by Peter Grose
Not content with this, the Germans and their Vichy allies struck again the next day. Mobile units, reservists and military police mounted raids in the Tence and Yssingeaux area. Eleven men were arrested and taken away. The Plateau was now in uproar as never before. If ever the mood changed from resistance to revenge, it was now.
• • •
An important character was about to return to the Plateau. After her release from the Spanish prison in early 1943, Virginia Hall had initially cooled her heels—or heel—in London, working at a desk job in the American embassy. Despite the fact that she was on a Gestapo wanted list, her one ambition was to get back to France. To her own disappointment, and that of Maurice Buckmaster, the head of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the Americans chose to send her back to neutral Spain. She had arrived in Madrid in May 1943, working under cover as a correspondent for Time/Life.
Madrid was an odd and probably unwise appointment. It was awash with spies from both sides, so it could only have the effect of making her face and name better known to the enemy. She was able to do a bit of good, helping a group of old contacts from the French Resistance to escape to England via Portugal, but otherwise the Madrid posting was a waste of talent. The Resistance was clearly going to play a key role in the imminent battle for Europe. She wanted to be part of it when it happened, and that meant getting back to London and then France. Ideally she wanted to be somewhere not too far from Lyon, the territory she knew best and the place where she had already been active setting up Resistance cells.
In January 1944 she demanded to return to London to join the American Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. The OSS worked in partnership with the British SOE, arming and coordinating the various resistance movements in occupied Europe. Through old contacts, Hall managed to get an interview with the OSS. It was agreed that she should work for them and not for the SOE: as an American, she should be part of her own country’s clandestine service. Nevertheless, she would have to work closely with the SOE. At first the British were not sure they wanted her. The Germans knew her by her true identity, and that left her compromised. And, let it be said, her wooden leg made her easy to spot in a crowd. However, both the SOE and the OSS agreed to take her in.
Her first move once she was accepted was to train as a radio operator. She did not want to bring the extra baggage of a specialist radio operator with her into France; she preferred to travel alone and do the job herself. She also trained with the SOE in sabotage work. She was a quick pupil and already had most of the skills she would need to survive in Occupied France. By March 1944 she was ready to be inserted into France. Her orders were simple. ‘In an area limited to Central France, examine the capabilities of the Resistance, in particular their manpower, and establish their requirements. Locate suitable landing fields and parachute drop sites. Assist the Resistance, and plan acts of sabotage.’ That left a big question unanswered: where should she go in France? Her bosses thought about Cher and Indre in the Centre region, La Creuse in the Haute-Saône, and Nièvre in Burgundy, before coming up with a brand-new suggestion: the department of the Haute-Loire in the Auvergne. It was ideal. There was even reasonable access to Paris if she needed to go there.
So Virginia Hall ceased to exist. She would now be ‘Diane’, ‘Marie Monin’, ‘Germaine’, ‘Marie of Lyon’, ‘Camille’ or, to some, ‘la Madone’ or even ‘la sorcière rousse’ (the redheaded sorceress). To the Germans she was ‘Artemis’51 or Die Frau die hinkt, the limping woman. In their estimation she was ‘the most dangerous of all Allied spies’.
On Tuesday, 21 March, Hall arrived off the Brittany coast in a British motor torpedo boat. Most agents parachuted in, or were inserted by the extraordinary 161 Squadron of the Royal Air Force, using single-engine Lysander aircraft. However, ‘Diane’s’ wooden leg made her poor parachuting material, so she chose the sea route. She was rowed ashore in a rubber dinghy, with her wireless set. At this point she was junior partner to a Frenchman named Laussucq, who had taken the name Henri Lassot, otherwise ‘Saint’ or ‘Aramis’. Hall was simply his wireless operator. The two agents took the train to Paris. Hall moved into the flat of an old friend, Madame Long. Her new address was 59 Rue de Babylone, in the 7th arrondissement. She was in the heart of Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower. Laussucq lodged with a sympathetic neighbour, who ran a guesthouse.
The two then moved on to La Creuse in the eastern department of Haute-Saône, and from there to Maidou near Crozant in the Limousin region of central France. On Tuesday, 4 April, ‘Diane’ sent her first radio message from Maidou to London. They were healthy and safe, she told them, and ready to start work.
At this point, work consisted of organising the ‘Heckler’ network. This gave Laussucq plenty to do, but left Hall with time on her hands.
She spent it investigating the La Creuse, Cher and Nièvre undergrounds, and training groups of men. For hard-pressed members of the Secret Army, Hall had a particular talent: she could organise guns. Once she’d put in a good word with London, the night skies would blossom with parachutes as containers of arms swung gently down into the eager hands of the Resistance. London trusted Diane. If she asked for guns, she got them.
Hall stayed on the move through April and May. Then she had a message from London to say that one of the SOE’s agents had been arrested, and that Hall herself might be compromised. Time to move on once more. She returned briefly to Paris and Rue de Babylone, then shuttled between Paris, the Loire and Burgundy. Finally, a new set of orders arrived. She should proceed to the Haute-Loire.
• • •
Allied military leaders now set about preparing a simple trap. Readers familiar with the game of chess will know about a tactic called a ‘fork’. This is a chess position where one piece simultaneously threatens two of the opponent’s pieces. If the opponent moves one of his threatened pieces to safety, he loses the other. The role of the Resistance would be to act as an attacking piece in a gigantic military fork.
By the spring of 1944, it was clear that the Allies would soon attempt a landing on the Western European mainland. The Germans expected it to occur around the Pas-de-Calais, the far northwest department of France and the one with easiest access from England: at this point the crossing from Dover to Calais is both short and simple, only 33 kilometres across the English Channel. The Allies did everything in their power to reinforce this idea, with elaborate deceptions involving double agents, dummy wooden aircraft and fake radio traffic; in fact anything they could think of to keep all eyes on the Pas-de-Calais and away from the beaches of Normandy.
From 1942 onwards, the Germans had poured enormous energy and resources into building an Atlantic Wall’, a line of defence that stretched along the Atlantic coast of Europe from the north of Norway to the Spanish border. When the Allied attack came, the Atlantic Wall was designed to hold the Allies at the beaches until German reinforcements could be wheeled in to throw the invaders back into the sea. So the principal job of the Resistance would be to stop the Germans bringing up their reinforcements. They would be needed to wreck railway lines, block roads, destroy bridges, sabotage airfields, attack barracks, ambush troops on the move—anything to keep the German reinforcements from reaching the front.
The Resistance had an additional role to play. If the occupying forces in, say, the Paris area succeeded in reaching the invasion point, then that would leave Paris as an easy target for a Resistance takeover. Wherever the Germans sent reinforcements forward, the Resistance would swoop on the vacated territory. On the other hand, what if the Germans decided not to reinforce their defences but ordered their troops to instead stay where they were and try to hold on to their territory? Then the Allied invasion force would soon punch a hole in the Atlantic Wall, and the invasion would succeed. So the presence of a powerful, armed Resistance was intended to put the Germans in a no-win fork. Try to reinforce, and you commit yourself to fighting your way across wrecked bridges, blocked roads and through ambushes. Succeed
in getting through? Then watch your conquests be taken over by the Resistance filling the vacuum you left behind. Stay where you are? Then watch the Allies pouring in through a hole in the Atlantic Wall, sweeping everything before them.
That was the plan for invasion day. But even before the actual invasion, the Resistance had an important role to play in tying up German forces. A guerrilla army can wreak havoc on its enemies using very limited resources. As an example, during the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland the British maintained between 9000 and 21,000 troops there; yet they were facing a Provisional IRA that counted its armed and active members in the hundreds rather than thousands. So for the Secret Army in France in 1944, a train derailed here, a ‘collaborator’ assassinated there, an army patrol ambushed somewhere else—all these meant that the Germans were kept constantly busy, and constantly on the back foot, rather than organising a defence against the inevitable invasion.
It would be nice to write that the Resistance on the Plateau set about the Germans with devastating effect in May of 1944. Nice, but untrue. A list of the actions fought is hardly the stuff of wartime derring-do.
12 May: Theft of 30 kilos of lard, six sausages, four legs of ham and five kilos of butter from a lady farmer in Le Mazet-Saint-Voy. The thieves told the farmer they were STO dodgers living in the forest of Le Meygal, and that if she lodged a complaint they would come back and burn down her farm.
20-21 May: Three young men aged between twenty and 25 staged a series of raids across the Plateau. They stole 1000 francs from a lady farmer at Chomor near Le Chambon; 2300 francs and four sausages from a farmer at Gratte near Le Mazet; 5000 francs and three sausages from a home in Ronsaveaux; and finally a massive 54,925 francs from an unnamed individual, consisting of 4925 francs from community funds and 50,000 francs from the individual himself (or herself).
25 (or 26, the facts are unclear) May: Four men armed with submachine guns broke into the town hall at Le Mazet-Saint-Voy and demanded that the secretary hand over the census records from 1921 to 1930. They then moved to the home of the town hall secretary in Le Chambon and demanded at gunpoint that she hand over the keys. Next they ransacked the town hall looking for census figures. Having failed to find what they wanted, they took 500 meat ration cards, 500 bread ration cards and 500 assorted other ration cards. They left in a Peugeot car in the direction of Fay-sur-Lignon.
26 May: Four men robbed two farmers: they took 6000 francs, 30 kilos of lard and twelve sausages from the first farmer, and 1700 francs, fifteen kilos of lard and two legs of ham from the second. This time they didn’t get away with it completely. One of the thieves was arrested by the gendarmes, along with an accomplice charged with receiving stolen goods.
27 May: The same men who had raided the town hall of Le Chambon on 25 or 26 May returned, heavily armed, and took away the 1925 census information, the register of food ration coupons and other pieces of census information.
It may well be that some of these actions were carried out by the faux maquis, the freelance bands of thieves pretending to be part of the Resistance. But your average rural village thief seldom carries a submachine gun or wants census information. Most of these raids have the fingerprints of the Resistance all over them.
• • •
At some point in the first half of 1944—the date is unclear—Pierre Fayol, head of the armed Resistance in Le Chambon, decided he should move house. Dr Le Forestier had received a tip-off from the gendarmes that the Germans were searching the area using radio-detector cars. They were also looking for someone called ‘Rivière’, one of Fayol’s pseudonyms. He might already be under surveillance. He found new lodgings at Le Riou, near Le Mazet.
On 2 June 1944, what Fayol describes as ‘real military operations’ began. He was ordered to move some of his Secret Army troops to Mont Mouchet, on the far western edge of the Haute-Loire beyond Le Puy-en-Velay. There they would be commanded by a Captain Hulot, who had arrived from the Loire, and whose cousin André Kauffman was one of Fayol’s troops in Yssingeaux. About eighty men from the Plateau accordingly set off for Mont Mouchet. Meanwhile, Fayol was told he should stay where he was and await further orders. What, he wondered, was going on?
Four days later, at 6.30 am on 6 June, the answer became clear: the invasion began. By that evening, 160,000 Allied troops (including 73,000 Americans, 61,715 British and 21,400 Canadians) had landed on the beaches of Normandy. This was D-Day. The liberation of Western Europe had begun. And so had the Resistance’s real fight.
Part V
• • •
LIBERATION
15
Guns
The first action fought by the maquis of the Plateau broke the most fundamental rule of guerrilla warfare, and failed as a result. Whole books are written about the military theory behind guerrilla actions, so there is something presumptuous about trying to condense it to a few sentences in a single paragraph. Nevertheless, the first principle can be stated fairly simply: hit and run. Don’t get dragged into a head-to-head battle with a well-armed and well-trained regular army. You’ll lose.
On 9 June the Mont Mouchet battle began. Some 3000 German troops, with air support, set out to rid the area of maquisards once and for all. The Resistance fighters were outnumbered five or six to one by regular Wehrmacht troops, and were not as well armed. The Germans launched their first attack at Venteuges, a few kilometres east of Mont Mouchet. At the same time, a group of well-trained and well-armed maquisards attacked the Germans at the tiny village of La Vachellerie, near Monistrol-d’Allier. Over the next two days the Secret Army fought a series of battles with regular German troops across the area. Predictably, the maquis took a terrible mauling. They lost 260 killed and a further 160 wounded. In addition, the Germans shot 100 civilian hostages. German casualties are unknown, though one Resistance report claimed 1400 German dead and 1700 wounded. This is transparent nonsense. The outcome was not a defeat for the maquisards, nor was it a victory for the Wehrmacht. The ‘Battle of Mont Mouchet’ was more a series of inconclusive skirmishes, with neither side able to claim a win. After three days the maquisards were ordered by their officers to disperse, which they did. It was a salutary lesson, ending the dream of finishing off the occupation of the Haute-Loire with a few well-aimed bursts of Sten-gun fire. The Germans were a tougher bunch than that.
Pierre Fayol needed no telling. He could see the folly of a head-on charge. There were better ways to harass the Germans.
• • •
Sometime in the first half of June 1944—there is no record of the exact date—a fearful pounding on his front door woke Pierre Fayol. On the doorstep stood Maurice Lebrat, one of his Resistance fighters. Lebrat told him that one of his men, Sergeant Petit, had some important information which he had to convey to Fayol in person. Petit was waiting by the road outside.
Petit did indeed have some important news. A British agent, a woman, had arrived in Le Chambon and had demanded to meet someone senior from the Secret Army. Together with Petit and Lebrat, Fayol went straight away to meet her. For reasons that would soon become apparent, the meeting took place in a field well away from the village. Fayol found himself in the presence of a tall American woman—not British—who spoke French with what Fayol describes as a ‘terrible accent’. She introduced herself as Diane. She was accompanied by a French woman who spoke not a word all night; Fayol never even learned her name.
Diane didn’t waste time with pleasantries: she got straight down to business. ‘Do you have sites for parachuting?’ she demanded.
‘Yes,’ said Fayol.
’Can you muster up about forty men?’
‘Ten times that number if we can arm them,’ Fayol responded.
‘Are you willing to follow orders?’
‘What sort of orders?’ Fayol asked.
‘Sabotage,’ said Diane.
‘Yes, anything that isn’t against the instructions of my chiefs.’
While all this was going on, Fayol heard an aircraft overhead. For th
e first time in the Ardèche, it delivered a man instead of arms: Lieutenant-Colonel Vanel, a Canadian, together with his radio, arrived by parachute. Fayol now knew why they had met in the countryside, not in the village. Clearly something important was happening.
Diane had a final question. ‘What do you need?’
Fayol had a ready answer. ‘Guns and explosives for operations, and some money for the quartermaster.’
Apparently satisfied, Diane told Fayol: ‘Come and find me at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. We’ll go and look around the area.’ She and her French companion then left, while Vanel stayed behind.
A nonplussed Fayol asked Vanel whether he had to obey orders from the American. You bet, said Vanel. Diane was the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel.
The next day, Fayol and Diane, accompanied by Maurice Lebrat, checked some potential parachute sites. The American seemed to like what she saw. Between them, they agreed on some codes. ‘The shark has a soft nose’ would send the Resistance scurrying to a drop site near Yssingeaux. ‘This dark moonlight falls’ repeated three times would signal a similar snowstorm of parachutes at Villelonge. Diane then handed Fayol a bag that she said contained 150,000 francs, and abruptly ordered Lebrat to count it.
Lebrat counted carefully, and announced: ‘A hundred and fifty-two thousand francs.’
‘That’s wrong,’ said Diane. ‘Count it again.’
Lebrat recounted the money. ‘A hundred and fifty-two thousand francs,’ he repeated.
Diane’s tone changed. ‘My mistake. I must have confused myself. I didn’t use much money on the trip here.’
Both Fayol and Lebrat felt they had passed some kind of test. Diane’s next words confirmed this. ‘When I get back, I’ll have a mission for you,’ she said. She also told Fayol he could expect a parachute drop of arms at Cosne-sur-Loire, about 300 kilometres away in the Nièvre, on the night of 15 June. He would hear the code message confirmation on the BBC.