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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

It became clear to the Maquis leaders that the numerous camps where the Maquisards had spent the winter had become targets for the Germans and created a great risk for the civilians around them who kept these camps provisioned. A vast difference of opinions existed on whether it was best to reinforce these camps with heavy weapons that the Allies would send or to abandon them. Although all the Resistance military groups had been unified since February 1, 1944, under the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), reaching a consensus on the best way forward was very hard. Reflecting on the fate of the Maquis groups recently attacked, the FFI commander for Vercors, Albert Chambonnet, known as Didier, advised all Maquisards to “not engage in frontal battles. Be flexible, fall back, and conduct guerrilla actions without mercy against the flanks of the enemy.” At the end of March, Didier ordered the camps abandoned and the men spread around Vercors in what he called “a state of dispersed defense.”

In early January 1944, the Maquis of Vercors came into contact with the Union mission, the first inter-allied team to be sent to France as a precursor to the Jedburgh teams that would follow after the invasion began. The team was led by British Colonel H. A. A. Thackthwaite and included American Captain Peter J. Ortiz of the OSS and the French radio operator André Foucault. The team parachuted on the night of January 6–7, 1944, near St. Nazaire-en-Royans, in the outskirts of the Vercors plateau, halfway between Valence and Grenoble. Within a few weeks, they had established contacts with the military leaders of the area from the French-Italian border to Lyon and impressed upon them that the main task of the Maquis at the time was to prepare for guerrilla activities on or after D-Day.

Mission Union spend considerable amount of time in Vercors, which had the widest concentration of Maquisards in the area. They advised the French leaders to adopt a mobile defense, which meant letting the Germans move freely by day and attacking their flanks and rear by night. They reported to the Special Forces Headquarters in England that there was the potential to mobilize up to three thousand Maquisards in Vercors; five hundred men were already active and lightly armed. There were many former French military among the Maquisards, with experience and training in the use of heavy arms, who could form strong fighting groups if supplied with mortars, machine guns, and other heavy weapons. When Mission Union returned to England at the end of May, they prepared detailed accounts of their activities and were debriefed for days. “Vercors has a very finely organized army,” they wrote, “but their supplies, though plentiful, are not what they need; they need long distance weapons and antitank weapons.”

The Allies had developed elaborate plans to activate all the resistance networks and Maquis groups in France in a general national insurrection against the Germans to coincide with the landings in the Normandy beaches on D-Day. On June 1, 1944, at 1330 hours, the BBC began broadcasting one hundred and sixty so-called personal messages, which were in effect code words alerting their groups throughout France to prepare for action. The messages were repeated at 1430, 1730, and 2115 hours of that day and then again at the same times on June 2. Then, there was nothing on June 3, 4, and during the day on June 5. Finally, at 2115 hours on June 5, the BBC broadcast for sixteen minutes the code words for action directed at the twelve regional organizations of the French Forces of the Interior and sixty-one Resistance circuits controlled by the Allied Special Forces Headquarters.

The code words for the Maquis of Vercors were “Le chamois des Alpes bondit,” or “The goat of the Alps leaps.” Those for the Drôme department in which the lower half of the Vercors resides were “Dans la forêt verte est un grand arbre,” or “There is a great tree in the green forest.” The military and political leaders of the Resistance received these calls to action with enthusiasm, believing that the moment had arrived to execute the Plan Montagnards, mobilize the population, and close Vercors to the Germans. They believed that “Vercors is the only Maquis in the whole of France, which has been given the mission to set up its own free territory. It will receive the arms, ammunition, and troops which will allow it to be the advance guard of a landing in Provence. It is not impossible that de Gaulle himself will land here to make his first proclamation to the French people.”

Calls went out to all nearby cities and villages for volunteers to join the Maquis camps in Vercors. The Communist Party printed and distributed leaflets in Grenoble calling for its supporters to take up arms. “Don’t wait any longer to join the battle. There is no D-day or H-hour for those who want to free the homeland. Let’s create everywhere combat groups to support the movement and to defend ourselves against the Boches and the murderous miliciens.” The calls were met with great enthusiasm. Within days, the number of Maquisards in the mountains increased tenfold to several thousand. This sudden influx of newcomers in the ranks of the Maquis created immediate problems: they had to be armed, fed, clothed, supplied, and trained before they could engage the enemy. Paradoxically, it worked to the benefit of the Germans who preferred to have the Maquisards concentrated in the mountains, away from the cities and main communication arteries, rather than wreaking havoc in their rear areas.

The problems were not limited to Vercors but extended throughout France. An intelligence report of the French Forces of the Interior on June 13 warned:

The ranks have grown considerably and the recruitment cannot be stopped. Those who have arms do not have sufficient ammunition. If a considerable effort is not carried out, we will witness the massacre of the French resistance.

All the partisan groups throughout France demand the same thing: arms, ammunition, money, medications. All claim to have permanent parachuting areas that they control where supplies can be sent day or night, with or without prearranged signals.

FFI tried to stop the rush to insurrection especially when reports of German atrocities and reprisals began arriving. The Germans recovered quickly from their initial surprise on D-Day and moved swiftly to restore order. Reinforcement divisions on their way to Normandy often went out of the way to sweep the areas of Maquisards and leaving a swath of blood on their wake. On June 9, in the city of Tulle, ninety-nine hostages were hanged from trees and balconies. On June 10, the Germans massacred and burned alive 634 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane, twenty miles northwest of Limoges.

On June 10, General Koenig issued the following clandestine order to his subordinates in France: “Rein in to the maximum guerrilla activity. Impossible at this time to provide you with arms and ammunition in sufficient quantities. Break contact with the enemy everywhere to reorganize. Avoid big gatherings. Operate in small isolated groups.” On June 17, Koenig further instructed to avoid gatherings around armed groupings of elements who were not armed and ready to fight. The focus of the guerrilla had to shift away from mobilizing the population in general insurrection and toward classical objectives such as disrupting enemy communications, railroad traffic, and long-distance telephone lines.

The efforts to throttle back the enthusiasm of the Maquis had little effect in Vercors. On July 3, 1944, the civilian authorities in the massif announced the restoration of the French republic in Vercors. A proclamation posted in all the towns and villages of the area informed the citizens that “starting from this day, the decrees of Vichy are abolished and all the laws of the republic have been restored…. People of Vercors, it is among you that the great Republic is being born again. You can be proud of yourself. We are certain that you will know how to defend it…. Long live the French Republic. Long live France. Long live General de Gaulle.” The flux of would-be fighters from the cities continued. Most of them had little experience and there were many who had never fired a weapon.

An initial conflagration with the Germans, a harbinger of things to come, did not bode well for the Maquis of Vercors. On June 10, two companies of German soldiers attacked Saint-Nizier, a key mountain pass in the northern extremity of the Vercors, which dominated the city of Grenoble in the valley below, only a few miles to the northeast. Saint-Nizier was an excellent observation point for all the automobile and railroad traffic into and out of Grenoble. The Maquisards holding the pass had little military experience but were able to hold out for several hours until more seasoned and better-equipped men arrived from other camps. The Germans retreated but returned on June 15. This time, there were between 1,000 and 1,500 German soldiers against 300 Maquisards stretched along a front of 2.5 miles. Within a few hours, the Germans broke through their defenses, entered the town, and burned it down.

Throughout June, the Germans assembled forces and equipment for the final assault on Vercors, which they gave the code name Operation Bettina. Over 1,500 reinforcements arrived in Valence, a city west of Vercors, among them troops specialized in mountain fighting and anti-guerrilla operations. Seventy airplanes and armored equipment were positioned at the airfield of Chabeuil, just south of Valence. General Pflaum took special care in retraining and preparing the 157th Reserve Division for the upcoming battle. He restructured the division around mobile columns who could operate more effectively in Maquis territory. He supervised personally the instruction of each unit of infantry and insisted on special drills at night and in camouflage. He was able to change completely the division’s state of mind, which resulted in a marked improvement in the ability of his soldiers to fight.

The German preparations did not go unnoticed by the French Maquisards. Spotters observing the German movements from the mountains reported in detail the preparations to the Vercors military commanders. They in turn sent appeals for help of increasing intensity to their superiors in Algiers and London.

To strengthen the Maquis of Vercors and to coordinate guerrilla attacks against the German lines of communications, the OSS dispatched a team, code-named Justine, of two officers and thirteen enlisted men from the French OGs based in Algiers. Captain Vernon G. Hoppers and First Lieutenant Chester L. Myers led the team. They left Algiers in the evening of June 28 and reached the designated drop zone near Vassieux at 0100 hours on June 29. The sky was clear, the weather was calm, and the entire team parachuted in perfect form to the reception area organized by the Maquis on the ground. They moved all the containers dropped with them to a farmhouse nearby and began distributing the supplies to the Maquisards.

They had been there for a few minutes when the excited Frenchmen brought in another five parachutists. They belonged to an inter-allied team, code name Eucalyptus, commanded by British Major Desmond Lange. It included another British officer, Captain John Houseman, two Frenchmen of the FFI, and a French-American member of the OSS Special Operations branch, First Lieutenant André E. Pecquet, the radio operator of the team. The French reception committee and the villagers were impressed and excited by the presence of twenty Allied soldiers in their midst. They served coffee, dark bread, and rich butter, which everyone took with gusto. The paratroopers passed around their cigarettes and a lively conversation ensued. After a while, vehicles arrived to transport the paratroopers—a smart private car for the Eucalyptus team and a special bus for the American OGs. They were taken to Vassieux and accommodated in villagers’ houses where they were able to rest for a few hours.

The next day, Commandant François Huet, the Maquis leader in the area, arrived early. He had coffee with the paratroopers and asked them to attend the hoisting of the flag, a short ceremony that nevertheless astonished the new arrivals for the strict military procedure with which it was conducted. Houseman described in his diary what happened next:

On the way back the people of the village had turned out to welcome us. We were shaken by the hand a score of times. The children kissed us, and the infants were held up also to be kissed. Bouquets were pressed into our arms—the whole unrehearsed greeting was very touching. They behaved as though our very arrival had liberated them from the burdens and fears of occupation.

The two teams began conducting their assigned missions immediately. Eucalyptus acted as liaison between the Vercors commanders and the Special Forces Headquarters in London. The OGs began training the Maquisards on the use of British and American equipment at hand and in planning strikes against the Germans. The news of the arrival of the Allied paratroopers spread fast, and the FFI commanders wanted them to visit the area to boost the morale and confidence of the Maquisards. On June 30, Captain Hoppers and a corporal from Team Justine, Houseman from Eucalyptus, and a Maquisard escort went on a three-day “see and be seen” tour in the southern part of Vercors in the department of Drôme.

In contrast with the sharp-looking military personnel in Vassieux, the Maquisards in these areas were “young and middle aged men, tough and rough-looking from months of hard living, some dressed in what remained of their wartime uniform, others in any civilian clothes they had managed to scrounge.” They had only a fair supply of arms, ammunition, and explosives. Throughout the villages they visited, they—the first Allied officers to visit the area—were treated as the saviors of France. People simply did not know how to express their delight and gratitude. Houseman wrote about the reception they received in the town of Aouste, the last town they visited at the southern end of the Vercors massif:

As we entered by some smallish streets I happened to see a young girl staring at us—she stared for a moment only. Turning round on her bicycle she shot off into the town itself—the news was out. No town crier can have had such a response.

We stopped at a small shop and shook hands (I think we were kissed as well) with the people inside. Wine appeared, and I had scarcely raised my glass, when I heard a seething mob outside in the street—the people of Aouste had come immediately to welcome us. They surged round us, shaking our hands and hugging us—all were talking at once, and my very poor French met its Waterloo. Armed with flowers and carrying children, they kept on streaming in, telling us of their experiences, asking us when the invasion armies would come and thanking us time and again for coming to their country and to their town. The bouquets of red, white and blue flowers by now covered the large table in the shop—more wine was brought up and the children reappeared with red, white and blue ribbons in their hair.

After an hour or so we left the shop to make what proved to be nothing less than a regal procession through the town. We had to walk at the head of this excited ever-growing crowd along the main street to an outpost at the far side of the town. Men saluted us, the women clapped, children ran to kiss us and give us more flowers to carry. People rushed into the road and held up the cavalcade to grasp us by the hand and to embrace us. On our way back, an elderly woman ran across the road with tears in her eyes, to tell me about a relation she had lost and to ask the ever-expectant question “when will the invasion from the south begin?”

Upon return of the inspection group to Vassieux, both teams, Justine and Eucalyptus, reported through their channels the need to send arms and supplies to Vercors. They also advised the FFI military staff on measures they could take to strengthen the ranks and discipline of the Maquisards. In early July, Commandant Huet decided to militarize the volunteer force and return to the military tradition of regular troop units. “In the past two years,” Huet wrote to his subordinates, “the flags, the standards, the pennants of our regiments and our battalions have been asleep. Now, with a magnificent drive, France has risen against the invader. The old French army that has shone in the course of centuries will reclaim its place in the nation.”

The old camps and companies of civilians were reorganized into alpine battalions and even an armored battalion, which included a section of irregular African riflemen from Senegal. Efforts were made to standardize the uniforms, using in part battle dress uniforms that had arrived with teams Justine and Eucalyptus. Requests were made to send more uniforms as well. In a report to London, Lieutenant Pecquet, the French-American radio operator of Eucalyptus, said that proper uniforms were a question of self-respect for the French, who were very sensible to the enemy propaganda that described the Maquisards as terrorists.

In the first days of July, Eucalyptus settled at the Huet’s headquarters in Saint-Martin-en-Vercors, twelve miles north of Vassieux. The team became the primary channel of communication between Huet and the outside world, with Pacquet exchanging hundreds of messages with Algiers and London. On the other hand, Captain Hoppers and the OGs of Team Justine took a much more visible role among the Maquis as they began preparing their first action against the Germans. They also equipped and trained a group of Maquisards to add strengths to their own group.

The French proposed a location suitable for an ambush at the southeastern extremity of Vercors, near the village of Lus-la-Croix-Haute, about forty-five miles south of Grenoble. On July 7, Hoppers and his men travelled to that location, a strip of road about three hundred yards long, shaped like a horseshoe and flanked on the east by an escarpment thirty feet high. It was perfect for an L-shaped ambush. On the short end of the L the OGs placed only two men armed with a bazooka and a Browning machine gun. The remainder of the group took positions along the long end the L. After waiting for about an hour, they saw a column of six trucks and a bus carrying about 120 Germans approaching. A bazooka round hit and disabled the leading truck as it came around the bend of the road. The machine gun fire stopped the second truck that attempted to drive around the disabled truck. The remainder of the convoy had nowhere to go and came under a barrage of fire from the OGs and the Maquisards lined up along the kill zone. Particularly effective were Gammon grenades, bags of canvas-like material and a fuse, which the OGs filled with one pound of C-2 explosives and one pound of scrap iron. The Gammon grenade was activated by removing the fuse and throwing the bag toward the enemy. Upon impact, it exploded, sending shrapnel in all directions and killing or maiming everyone in the vicinity.

In true guerrilla fashion, the attack ended almost as soon as it began. By the time the Germans had taken cover, set up mortars, and began to return fire, Hoppers gave the order to withdraw to the prearranged rendezvous point ten miles from the ambush location. They had destroyed three trucks and one bus, killed sixty Germans and wounded another twenty-five. One Maquisard was killed in action, and another one was missing. The next day, they learned that the Germans had captured the wounded Frenchman and had tortured him to death in front of the villagers of Lus-la-Croix-Haute.

This operation was the only successful combat operation the Maquisards had conducted since the Germans had dislodged them from Saint-Nizier near Grenoble. It added to the fascination the Maquisards had developed with the Americans’ appearance, their weapons, and the aura of abundance and modernity that seemed to surround them. It also added further credit to rumors of a massive arrival of Allied soldiers in Vercors, rumors that puzzled Pecquet who wondered about their precise origin in a report to Algiers. The diary of Henri Audra from the town of Die, about twenty miles south of Vassieux, allows us to trace the progression of these rumors among the population of the area. On June 19, he noted, “the imminent parachuting of 2,000 Canadians coming to support the dissidents in Vercors.” On June 25, hearing airplanes flying overhead, he wrote, “most certainly, they are parachuting the Canadians we have been expecting for several days.” On July 10, he noted that he saw passing though the town “trucks carrying Canadians to attack a German convoy.” Then, on July 13, he noted that it was not Canadians after all, but “Americans from New York!”

The Germans were well informed of such rumors, as well. In its orders for the final preparations for Operation Bettina, issued on July 8, 1944, the headquarters of Army Group B responsible for defending South France said:

The concentration of important enemy troops in the zone of Vercors, their increasing equipment with heavy weapons, their probable reinforcement by Canadian paratroopers, and a considerable number of enemy forces expected to be transported by air in the plateau of Vassieux, make us think that in case of further landings by the enemy we should expect greater offensive actions launched from this region aiming to occupy Valence and the valley of Rhone, and perhaps at the same time to take the city of Grenoble.

The Germans tightened the stranglehold on the region in preparation for the final assault. General Pflaum began concentrating his men for the attack on Vercors. He set the D-day for operation Bettina on July 21, 1944. The initial striking point would be the town of Vassieux. The German soldiers were ordered to “hit fast and hard” and to show no mercy because Vassieux harbored the supreme command of the Resistance and considerable forces protecting it. The Luftwaffe flew multiple reconnaissance missions every day over the plateau photographing the terrain, roads, towns and villages.

Through communications with Team Eucalyptus, French authorities in Algiers sent warnings to the leaders of Vercors to expect a major attack at almost any moment. Local intelligence services of the Maquis confirmed this information: three German divisions were closing in on Vercors from Valence, Romans-sur-Isère, and Grenoble. The command of Vercors issued a general mobilization order on July 11. Six hundred men volunteered as laborers to prepare an airfield in Vassieux where Allies could land troops and supplies if they decided to come. Another one thousand men were called to the colors, but arming and equipping them remained a problem.

On July 12, the Germans were on the move. Chapelle-en-Vercors, in the heart of the plateau, was bombed on July 12 and 13 while surveillance airplanes flew over the plateau constantly during that time. In the evening of July 13, London sent word to expect a mass parachute drop the next day. On July 14, Bastille Day, at 0900 hours, eighty-five Flying Fortresses flew in formation over Vassieux in three waves and dropped 1,457 containers with red-white-and-blue parachutes in honor of France’s national holiday. The inhabitants of Vassieux celebrated in the streets, waiving at the planes and thanking the members of Eucalyptus and Justine for their efforts.

It was a sight to celebrate, but the joy was short-lived. Thirty minutes later, German airplanes began to bomb and strafe the town, and continued to do so for three days in a row, from dawn until well into the evening hours. The Germans used explosives during the day and incendiaries in the evening. The town was set ablaze, and the planes machine-gunned people trying to salvage belongings out of their homes. By July 16, Vassieux was completely in ruins, and the Germans began to destroy Chapelle-en-Vercors, seven miles to the south. From all the containers dropped to them, the Maquisards were able to retrieve only about two hundred during the night.

On July 17, the 157th Reserve Division and selected mobile units of the Ninth Panzer Division moved in on the Vercors triangle and began engaging the Maquisards at a number of outposts and mountain passes. The bombing and strafing of the towns and villages continued incessantly. According to estimates, seven hundred Germans closed in from the east, three thousand from the south and west, and four thousand from the north. No other Maquis group in France had drawn this many enemy troops against them.

Commandant Huet proclaimed martial law throughout the Vercors and all units were put in battle positions. The Maquis counted in their ranks two thousand fully armed men, one thousand partially armed men, and another one thousand unarmed men. Desmond Lange and John Houseman, the officers of Team Eucalyptus, sent requests to London and Algiers for heavy weapons and additional support troops, without effect. Houseman noted in his diary entry of July 18, “Commandant H[uet] maintaining extraordinary calm. He seemed (as in fact he had) to have the situation completely in hand. Signs of nervousness in the P. C. [command post] among the junior officers—Desmond and I trying hard not to show signs of alarm!”

In the morning of July 21 at 0930 hours, French volunteers working at the airfield in Vassieux saw twenty airplanes carrying enormous gliders approaching from the south. The sight lifted their spirits with the hope that these were the much-expected paratroopers and heavy equipment coming to the rescue of Vercors. The hope disappeared moments later when the gliders began their final approach and the Frenchmen noticed the Luftwaffe markings on them. One by one, twenty DFS 230 troop gliders touched ground, some of them in the airfield itself and the rest in the plateau outside Vassieux. Within minutes, two hundred German paratroopers of special commando units of the Luftwaffe stormed Vassieux under the protection of Stuka fighters overhead. Each glider had a machine gun mounted in front, which the pilot used to cover the exit of the paratroopers from the aircraft and their rapid advancement toward the objective. The element of surprise was complete, just as it had been when Germans had used the same technique to take the Belgian fortress of Eben Emmael in 1940, occupy Crete in 1941, and rescue Mussolini in 1943. “It was as if lightning struck Vassieux,” was how a number of Frenchmen described those initial moments.

The shock did not last long, however. The Maquisards around Vassieux rushed to block the German paratroopers. The officers and men of the OG mission Justine organized the Frenchmen into surrounding the Germans in town and attacking them with all the weapons at their disposal. According to German sources, during the first day of fighting, the German paratroopers suffered over 25 percent casualties, twenty-nine dead and twenty wounded. The attacks on all sides, the constant bombardment of towns and villages, and the fierce battle in Vassieux rattled the nerves of the Maquisards. Houseman described “an oppressive atmosphere of confinement in our house with bombing and machine gunning off and on all day.” When assistance from the outside failed to materialize, a feeling of abandonment if not betrayal set in. Eugène Chavant, the civilian leader of Vercors, who had traveled to Algiers in May 1944 to meet with De Gaulle’s military staff and believed he had received assurances of help from them, fired off a message on the night of July 21:

La Chappelle, Vassieux, Saint-Martin bombarded by German aircraft. Enemy troops parachuted on Vassieux. We demand resupplies in men, foodstuffs and supplies. Morale of population excellent but will turn quickly against you if you do not take immediate measures and we will be in agreement with them in saying that those sitting in London and Algiers have understood nothing of the situation in which we find ourselves and are considered criminals and cowards. Let us be clear on this: criminals and cowards.

The next day, the Americans and Maquisards continued their attacks on the German paratroopers, helped by the rain that prevented the Germans from reinforcing their men. But the following day, on July 23, the weather cleared and another 250 German paratroopers landed in Vassieux aboard twenty DFS 230 gliders. While the Maquisards and the American OGs were going through their last reserves, the Germans used larger Go242 gliders to bring supplies and ammunition for their beleaguered paratroopers. The Germans dropped in a 20-mm Flak 38 antiaircraft gun, which could fire eight hundred rounds per minute from four independent guns at a range of 2,200 meters. They used the gun to destroy the Maquisards’ positions and force them to withdraw.

The Germans came out of the three-day battle victorious, losing 101 paratroopers and four glider pilots. Elsewhere around Vercors during these three days, two heavy mountain battalions took all the mountain passes to the southeast of Vassieux from ill-equipped Maquisards. German infantry pushing south from Grenoble broke through the northern positions in the key town of Valchevrière. Armored columns from the Ninth Panzer Division moving from Valence breached the southern defenses in the town of Die. On July 23 in the afternoon, the battle was over. In a telegram to Algiers sent on the night of July 25–26, Huet summarized the situation as follows:

Defenses of Vercors pierced on the 23rd at 1600 hours, after 56 hours of battle. Have ordered the dispersion in small groups with the hope to resume the fight when possible. All did their duty courageously in a desperate struggle and all carry with them the sadness of having succumbed to superior numbers and having been left alone in the moment of battle.

What followed is the most bloody and tragic chapter in history of the Maquis of Vercors. The Germans cordoned off the entire area and set up surveillance posts on all the roads, primary, secondary, and even forest tracks. Airplanes constantly flew overhead searching for movements in the mountains and woods. The German command ordered:

It is now the time to mop up Vercors methodically, to find the bands and the terrorists dispersed in their hiding places and to exterminate them completely, to discover the stockpiles of ammunition and provisions of the enemy, and to destroy their depots and hiding places, to make impossible any future resurgence of the enemy in Vercors. A period of seven days is envisioned for the mopping up…. The houses that have been points of support and supply for the terrorists, especially in the Vercors proper, shall be burned.”

Thus, seven days of reprisals and barbarity were unleashed upon Vercors. The toll mounted to 840 killed, of which 639 were Maquisards and 201 civilians. In Vassieux alone, the Germans massacred one hundred civilians, often killing entire families on sight. Only seven houses remained inhabited out of the 120 houses that the town had before the operation.

On July 27, a surveillance plane noticed a Red Cross flag spread at the entrance of the cave of Luire, three miles east of Vassieux. A German infantry unit arrived around 1700 hours to discover that the cave had become a temporary refuge for the military hospital of Saint-Martin, evacuated since July 21 to escape the bombing and strafing of the Luftwaffe. Most of the wounded were Maquisards, but they also included First Lieutenant Chester L. Myers of the OG team Justine, who had come down with appendicitis and was recovering from surgery,46 four Wehrmacht soldiers from Poland, and two women from Vassieux.

The German soldiers sprayed the walls of the cave with bullets and began searching the place for hidden resistance fighters and arms. They ripped off bandages of the wounded to make sure they were not fake. The Poles tried to intervene, explaining that they had been treated well, but without success. The Germans marched everyone down the ridge where they shot thirteen gravely wounded Maquisards as they lay in their stretchers. They took the rest to the nearby village of Rousset, where they executed twenty-five lightly wounded Maquisards. They considered the four Poles deserters and shot them as well. Then they unleashed reprisals on Rousset and the nearby town of Saint-Agnan, where they interrogated, arrested, or killed several civilians.

The Germans took the rest of the prisoners to the Gestapo headquarters in Grenoble. An aerial bombardment was going on when they arrived, and, in the confusion, one of the doctors managed to escape together with his wife, daughter, and a Red Cross nurse. The rest were not so fortunate. The Gestapo interrogated and then executed Lieutenant Myers that night. They executed two French doctors and a priest on August 10. They sent eight nurses to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück where one of them died of disease and the rest managed to survive until liberation.

When Commandant Huet gave the order to disperse on July 23, Team Eucalyptus split up. The French-speaking members of the team, including the OSS radio operator, André Pecquet, moved up the mountains, where they hid the W/T equipment in caves. Pecquet changed into civilian clothes and made several dangerous reconnaissance trips into villages and towns in the area, collecting information about the disposition of enemy troops in the area that the Allied command used to great benefit during the landings in the south of France in mid-August.

During one of these trips, Pecquet went to a post office outside Vercors to buy stamps. He was an avid stamp collector and showed great interest in the stamps issued by the Vichy government, although they had been in use in that area of France for almost four years. His unusual interest attracted the attention of the man standing in line behind him, who could tell that Pecquet had not lived long in the country. The girl at the post office winked. Pecquet realized his error and left the post office in a hurry with the man following him. Pecquet was able to get rid of his pursuer but only after a great deal of trouble.

On August 21, 1944, when the German 157th Infantry division retreated and the US forces arrived in Grenoble, Pecquet assumed a liaison role between the FFI and the US Army command. The French considered Pecquet one of the heroes of Vercors, and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for “his devotion to duty, perseverance and courage displayed throughout his hazardous assignment” in Mission Eucalyptus.

The two British officers of Eucalyptus, Major Lange and Captain Houseman, travelled through the mountains and woods with a small group of four Frenchmen, including a young girl who had worked for the mission as a cipher clerk. The journey was harrowing, with hair-raising escapes from German and Milice patrols, which forced the members of the party to talk in the mildest whispers. Houseman wrote in his diary, “every unusual sound in the woods caused an instant silence among the party—a hunted dog look, as everyone strained his ears and slowly, but with calculated intention, reached for his gun.”

Further complications came from scarce food, and especially lack of water in the mountains. “The meagre ration of half a cupful of water a day (sometimes) and two table-spoons of goat’s milk were not much help.” Houseman wrote. “So I settled down to squeeze water out of moss irrespective of the physical effort which it entailed. After two or three hours of hard work, sometimes with the assistance of one or another member of the party, I had perhaps 3/4 of a pint which, though muddy and having an unwelcome taste, was nectar.”

On July 26, the party decided to split to make it easier to move undetected and to find food and water. Lange, Houseman, and a French guide left in the afternoon to climb down in the valley in search for food and water. “We were to learn later that the remainder of the party were surprised by a German patrol.” Houseman wrote. “The men, after castration, were beaten to death with rifle butts and the girl disemboweled and left to die with her intestines wound round her neck. I saw the photographs later—they were unrecognizable.” Throughout the night, Lange, Houseman, and their French guide, made their way through the valley and across German lines, “running, walking, crawling and rolling” under bursts of fire and pursued by attack dogs, until they were able to reach the mountain ridge and forests on the other side.

After several days of experiences like this, the team was finally able to exit Vercors on August 3 from the north by crossing the river L’Isère. There, Lange and Houseman established contact with the local Maquisards who guided them on a 125-mile journey through the mountains to the city of Chamonix on the Swiss border. On August 11, 1944, Lange and Houseman crossed into Switzerland.

The OG team Justine had a similar harrowing escape. After breaking off the engagement with the German paratroopers in Vassieux, the members moved to the northeast to the plateau of Presles in an attempt to break the encirclement toward the town of Saint-Marcellin. When four hundred Germans appeared on Presles, the OGs took to the woods, where they remained in hiding for eleven days, subsisting only on raw potatoes and occasionally a little cheese. They were never allowed to speak above a whisper. Not more than one man moved at a time, and then never more than fifty feet. Finally, on August 9, when the situation had calmed down a little, a French guide went to Saint-Marcellin and stole a truck that the OGs used to drive outside the Vercors plateau to the west across the L’Isère. From there, they moved along the Isère valley for ninety miles to the Chartreuse Mountains, twenty miles to the north of Grenoble. Then the team crossed L’Isère again this time eastward to the Belledonne Mountains. By this time, the American army had arrived in Grenoble, and Team Justine moved into the city. They were all in poor condition. Many had severe cases of dysentery, three men were unable to walk and all had lost weight, including Captain Hoppers who had lost thirty-seven pounds.

The experiences of the Maquis of Vercors, the pitched battle it put up against the Germans during the assault of July 21–23, 1944, and the bloody reprisals that followed have been a source of debate and controversy in France since the end of the war. The prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials, under the charge of “senseless destruction of cities, town, and villages, and devastations unjustified by the military necessity,” cited the example of numerous villages destroyed in their entirety in France, among others “Oradour-sur-Glane, Saint-Nizier, and in the Vercors: La Mure, Vassieux, La Chappelle-en-Vercors.” Nevertheless, not a single soldier of the Wehrmacht who participated in the operations against Vercors was held accountable for war crimes.

Countless accounts have been written to discuss whether the French authorities in Algiers gave false hopes to the leaders of Vercors on their support for the Plan Montagnards. The fact is that this plan was never part of the Allied strategy for using the French Resistance in coordination with the landings in Normandy and Provence. The reprisals in Vercors left the participants in the Resistance with a feeling of having been misunderstood, abandoned, and even betrayed by the Allies. Historians have established that there were not sufficient means among the French officials in Algiers or among the Allies who supported them to match the enthusiasm of the members of the Resistance. Several members of the Resistance have pointed out that shortly after the reprisals, the region rose up again when the Allies landed in the south of France, which they would not have done had they felt betrayed.

The military choices of the Maquis leaders have been questioned as well, and their decision to engage in frontal battles against a much stronger enemy has been called in various degrees a tragedy, a disaster, and a mistake. Alain le Ray, one of the proponents of the original Plan Montagnards, rejected the aura of disaster and strategic error. In a debate in 1975, he suggested that guerrilla tactics in Vercors might have provoked even more reprisals and that the battle of the Vercors tied down an important section of the Germans army. It “induced in the German war machine a kind of paralysis, both moral and material in the very locality where the Allied forces would penetrate into France after the landings in Provence.”

In the end, General Koenig probably summarized best the story of the Maquis of Vercors when he told an enquiry commission in 1961:

Due to circumstances that were quite unfortunate at the time, you became soldiers assigned with a true sacrificial mission. You became, pardon the expression, “laboratory rats …” I tell you this to remove a little bit of the bitterness that you who lived through those hours feel. There are moments when we find ourselves, pardon the expression, in deep s … and unfortunately the story has a sad ending, meaning no one is able to escape.