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

By midnight, all was ready and there was nothing to do but wait …

… The moon slowly slipped towards the horizon threatening to leave us alone under a silent and empty sky.

And then suddenly, borne on the wind, there was a sound like a far-off whispering. Almost nothing. No more than the rustle leaves make in a breeze. But quickly it became more constant, heavier somehow and with a kind of strong underlying beat. Soon we could tell where it came from – the north-west. It was them – it was undoubtedly them!

We stood in the middle of the site and the Commander pulled out a large electric torch. Pointing it in the direction of the noise, he started to flash a series of dots and dashes in Morse code. Suddenly – there! – up there! A new star suddenly appeared and flashed back the same sequence at us! They had seen us …

‘Light the fires!’

Immediately a lance of flame, fanned almost flat by the wind, leapt out of the darkness near by. Then another and another and another until a vast letter T was picked out in flames around us – four bonfires long and three across. Above us we heard the still invisible aircraft turning as though enclosing us in a wide circle of noise, holding us in an embrace of friendship. We suddenly felt – wonderfully – that we were not alone.

And then the miracle happened. One of the aircraft burst out of the darkness above us following the line of the long stroke of the T. And suddenly, beneath it, a great white flower blossomed against the darkness of the sky. It did not appear to us as something falling, but rather as something sprouting out of nothing – as though it was the product of magic conjured into existence by the black shape above and by the noise it made. And then there was another and another and another. The wind made them all dance as though in some fantastical aerial ballet. The spectacle was one of utterly intoxicating, utterly astonishing beauty. Now we could see the round circles of the parachutes jostling each other for position. Below each one swung a long black, cylindrical shape. At first we thought they were men. Then a dull heavy thud, then two, then three, then four, five, six, ten, twenty, thirty, repeated and repeated and repeated. The white flowers now lay deflated, exhausted, dead and lifeless on the ground around us. The miraculous cargo had arrived.

Everyone, even the sentries rushed to the landing ground – if an enemy had attacked us then we would all have been caught like rats in a feeding frenzy …

We rushed to the dark forms lying inert in the grass … and began to unpack our treasures. They were contained in long aluminium tubes shaped like torpedoes: rifles, stripped-down machine guns, wicker baskets covered in cloth containing bandages and surgical instruments. Here were heavy iron boxes containing ammunition and explosives and there were bundles of clothing and waterproof covers and woollen wear. No presents could have been more welcome … thank you, Father Christmas!

[In the end, however], the arms, the explosives, the equipment – though all were magnificent, our nocturnal visitors brought us an even more special gift. They brought us back our confidence, our enthusiasm and, with these, the sure knowledge that we were not, after all isolated, abandoned and alone.

What may be guessed at from Valot’s lyrical account, but is not explicitly stated, is that the results of the Darbonouse parachute drop were less than optimal. The high wind distributed the parachutes and containers over a very large area and some were not found until years later hanging in the branches of fir trees or lying in the bottom of small depressions where they had plunged into deep snowdrifts. The contents of those that were found were enthusiastically pillaged, resulting in some groups having arms without ammunition, some ammunition without arms, some boxes of grenades, others the detonators, some surgical instruments which they didn’t know how to use and more woollen socks than they could ever possibly wear. There would, in due course, be a price to pay for all this undisciplined brigandage.

Much of what could be recovered in an organized fashion was stored in a nearby cave, the Grotte de l’Ours, and distributed later. The Maquis unit which had established itself at Malleval on the east of the plateau went to collect its share ten days after the drop and came back with an entire lorry full of arms and ammunition, storing it in the village presbytery.

Two days after the Darbonouse parachute drop, on 15 November, Francis Cammaerts was recalled to London, where he explained in detail his plans to hold the Valensole, the Beaurepaire and the Vercors plateaux as bridgeheads for paratroops in the event of a landing in the south of France. It was a message which would have been welcome in the British capital for, at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt had decided that ‘Operations against southern France (to include the use of trained and equipped French forces) should be undertaken to establish a lodgement in the Toulon and Marseille area to exploit northward in order to create a diversion in connection with Overlord. Air-nourished guerrilla operations in the southern Alps will, if possible, be initiated.’ Planning for the invasion of the Mediterranean coast of France began immediately under the codename Anvil. In a September minute to the Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, it was proposed that Anvil should be a diversionary operation to be carried out simultaneously with Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings. Its primary aim was not to capture territory but to draw German troops south, away from the Normandy beaches.

The Vercors may have lost its direct line to the highest level of the Free French command in London, but events elsewhere were conspiring to give it a potentially important role to play in the much bigger game which the Supreme Allied Command was now planning – the invasion of the European mainland.

On the Vercors, however, the autumn of 1943 brought the Resistance more to worry about than the distant plans of the mighty. On 24 November, three German gonio radio-detector vehicles were seen in La Chapelle. It seemed that they found nothing, for they were reported at the end of the day returning home over the Col de Rousset ‘empty handed’. The plateau breathed a sigh of relief. But it was premature.

The following day, the Gestapo descended on Saint-Martin in force and, seeming to know exactly what they were looking for, headed straight for a large farmhouse complex, Les Berthonnets, a kilometre or so east of the village. This housed two clandestine radios and their operators, Gaston Vincent and Pierre Bouquet, working to the Algiers office of the American equivalent of the SOE, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Warned just in time, the two men fled, Vincent carrying his heavy radio set. After a short chase, a German soldier who got within range of the weighed-down Vincent shot and wounded him. Helped by the owner of Les Berthonnets, Vincent hid in a pile of hay in a barn. Here he was subsequently found by a German search party, covered in blood. Presuming him to be dead, they left him alone.

Bouquet, however, was caught and held, but then – surprisingly – released by the Gestapo. He re-established contact with the Resistance but was placed under discreet observation. His former colleagues concluded that he had been ‘turned’ while in captivity. His body was found on 23 December, riddled with bullets as a result of an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a Resistance execution.

Though this raid was small in comparison with later incursions, it indicated the Germans’ determination to ensure that the Vercors did not harbour activities against their interests. And it demonstrated their ability to invade the plateau and leave it again, whenever they chose to do so. The Vercors Resistants may have viewed the plateau as a safe area, but the Germans certainly did not.