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

The damage done by the Gestapo’s 25 November raid was minor, however, compared with that done not much more than a week later by the French regional military commanders.

In the early autumn Marcel Descour ­ – accompanied by his ever-present counsellor/monk Dom Guétet – took up a new post as the Military Chief of Staff for Region 1 of the Secret Army, within which the Vercors fell. He was therefore, in effect, Alain Le Ray’s direct military commander. Descour’s job was to unify the disparate elements of the Resistance in his region under an effective military command. Criticisms of the Vercors Maquisards for their lax ways had already reached him and he may have taken their independence of spirit as a challenge to his authority. He may also have been irked by the fact that, while he was trying to unify fighting structures under military control, in the Vercors it was a civilian in the form of Patron Chavant who was formally in charge, and Le Ray seemed content with this.

Whether there is substance in this or not, the question of the Vercors and Le Ray as its military chief came to a head at a meeting called by Descour and attended by all the military commanders in the Lyon area in early December. Not long into the meeting, Descour himself started openly criticizing Le Ray for ‘feudalism’ and especially for the mishandling of the parachute drop at Darbonouse. Le Ray described what followed as an ‘Inquisition based on the unproven suspicions of the unidentified’. Finally unable to control himself, he exploded: ‘Well, if it’s my resignation you want, you have it.’

Descour returned fire with fire: ‘Resignation accepted!’

Both men were later to say that they regretted their hotheadedness – though Le Ray regarded an eventual rupture as inevitable. ‘The Vercors was seen as a trump card in the whole French Resistance organization. The authorities wanted to put someone there who they could be sure would be their man.’

However, even if both men had wanted to pull the moment back, they couldn’t. The die had been cast, the damage done. The Vercors had lost its most able commander and the only one who understood that guerrilla warfare was about constant mobility and the closest possible military/civilian integration, not fixed defences and conventional military control. Some believe that many of the tragedies which would ensue would not have happened if these few testosterone-fuelled seconds could have been avoided. Chavant was furious when he heard and wanted to disband the whole Vercors structure immediately. But Le Ray, who had been instructed to leave his post at the end of the following January, persuaded him not to, saying that no purpose could be served by adding revenge to rancour.

Everyone presumed that, after the ‘resignation’ of Le Ray, his deputy, the much liked and admired Roland Costa de Beauregard, would take his place. But Descour, true to Le Ray’s prediction that the Army wanted a man who would take the Army line, chose Narcisse Geyer, who was at the time still in the nearby Thivolet forest. Geyer, acknowledged by all to be a man of great courage, initiative and élan, had many qualities. Among them, however, were not tact, diplomacy, sensitivity or any kind of understanding of the role of the civilians in the struggle. Diminutive, right wing and haughty in his demeanour, Geyer was mostly to be seen in full uniform, complete with kepi and soft white cavalry gauntlets, riding around the plateau on his magnificent stallion Boucaro: Descour could hardly have chosen a person less likely to appeal to Eugène Chavant and his Socialist colleagues. It did not help that Geyer himself made it plain to all that he intended to marginalize the Combat Committee and place the plateau under overall military control.

The first meeting between Geyer and Chavant at a saw-mill near Saint-Julien-en-Vercors in the weeks before Christmas went as badly as might have been predicted. Chavant took an instant and intense dislike to his haughty new military partner, refusing to permit him to have any contact with the camps or give training to the Maquisards. Geyer reciprocated by making plain his distaste at having to discuss military matters with a civilian. This deep schism was widened by the different strategies followed by the Maquis fighters on the one hand and the professional military on the other. The military pursued a ‘wait and see’ policy whose aim was to avoid drawing German attention to themselves in order to gain the time and space to build up their units and train their men for the ‘big moment’ (D-Day) – when they could come out into the open and play a major part in the liberation of their country. The Maquisard leaders, however, pursued an activist policy which concentrated on small raids and sabotage designed to harry the Germans, make them feel insecure and deny them freedom of movement. This policy had the double advantage of hardening and professionalizing their guerrilla forces through action, while at the same time encouraging other young men to the cause.

The difference between these two approaches became evident in December 1943 when there was a sudden and sharp increase in the raids carried out from the Vercors plateau and the area around it. On the night of 1/2 December there was an attack on high-tension electricity lines near Bourg-de-Péage. At 08.20 the following day, an explosion rocked the Borne Barracks in Grenoble, killing twenty-three German and Italian soldiers and wounding 150 French civilians. In reprisal, the Germans shot thirteen hostages. On 10 December, railway locomotives were sabotaged at Portes-lès-Valence and, the following day, the Merlin-Gerin engineering works in Grenoble were attacked, causing an estimated 30 million francs’ worth of damage. On 15 December the Maquis group in the Malleval valley in the north-west corner of the plateau sabotaged the Valence-to-Grenoble railway. On the 20th, the Mayor of Vilnay was assassinated for collaboration and, two days later, another train was sabotaged at Vercheny. On 27 December, in what it is tempting to think of as an attempt to make the old year go out with a bang, there were raids and reprisals at Vercheny, Sainte-Croix, Pontaix and Barsac.

This increased level of sabotage and raids seems not to have been set back by the early and ferocious arrival of ‘General Winter’ *on the plateau. On 6 November, unseasonably early, the first heavy snow fell on the Vercors. Two weeks later, there was an even covering of 30 centimetres of fresh snow, right down to the mid-levels of the plateau. By Christmas, the snow was a metre deep at the Ferme d’Ambel.

This was the first winter which most of the young réfractaires had spent away from home and they found it very hard. Even the simplest chores required super-human effort. Almost worse than the cold was the sheer unrelieved, bone-numbing boredom, with nothing to do but get on each other’s nerves as the snow swirled outside their mountain refuges, while the days shortened and the nights, lit only by a single oil lamp, lengthened interminably. Morale plummeted and young men started slipping away for the comforts of their homes in the valleys. Of more than 400 réfractaires estimated to be in the camps in September, only 210 of the hardiest were left by Christmas. The camps at C8 and C11 fused together and descended to take refuge in the old, now deserted eleventh-century monastery of Our Lady of Esparron under the eastern ramparts of the plateau. Christmas, when it came, was celebrated by the young men in their mountain refuges and forest huts as best they could, given their conditions and heterogeneous beliefs. In Camp C3 above Méaudre, Christians gave readings from the Bible, the Jews from the Torah and the Communists from the texts of Karl Marx.

As early as October the camp at C2 had been abandoned when its inhabitants descended from the plateau to winter quarters in empty houses in the village of Malleval, nestling in a steep little bowl to which the only easy access was through the narrow gorge at Cognin, off the north-western quadrant of the plateau. Here the Maquisards under the leadership of Pierre Godart had an excellent relationship with all the local villagers, who despite the wartime restrictions still managed to organize a sumptuous Christmas for their young visitors. Godart sent one of his most devout men to Grenoble to ask the Bishop if he could provide a priest to take Christmas mass for the Maquisards in the little village church. But the answer was an abrupt no – ‘those who put themselves outside the law, are also outside the law of God’, as one later observer summed up the great churchman’s response. Eventually, however a priest was found to take confession and mass. On Christmas Eve, a French traditional réveillon de Noël *began.