by Clare Mulley
On 5 June, as the ‘Overlord’ armada neared the Normandy beaches, the BBC broadcast seventy coded messages mainly for the circuits operating in the north of France, such as ‘Giraffe, why do you have so long a neck’ and ‘The cats mate in the front garden’.12 The next day the resistance swept into action with nearly a thousand acts of sabotage undertaken in twenty-four hours. The precise date for ‘Dragoon’, the Allied invasion of the south, was still under wraps, and further south there was some dispute as to whether the specific call to the Vercors, ‘The Alpine chamois leaps’, had been included.* But there was no doubt that a nationwide rising had been signalled and Francis had received the call to action for the Jockey network.
After years of bearing the humiliation of defeat and occupation, and witnessing the arrest and execution of friends, the desire to make a stand proved irresistible for men impatient for action across France. Among them were the leaders of the Vercors Maquis. ‘The supreme battle is being fought…’, De Gaulle broadcast to the French nation the following night, laying their fears to rest. ‘For the sons of France, wherever they are, whoever they are, the simple and sacred duty is to fight the enemy by every means at their disposal.’13 In a bold statement of intent, a tricolore flag bearing the Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the resistance, was raised over the Vercors plateau on 7 June.
On hearing of the Allied landings in Normandy, Francis and his friend Gilbert Galletti, a resistance leader in the Hautes-Alpes, had trekked into the hills to recover hidden munitions and prepare for action. A few days later Francis was informed that his circuit was now officially part of the French Forces, and he was in effect deputy to Colonel Henri Zeller, the FFI regional commander for the south-east and one of the ‘moving spirits’ of the French resistance.
A series of what Brooks Richards called ‘increasingly pathetic and desperate calls’ to Algiers for heavy artillery, anti-aircraft guns and anti-tank weapons followed.14 None were available, and in any case it would have been impossible to supply sufficient ammunition for a sustained battle for anything heavier than a bazooka. ‘They had got the impression that paratroop reinforcement might be expected within a very short time’, Brooks Richards said later, avoiding any notion of conceding Allied responsibility. ‘Well, of course it was quite irresponsible … No one had consulted the US or Great Britain as to whether they could supply the Vercors.’15 The extent of the breakdown in communications between field and HQ became apparent not when Brooks Richards replied to Francis, blaming atmospheric conditions for preventing sorties, but when Koenig in London defied all expectations with the order, ‘Send the men home because mobilised prematurely’.16 The thousands of Maquis would be arrested immediately if they went back home, and in any case they were already far too committed to stand down. London clearly had little understanding of the situation on the ground, while the expectations of the Maquis were hopelessly unrealistic.
That same week a group of men working with Francis received an order to hand over all their recruits, arms and explosives for the defence of Barcelonnette, a medieval town in the Basses-Alpes that was strategically placed on the principal route in and out of Italy. As the note was not signed by anyone they knew, Francis told his men not to comply. He received an immediate response informing him that if he did not obey orders he would be ‘court-martialled and shot’.17 Nerves were fraying, but an apology soon followed, with a request that Francis himself come to Barcelonnette.
Francis was amazed to find the tricolore decorating Barcelonnette’s faded stone town hall. The local German garrison had been temporarily overcome and the town was now being defended by the FFI. Colonel Zeller, just arrived from Lyon, met Francis on the town hall steps, along with local resistance leaders and Captain Hay, a British officer recently dropped from Algiers. Hay believed the Allied landings in the south were due within a week, and liberating columns could be expected in less than ten days. The town was being held by 600 men, all in high spirits and some in uniform, with 600 tricolore armbands, but arms and equipment for only 250, some of which were the men’s own hunting rifles or relics from the Great War. They had just twenty rounds of ammunition each. It was a pitifully small force with which to face Nazi tanks, regardless of anticipated reinforcements. To make matters worse, neither Francis nor Zeller was expecting the southern invasion imminently.
Francis was astonished when Zeller demanded that he hand over his stock of arms and explosives. It was, he said, impossible. The arms had been distributed, some to people who had been waiting years for them. ‘If you have a nice but fierce dog and you give him a bone,’ Francis argued, ‘you don’t put your hand out and take it away again.’18 In any case he felt that they would have been giving up all their equipment, simply ‘for the Germans to capture’.19 Seeing that the situation was critical he did, however, agree to send a small force across the mountains to attack from the rear. He also sent urgent signals to Algiers resulting in the drop of over a hundred containers of anti-tank arms on 11 June. Unfortunately many of these supplies were collected by enemy troops. Four days later the Germans moved in – too fast for Francis to bring his reserves to bear. 150 men were killed defending Barcelonnette, including Captain Hay, who was mown down by machine-gun fire during a heroic bid to take out a third German tank with the only PIAT anti-tank weapon that Francis had been able to provide.
Undeterred by the tragedy unfolding at Barcelonnette, the Vercors Maquis managed to repel several attacks, during each of which the Wehrmacht suffered disproportionately high losses. Then, in a ceremony on 3 July, the civilian leader of the Vercors resistance, Eugène Chavant, proclaimed the plateau ‘the free Republic of Vercors’. All Vichy laws were immediately rescinded. It was the first democratic administration in France since the start of the German occupation in 1940. It was also a courageous act of outright defiance, and one the Nazis could not ignore. Francis, who had not been consulted, was furious. He was now left with the difficult task of transporting arms across country to a known resistance stronghold.
On 7 July, the night that Christine crashed into France, Francis sent his first report to London since the Allied landings and the tragedy at Barcelonnette. ‘There has been a complete lack of understanding…’, he raged, ‘which amounts to criminal negligence against which shot hostages, raped women and burnt villages can bear witness.’ ‘You must treat us as a serious military force…’, he concluded. ‘Don’t let the French down again.’20 It was a voice that would only become more familiar to SOE HQ over the next few weeks.
For the Maquis, the arrival of Christine’s travelling companion, Jean Tournissa, and orders to build an airstrip, seemed to indicate that the heavy armaments that could only be delivered by plane, and possibly paratroop reinforcements, must surely follow. Francis and Christine spent the next few days crossing the plateau with whatever supplies they could coordinate, while sending increasingly desperate signals to Algiers and London for the artillery, antiaircraft guns and anti-tank weapons that the Maquis so urgently needed. Daniel Huillier, the sixteen-year-old son of one of the original Vercors Maquis, remembered having an aperitif with Christine in a café at Saint-Martin. Daniel was struck by how at ease she seemed, the only woman among all the men, and wondered what on earth she could be doing there. ‘She was truly beautiful’, he sighed, ‘a fine person, a great woman … magnificent.’21 Christine knocked back her drink while Francis started the engine on his motorbike, then, grabbing her rucksack, she swung one leg over the back and they were off to the next unit without a backwards glance.
A week later Christine found herself in the middle of the crisis that followed the Bastille Day sortie at Die. By ten o’clock the Germans were carpet-bombing the plateau in a concerted attempt to stop the Maquis from collecting the light arms and supplies dropped by the planes. ‘By eleven our communications were cut’, one of the maquisards noted. ‘Having sprayed us lavishly with bombs, the enemy planes then inundated the plateau with dozens of grenades … Vassieux was on fire.’22
Christ
ine, true to form, stood her ground calmly in the face of the Luftwaffe fire and set to work, cutting away the fallen parachutes that gave such clear targets to the Nazi bombers, collecting those canisters that could be gathered in daylight and unloading supplies, stripping the weapons of the grease in which they were packed and preparing them for use. Soon there were stacks of cartridge boxes, round cases of explosive, and piles of grenades shored up against the empty containers, waiting to be distributed. She then helped to deliver arms, and Francis’s advice, to the quickly assembling units of Maquis, and worked to keep a secure line of communication between Francis, Zeller and Albert.
Christine’s friend Sylviane Rey was also hard at work. With a starched pinafore tied over her grey skirt, she was busy moving among the many casualties, administering first aid. The church at Vassieux, with its massive wooden doors, was already in ruins, one of the bombers’ first targets, and all the towns of the Vercors were soon under fire. Makeshift hospitals were quickly set up in schools, and buses and lorries converted for use as ambulances. The air attacks continued all day.
In between directing the response, the Vercors military commander, Major François Huet, hosted a surreal lunch, discussing strategy in the face of the assault, and proposing a series of patriotic toasts as bombs exploded around his HQ in Saint-Martin. At midnight Francis and other senior officers attended a crisis meeting at Huet’s villa, in a room thick with cigarette smoke. In the early hours he retreated to Saint-Agnan, the next village south, where Christine joined him in what Francis described as ‘a burning hotel’.23 It was here that they spent their first passionate night together. Bombs were still falling as they climbed the stairs, and just a few miles away enemy troops were massing for a final onslaught. They were physically and emotionally shattered but, as Francis put it, ‘absolutely certain that we were going to die the next day; it was all over, this was the end’, each considered the other’s arms an excellent last sanctuary.*24
Standing by the window in the first light of dawn, they watched a Nazi bomber heading directly for them. When the plane was close enough to see the pilot’s face Francis bent his head slightly and said quietly to Christine, ‘If they release a bomb now it will come right in through the window next to us.’25 As Francis said ‘now’ the pilot let a bomb fly. Francis was not often wrong, but he was about three feet out on this. The bomb skidded over the roof, so close they could feel it brushing the tiles, and buried itself in the dry earth bank beyond without exploding. Gripping his hand, Christine led Francis out of the room, down the stone stairs and round the back of the building to find it. Then, glancing up at the already busy morning sky, she laughed, exclaiming, ‘They don’t want us to die!’26 It was typical Christine, no mention of God and no sign of fear, just defiant joie de vivre.
Over the next few days, constantly under fire, Francis and Christine continued their efforts to coordinate, collect and distribute supplies, support the preparation of Tournissa’s landing strip, which was still being levelled with a steamroller, and generally maintain the Maquis’s communications and morale. Many hours were spent at the command post at the top of the plateau, watching the troop formations through heavy binoculars. By counting the lines of soldiers neatly forming into reconnaissance patrols, Francis hoped to work out where they planned to break through the Maquis’s lower defences and begin their push up into the interior of the Vercors both on foot and with tanks. Despite his continued and increasingly desperate requests to Algiers and London for anti-tank weapons, mortars and paramilitary reinforcements, there were no further deliveries.
Part of the problem was that the SOE had never won the respect or support of the RAF. The British Air Marshals believed that their limited resources should be at the full disposal of Bomber Command. ‘The dropping of men in civilian clothes for the purpose of killing members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated’, Sir Charles Portal, Chief of Air Staff, had written early in the war.27 As the battle for air resources intensified the relative merits of acts of sabotage on the ground versus bombing from the air were considered, with Portal now claiming that ‘my bombing offensive is not a gamble. Its dividend is certain; it is a gilt-edged investment.’28 In retrospect sabotage was shown to have been more effective at targeted impact, but until the summer of 1944 Britain’s only visible contribution to the war in Europe was through the bombing offensive, and it was therefore vital to maintain Allied credibility. Repeated lobbying by Francis and others had, however, resulted in an increase in the amount of air support for SOE agents. And in June 1944 Churchill announced that ‘every effort must be made to supply the Maquis at once with rifles, Bren guns, Piat guns, mortars and bazookas with ammunition’ – but there were never enough pilots or aircraft.29 A month later, with the Allies advancing into Normandy, and the second invasion imminent, Britain was still not in a position to risk reducing air coverage of the invading army, even for the established French resistance. At the same time, Algiers was facing a barrage of demands for supplies, all of them urgent, from resistance groups across the country.
The lack of air support for the Vercors Maquis might have been strategically justifiable, but neither London nor Algiers seemed even to acknowledge the desperate situation on the ground or give serious consideration to the possibility of evacuating the plateau. As the Maquis fought off the first assaults from the local German garrisons, a series of weakly apologetic signals sent from Algiers ended ‘love to P’, short for Pauline, Christine’s alias. Such flippant niceties incensed her. ‘Psiakrew!’ (Dog’s blood!) Christine cursed, as a colleague beside her swore that he ‘would gladly break their necks, we have no time for love here’.30
On 20 July, Francis and Christine sent a signal in the name of Colonel Zeller: ‘Fierce battle for capture of Vercors imminent. Without your help result uncertain…’31 As well as reinforcements in the form of a parachute battalion and mortars, they repeatedly requested the immediate bombing of the German airfield at nearby Chabeuil, where fifty to sixty Luftwaffe planes were assembled, before ending rather pathetically, ‘Come to our aid by every means.’32 But no attack came and the following morning the Nazis launched a full-scale assault on the Vercors Maquis. It would be the biggest operation undertaken by the army of occupation in France. A major air offensive was followed with strategic attacks by highly trained commando units against whom the lightly armed Maquis, so effective at ambush and sabotage, could offer little sustained resistance. ‘Massive attacks by airborne troops…’, Francis signalled Algiers. ‘We hope to be able to maintain radio link…’ But he signed off ‘adieu’, suggesting a more permanent farewell than his more usual ‘au revoir’.33
That morning the defenders of the Vassieux airstrip would at first mistakenly welcome twenty enemy gliders containing at least 200 SS troops armed with flame-throwers, believing them to be Allied support. The landing strips had just been completed, but the British considered them too short to be used. The Germans did not. It was, in Brooks Richards’s words, a total ‘cock-up’.34 The gliders descended steeply and very rapidly, the pilots maintaining a steady stream of machine-gun fire as parachutes slowed their approach for landing. Two were shot down and two more damaged. The rest discharged ten Waffen-SS soldiers each, who dispersed ‘like flies’, allowing the defenders little time to take cover.35 Heavily wounded, Jean Tournissa, the airstrip engineer, crawled into a shallow trench. Within minutes a hundred people lay dead on his landing strip, slumped across the few machine guns and under wheelbarrows where they had run for shelter. Christine reported that she was in a barn at the far end of the airstrip, en route to deliver a message from Francis to Tournissa, when the gliders came in. Shaking violently, she managed to retreat, taking news of the airborne invasion back down the hill.36 Later accounts would have her using a machine gun and hand-grenades against the gliders.*37
The ensuing slaughter was not restricted to the Maquis. Despite attempts to keep the conflict zone away from the local populatio
n, many of whom had taken shelter in the Vercors caves, Wehrmacht troops and SS units progressed mercilessly up the roads and farm tracks cutting into the forests and mountains, and through all the villages, killing indiscriminately as they went. The intermittent sound of machine-gun fire echoed across the plateau, punctuated by the screaming of cows that had not been milked. Still no help came. Over the next few days the Nazi troops pressed into the Vercors interior, forcing local women and children to walk ahead of their columns as human shields. Hostages were shot, farms burnt down, and the Maquis were forced into isolated positions deep within the forests while enemy reinforcements arrived at Die.
Francis, Albert and Christine now put themselves entirely at Zeller’s disposal. Albert almost slept with his headphones braced over his head and his aerial harnessed round his chest, and Christine spent hours coding and sending increasingly desperate signals to Algiers and London. There were occasional victories: the blocking of a strategic pass, the routing of the enemy in one sector by throwing hand-grenades from a beauty spot, and the capture of some heavy artillery with at least one big gun dragged higher up the plateau with a maquisard riding gleefully on its barrel. ‘Morale of our people excellent’, one message to Algiers began, ‘but they will turn against you if you do not take immediate action. Those in London and Algiers understand nothing about the situation in which we find ourselves and are considered as criminals and cowards. Yes repeat, criminals and cowards.’38