Paddy Ashdown - The Cruel Victory - The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944

Aimé Pupin and his co-conspirators should have realized that they had been given two warnings that day. First that their activities were no longer secret. And second that keeping centralized records was dangerous folly. Sadly neither warning was heeded.

Flight Lieutenant John Bridger, DFC, throttled down and watched the needle on his Lysander’s air-speed indicator drop back. Almost immediately the little aircraft’s nose dipped towards the three dots of light laid out ahead like an elongated ‘L’, the long stroke pointing towards him and the short one at the far end pointing to the right.

Bridger was one of the most experienced pilots in RAF’s 161 Lysander Squadron. On a previous occasion he had burst a tyre while landing Resistance agents at a clandestine strip deep in France. Worried that, with one tyre out, his Lysander (they were known affectionately as ‘Lizzies’) would be unbalanced for take-off, he pulled out his Colt automatic, shot five holes in the remaining good tyre, loaded up his return passengers for the UK and took off on his wheel rims.

Maybe it was because of his experience that he had been chosen for Operation Sirène II. Tonight, 19 March 1943, he was carrying passengers of special importance – Charles de Gaulle’s personal representative in France, Jean Moulin, the Secret Army’s commander General Charles Delestraint and one other Resistance agent. In truth, with three passengers on board, the little plane was overloaded for it was designed to take only two. But 161 Squadron pilots were used to pushing the limits.

Bridger’s destination this night was a flat field close to a canal a kilometre east of the village of Melay, which lies in the Saône-et-Loire valley 310 kilometres south-east of Paris and 700 from 161 Squadron’s base at Tangmere on the English south coast. This meant a round trip in his unarmed Lysander of some 1,500 kilometres, most of which would be flying alone over enemy-occupied territory. With a cruising speed of 275 kilometres per hour and allowing for headwinds and turn-around time on the ground, Bridger would be flying single handed for the best part of seven unbroken hours.

Like all of the RAF’s clandestine landings and parachute drops into France, tonight’s operation was taking place in the ‘moon period’ – roughly speaking the ten nights either side of the full moon (sometimes known by the codeword Charlotte). The remaining ten nights of the month were known as the ‘no moon period’ when conditions were too dark for accurate parachuting or safe landings. The March 1943 full moon occurred two days after Bridger’s flight, which meant that the moon’s luminosity this night was 91 per cent of that of the full moon, enabling Bridger to see many of the main topographical features such as woods and towns of the area he would be flying over. Most visible of all would have been the great rivers of France, which were 161 Squadron’s favourite navigational aids.

According to his logbook Bridger took off from 161 Squadron’s base at RAF Tangmere at 22.44 hours, two and a half hours after sunset that day. His post-operational report of his route is laconic and sparse on detail: ‘went via St Aubin-sur-Mer, Bourges, Moulins and direct to target. Apart from meeting a medium sized [enemy] aircraft 4 miles north of Moulin … the journey was uneventful.’

At Moulins, Bridger would have turned due east to pick up the River Loire, now turned by the gibbous moon into a great ribbon of silver, its little lakes and tributaries appearing as sprinkles of tinsel scattered across the darkened countryside. Here he swung south on the last leg of his journey – a lonely dot hidden in the vast expanse of the night sky. It is not difficult to imagine Jean Moulin and Charles Delestraint looking down on the moon-soaked fields and villages of occupied France and wondering about the task ahead and what it would take to free their country from the merciless grip of its occupiers.

The reception team waiting for Bridger at Melay that night was commanded by forty-year-old Pierre Delay, an experienced operator who had already received the Croix de Guerre from de Gaulle for his conduct of a previous SOE landing. He had been alerted that there was to be a landing on this site by a special code phrase broadcast during the six-minute ‘Messages personnels’ section of the BBC’s Les Français parlent aux Français . Delay had chosen Melay for tonight’s operation because he had a cousin who had a safe house 2 kilometres north of the landing site where the new arrivals could be put up, and a sympathetic local garage owner, whose Citroën was always available on these occasions.

According to Bridger’s operational report he ‘Reached target at 0140, signals given clearly & flare path good’. Delay’s men, who had waited in the deepening cold for two hours before Bridger arrived, now watched as the plane – it seemed big to them now – glided in almost noiselessly to touch down on the dewy grass. Moulin and Delestraint were bundled into the waiting Citroën and spent the night in the safe house, leaving the following day for Macon. They had arrived back in France to take command of a Resistance movement which was in a high state of expectation that the Allied landings would take place some time during the summer of 1943.

An SOE paper marked ‘MOST SECRET’ and dated 13 March 1943, just a week before the return of Moulin and Delestraint, discussed the possible uses of the Resistance in the event of an Allied landing, but warned that ‘the state of feeling in France has, after a gradual rise in temperature, suddenly reached fever pitch … there is a real danger that, if this … is allowed to pass unregarded, the French population … will subside into apathy and despair’. On 18 March, the night before Moulin and Delestraint landed, Maurice Schumann – who was for many the voice of Free France broadcasting on the BBC – was so inspired by news of the flood of réfractaires to the Haute-Savoie that he invoked the famous French Revolutionary force, the Légion des Montagnes, in one of his famous broadcasts, implying a Savoyard uprising. He was immediately rebuked by his London superiors for being premature – but he had accurately caught the feverish mood of excitement and expectation.

On 23 March, just three days after he arrived, Jean Moulin sent a coded telegram to London saying that the mood was so ‘keyed up’ that he had been ‘obliged to calm down the [Resistance] leaders who believe that Allied action was imminent’. One local Resistance leader, however, was sure that the state of over-excitement was generated not in France, but in London: ‘not a single one of us at the time was expecting an imminent landing. The truth was that the “over-excitement” of the [local] leaders reflected our intense preoccupation with the drama that was unfolding as a result of having Maquis organizations [in the field] without any support and our irritation over the attitude of de Gaulle and [the French] clandestine services.’

De Gaulle’s personal instructions to Delestraint before his departure, a copy of which can still be found in the French military archives in the Château de Vincennes in Paris, also give the impression that D-Day is fast approaching. Under the heading of ‘immediate actions’ to be taken ‘In the present period, before the Allied landings’, he instructed Delestraint to ‘prepare the Secret Army for the role it is to play in the liberation of territory’, including the ‘delicate measures necessary to permit a general rising of volunteers after D-Day [referred to by the French as ‘Jour J’] in the zones where this can be sustained because of the difficulty the Germans have in dominating the area’ – a clear reference, it would seem, to Plan Montagnards and the Vercors.