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.
