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

Whatever the true cause of all this premature excitement, the Vercors was not immune from its effects. Aimé Pupin commented that in the camps on the plateau the Allied landings were expected daily and ‘They were all burning for action …’ Unfortunately it was not just the Resistance who were ‘burning for action’ in anticipation of an Allied landing soon. France’s German and Italian occupiers were too.

By this stage of the war the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and were able to provide SOE with the complete text of a cable sent by Japan’s Ambassador to France giving his analysis of the state of the Resistance, following a visit to Vichy in the middle of 1943. This document revealed that the Gestapo had penetrated the entire Resistance movement and were also anticipating ‘a hypothetical D Day which they feared might be imminent’. The Ambassador predicted that the Gestapo would soon unleash a ‘heavy drive’ against Resistance structures with the aim of emasculating them before any landing could take place. At the end of April agents in France were also reporting to London that the Germans were making detailed plans to combat an Allied invasion in the summer.

By the time of the Japanese Ambassador’s visit to Vichy the ‘heavy drive’ had, in fact, already started. Following the arrest of Aimé Pupin’s wife in the Café de la Rotonde on 3 March, the Italians raided the Ferme d’Ambel. But, warned by Fabien Rey, the young occupants fled before the enemy party got there. Then on 18 March Italian mountain troops tried to surprise the C4 réfractaire camp on La Grande Cournouse, the great forest-covered buttress of rock which overlooks the Gorges de la Bourne. Once again the Maquis were warned in time and managed to slip away in good order. By now similar operations were taking place against réfractaire camps across the whole of the region and even in Grenoble.

On 19 April the Italians tried again on the plateau, this time raiding C7 camp on the Plateau de Saint-Ange. ‘The Italians arrived so quickly that our sentries didn’t have time to warn us and everyone tried to find the best hiding place they could, some taking refuge in holes, others scrambling towards the nearest pine tree … No fewer than a dozen of us ended up sitting perched, rucksacks on our backs, in the branches of one especially large fir. “Now this really is what I call a Christmas tree,” one wit remarked. The camp dog, thinking it was all some kind of game, tore after us yelping as we ran for our hiding place and then insisted on sitting down at the base of the tree staring intently at our merry pantomime, while we tried in vain to persuade it to go away. The Italians, the black feathers on their Alpine hats waving in the wind, ran past us not ten metres away.’

Alain Le Ray, who spent much of his time travelling from one camp to the other checking on wellbeing, security and training, saw the danger early and issued instructions: ‘At the smallest sign of trouble, get out, cover your tracks and keep moving for as long as possible.’

By the beginning of May, the Maquisards of C4 camp arrived back at their original site on La Grande Cournouse after a long series of peregrinations, only to be woken in the early morning of 18 May by their sentry shouting ‘Les Ritals! Les Ritals!’ (slang for Italians). In a later coded message to London Aimé Pupin reported that a force of Italian Alpini ‘three thousand’ strong, guided by the Milice, had scaled the sheer slopes from the Gorges on to the plateau overnight. But again the attack appears to have been bungled for, of the eighty in the camp, at the time, the Alpini managed to catch only four, whom they surprised returning from collecting food. De Gaulle himself sent a message to the young Maquisards congratulating them on ‘thwarting the attack’.

And so began what the Vercors fugitives called the ‘summer of nomadisation ’ with the réfractaires and their leaders playing a game of cat and mouse with the Italian Army which the Maquisards almost invariably won. But it meant constant changes of camp, hurried last-minute exits and lengthy marches across the mountains often at dead of night. Uncomfortable as it was, the hardships of this period served to toughen soft city bodies and create a real sense of teamwork, comradeship and trust in their leaders.

On one occasion a troop of fleeing Maquisards (after two weeks of nomadisation ) passed through the little settlement at Col de Rousset where the redoubtable Jeanne Bordat, known as Mémé Bordat, kept a bar/café/rest house for the refreshment of travellers crossing the Col. Hot on the fugitives’ tail came a troop of Alpini led by an Italian officer who demanded to know where the Maquis were. Mémé Bordat denied any knowledge of the Maquis – indeed, she wanted to know what exactly were these mythical creatures, ‘the Maquis’, for she had never seen them. The Italian officer replied that they were the young men who lived in the mountains. Again Mémé Bordat professed ignorance. Again the Italian returned to the charge, demanding in more insistent terms to know where the fugitives were. Finally, according to Vercors legend, the good Mme Bordat lifted her skirt, pulled down her knickers and, pointing to her bottom, told the officer that if he really wished to know where the young men were, no doubt he could find them up there. The officer left, red faced, taking his Alpini with him.

The importance of this story lies not so much in its veracity as in the indication it provides that, although the disruption caused by nomadisation was uncomfortable, the French Resistance in the Vercors did not regard the Italian Army as a serious threat. As one Maquis leader put it ‘The “Piantis” *were less troublesome and much easier to fool than their allies and friends [the Germans].’ Francis Cammaerts, a British SOE agent in south-eastern France, had the same view: ‘the morale of the Italian Army was so low that [they] … presented no difficulty to the French resistance movements, as nearly all their work was left to the French police’.

Meanwhile, progress continued to be made on the Montagnards plan. In April, Jean Moulin sent a further 1.6 million francs to Dalloz for Montagnards and asked London for a further 40 million to fund his work across France.

On 6 April 1943, just ten days after his return from London and right in the middle of the early Italian raids on the plateau, Delestraint, on Jean Moulin’s instructions, attended a meeting of the Montagnards leaders in the main reception room of Pierre Dalloz’s house at La Grande Vigne, looking out over Grenoble and the Alps on the other side of the Grésivaudan valley. It was a beautiful day, with early-spring light streaming through the windows and the brilliance of the snow on the distant mountains, reflecting in the gilt mirrors on the Villa’s walls. Here, protected by sentries posted at all the main points around the house and on the neighbouring roads, Delestraint was briefed in detail by Dalloz and his co-conspirators on the state of Montagnards. This included presentations on the camps, the Maquisards, the logistics, lorries and cars, mountain refuges, parachute sites and landing zones, resources and food.

Dalloz wrote: ‘We told him that we had no doubt that the Allies would land on the beaches of Provence and that the Germans would try to reinforce their positions before the attack by moving their forces along the north–south line of the valley of the Rhône and the Route des Alpes. But they would be very concerned about their line of retreat. At this moment the Vercors would rise and block the access roads to the plateau at the ten points marked in red on the map. The Allies could then launch paratroop units with their full armament on to the plains of the Vercors at Vassieux, Autrans and Lans … This would be the signal for the whole region to rise. Lyon would fall.’