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

William Collins

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London W6 8JB

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014

Copyright © Paddy Ashdown 2014

Maps by Harriet McDougall

Paddy Ashdown asserts his moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Cover photographs © Musée départmental de la Résistance du Vercors, Vassieux-en-Vercors

Maps by Harriet McDougall

Source ISBN: 9780007520800

Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007520824

Version: 2014-11-28

To the boy in the white shirt

In war, young men go out to die for old men’s dreams

Anon

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

A Note on Usages

Preface

Dramatis Personae

List of Maps

Prologue

1 The Vercors before the Vercors

2 France from the Fall to 1943: Setting the Scene

3 Beginnings

4 The Army Goes Underground

5 Camps and Plans

6 Exodus and Folly

7 Expectation, Nomadisation and Decapitation

8 Retreat, Retrenchment and Reconstruction

9 Pressure and Parachutes

10 The Labours of Hercules

11 January 1944

12 Of Germans and Spies

13 February 1944

14 March 1944

15 Weapons, Wirelesses, Air Drops and Codes

16 April 1944

17 A Basket of Crabs

18 May 1944

19 The First Five Days of June 1944

20 D-Day: 6 June 1944

21 Mobilization

22 The First Battle of Saint-Nizier

23 The Second Battle of Saint-Nizier

24 Respite and Reorganization

25 A Damned Good Show

26 Mixed Messages

27 The Republic

28 Action and Expectation

29 Bastille Day: 14 July 1944

30 Pflaum’s Plans and People

31 The Rising Storm

32 The End of Dreams: Friday 21 July 1944

33 Fighting On: Saturday 22 July 1944

34 The Final Battles: Sunday 23 July 1944

35 Retreat and Refuge

36 The Harrowing of the Vercors

37 Resurgence and Revenge

38 Aftermath and Afterlives

39 Postscript

Annex A

Annex B

Annex C

Acknowledgements

Notes

List of Illustrations

Bibliography

Picture Section

Index

Also by Paddy Ashdown

About the Author

About the Publisher

In this text I have not included dialogue unless it comes from a source who I have reason to believe might have been present at the time or it has been noted down as dialogue in the course of taking testimony from a living witness.

Since this story concerns primarily military operations, I have used the twenty-four-hour clock throughout. In 1943 and 1944 all British forces in the European theatre used Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) plus one hour (UK Single Summer Time) from 16 August to 3 April, and GMT plus two hours from 4 April to 15 August (UK Double Summer Time). The time used in all German-occupied western European territories was Central European Time (CET), which in that era was UK Single Summer Time plus two hours. Since this story takes place primarily in France, all times in the text are given in, or adjusted to be consistent with, CET.

For a similar reason, units of measurement have been converted, where appropriate, to the metric scale.

Readers may want to know what the wartime franc was worth. Prices more than doubled during the four years of the German occupation of France, and inflation was very much worse on the black market. But one can get a rough idea of money values if one thinks of 1,000 francs in 1943–4 as the equivalent of 250 euros or £200 today.

Except where otherwise stated the translations of French source documents into English are those of the author. Where the original French was in a written formal document I have tried to make the translation as precise as possible. Where the original source is oral (for example, the oral evidence of witnesses) I have allowed myself greater latitude to cope with the differences in sentence formation between spoken French and English in an attempt to preserve the original sense and colour, while conveying this to the English reader in the most readable fashion.

The word ‘maquis’ has subtly different meanings in English and French. The word originates from the Corsican term for the dry scrub which covers the hills of southern and Mediterranean France, but even more so from a Corsican expression prendre le maquis , which means to shelter in the woods to escape the authorities or a vendetta (to go underground). Even today, the word is used by the French primarily to describe those who resisted the Germans by going into the countryside and especially the wilder places. They formed into groups which sometimes took the name of the area they operated in – for instance, le maquis du Vercors . The term maquisard in French denotes someone who belonged to a maquis cell, usually in a rural area. In French the term is not normally taken to apply to those who belonged to urban Resistance groups (for example, in Paris or Lyon). In modern English usage, however, the word Maquisard has become, for all practical purposes, synonymous with that of a Resistant, whether urban or rural. Since this is an English book the word Maquis is used in the English sense, except where it is plainly inappropriate to do so.

One of the problems with writing this book has been the story’s high degree of complexity and detail. In an attempt not excessively to confuse the reader, I have tried to keep the personal names of those who played a minor role in the story out of the main text. For those interested, these, where known, are given in the Notes. Similarly, I have removed from the main text as many of the military unit names as possible; these too can be found in the Notes. And finally, in the same endeavour, I have submerged some of the myriad organizations involved in both London and Algiers. Thus the main directing French organization in London, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), is referred to simply as ‘London’ or ‘de Gaulle’s headquarters in London’, while the main Algiers organization for directing the Resistance in southern France, the Special Projects Operations Centre (SPOC), becomes just ‘Algiers’.

For the same reason and in the hope it will make them more accessible to the reader, I have tried to simplify the references by providing abbreviations for the main archives which I have consulted (such as TNA for the British National Archives at Kew, and NARA for the US National Archives and Records Administration). A key giving each of these abbreviations can be found at the start of the Notes section.