moment, would attack railways, roads, bridges, electrical lines, and industrial plants in the area. The area would be a launching point for incursions in the rear of the German armies only at the time when they began their withdrawal from the Rhône valley.” The second option, the most audacious one, envisioned “the transformation of the plateau of Vercors into an aircraft carrier docked on dry land.” Under this option, the main task of the Maquisards would be to clear and prepare areas where Allied airplanes and parachutists could land.6
The leaders of Vercors found a way to brief the French leaders in Algiers about Plan Montagnards. They received the response over the airwaves when the BBC broadcast the message “Les montagnards doivent continuer a gravir les cimes,” or “The highlanders should continue to climb the summits.” It meant that the plan was approved. No further instructions arrived to indicate which of the two options was seen as more favorable, although during a clandestine visit in Vercors, a senior French officer from Algiers made it clear that “without artillery, or mortars as a minimum, there is no hope to hold the plateau for long” in the event of an attack.7
* * *
After the fall of Mussolini on July 25, 1943, and the signing of the armistice between Italy and the Allies on September 8, Vercors came under the 157th Reserve Division of the Wehrmacht, a unit created in November 1939 in Munich from local recruits from Bavaria. It had been located in southeast France since the fall of 1942 and did not have the combat experience that had hardened other German troops, such as deployments in the Eastern Front or in the Balkans. The division was under the
commanded of General Karl Pflaum, a career officer of the German military establishment since 1910. Pflaum, born in 1890, had become a captain in 1921 and a colonel in 1937. He became general in 1941 and commanded the 258th Infantry Division in the battles for Moscow between October 1941 and January 1942.8
The Germans replaced OVRA with the Gestapo and the Milice Française, or French Militia, the dreaded paramilitary force of the Vichy regime. Known simply as the Milice, the French Resistance feared it even more than the Gestapo and the SS for its ruthlessness and cruelty.9 The Gestapo and the Milice quickly showed that they would not tolerate any acts of defiance in the area. On November 11, 1943, when two thousand men marched to the monument of the fallen in Grenoble to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the French victory in 1918, Gestapo and French police surrounded them and deported four hundred marchers to Buchenwald. The resistance responded by sabotaging railroad and electricity lines, killing Milice members, and blowing up a depot with two hundred tons of artillery munitions.
The Germans countered with Operation Grenoble, executed between November 25 and 30, during which they arrested, killed, or deported most of the resistance leaders in the area. It became known as the “bloody week” or the Saint Bartholomew Massacre of Grenoble.10 On January 22, 1944, about three hundred Germans responded strongly to a strike by the Maquis two days earlier that had blocked one of the gorges leading into Vercors. The Germans easily broke through their positions and moved in the village of Chapelle-en-Vercors, forty miles south of Grenoble, where they burned down half of the houses in reprisal. On January 29, the Germans attacked the Maquis at Malleval, thirty miles south of Lyon on the opposite side of the plateau. A French survivor of that engagement recalled later how the inexperienced Maquisards had fallen into a lethal trap while advancing single file to meet the enemy. A well-positioned machine gun opened up on them. About thirty Maquisards died and only five or six were able to escape the massacre. The Germans burned the village to the ground.11
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