by Jim Ring
The Fall of France focused minds wonderfully. On 16 July 1940, the same day that Hitler signed Directive No. 16 ordering the invasion of Britain, a midnight meeting was held by Churchill in Downing Street. A plan was agreed to foment sabotage, subversion and resistance throughout Europe. Hugh Dalton, the blustering and belligerent Minister of Economic Warfare, was to be the political chief of the top-secret agency. It was to be called Special Operations Executive or SOE. Churchill’s parting shot to Dalton as he left Number 10 through a haze of cigar smoke has passed into legend: ‘Now set Europe ablaze.’
This was indicative of the high hopes that Churchill himself, Dalton and many others entertained at the time. The Executive was classed with strategic bombing and the naval blockade as amongst the country’s most powerful weapons, its role to foment popular uprisings in Europe of which a new expeditionary army would merely be a guarantor.1
In practice, nurturing resistance proved far more difficult than envisaged. In due course there grew sufficient will to resist in the occupied countries of Europe. It was rarely to be found in 1940. The populations of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark and Poland were shocked, cowed, subdued and generally submissive to their new masters – be they Nazis, Italians or puppet governments. The Alps themselves, remote though they might be, at first seemed little different. As to what Churchill dubbed the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, SOE had to begin at the beginning. In 1940 this was not necessarily a very good place to start. Lord Selborne, a Tory grandee who replaced Dalton in 1942, recalled, ‘Underground warfare was an unknown art in England in 1940; there were no text-books for newcomers, no old hands to initiate them into the experiences of the last war … lessons had to be learned in the hard school of practice.’2 There was also the problem of MI6. Section D had been folded into SOE at its inception, and the intelligence service saw the new organisation as an upstart. This was understandable given that the two agencies’ interests were perpetually at odds. Clandestine activities were undercover: silent, secret and inconspicuous. Sabotage and subversion were the polar opposites. A bomb here, a derailed train there, an assassination ‘pour encourager les autres’. Visibility was all.
At once this conflict arose in the Alps.
As Switzerland’s General Henri Guisan regularly made clear, the republic’s very existence hinged on the Alpine railway tunnels that welded Italy and Germany into the Axis. When the British discovered that a third of Mussolini’s coal requirement was trucked from the Ruhr and Saar coalfields through the St Gotthard and Simplon, they became an obvious object of interest to SOE. An operation was drawn up to destroy the marshalling yards, sabotage the bridges and block the railway lines. The Executive claimed that such an action ‘might conceivably result not only in holding up [Italy’s] coal deliveries but also military supplies or even, in certain circumstances, offensives’. It would shake the foundations of the treaty between Italy and the Reich. Dalton was delighted. ‘So act!’ he told his staff. ‘I will gladly snap for this!’3
The plan was duly tabled with the Foreign Office and MI6. Both gave somewhat qualified support. MI6 regarded Switzerland as its own backyard and the FO pointed out that the operation might perhaps compromise Anglo-Swiss relations. The Swiss were protective of their tunnels, even if their railway had been an English idea. Moreover, both agencies had a general embargo on operations that might endanger Swiss neutrality. On 8 October 1940 it was nevertheless agreed that an SOE officer, John ‘Jock’ McCaffery, should be sent to reconnoitre.
McCaffery was a thirty-eight-year-old Glaswegian of Irish extraction. A Catholic who trained for the priesthood in Rome and subsequently settled in Italy, he married, retrained as a teacher and ultimately found himself head of the British Council in the Ligurian port of Genoa. The Council peddled British culture and acted as a cover for intelligence operations. McCaffery, with his grasp of the intricacies of central European politics, was briefed to explore the practicality of the railway scheme, source explosives, and recruit Swiss railway workers. This took time. It was spring 1941 before the Scot had been sent to Switzerland, discovered quite how much dynamite would be needed, quite how closely the Swiss policed the tunnels, and quite how reluctant were the railway workers to blow up their own country’s infrastructure. By then the mood in London had also changed. The pressure on Italy had briefly eased because of Hitler’s momentous decision to invade the Balkans, the move that buttressed the Italian forces in Greece. The chance of detaching Mussolini’s state from the Axis had temporarily slipped away. At the same time, over the winter MI6 agents in Switzerland had unearthed a rich vein of intelligence. This London was loath to lose. In these circumstances the FO and MI6 confirmed that no exception was to be made to the general policy about compromising Swiss neutrality. Dalton stopped snapping.
Yet in other ways the passage of time played into the hands of the SOE. By the summer of 1941, the Executive had settled into its secret headquarters at 64 Baker Street in London’s West End, parachuted its first agents into France, and established a modus operandi. ‘SOE’s objects’, related its historian M. R. D. Foot, ‘included discovering where these outbursts [of resistance] were, encouraging them when they were feeble, arming their members as they grew, and coaxing them when they were strong into the channels of greatest common advantage to the allies.’4 Likewise, the more enterprising, courageous and resourceful inhabitants of the occupied countries had familiarised themselves with the Nazis and their agents and determined to get rid of them.
In the Alps, principal amongst the naysayers were the French in the west, and in the east the patriots and the partisans of Yugoslavia.
2
In France, as in all the occupied countries, resistance began in the form of virtually spontaneous and very largely incidental activity; only later did it coalesce into a unified, national resistance ‘movement’ of any substance.
Its figurehead was of course General de Gaulle. Born in Lille in French Flanders in 1890, Charles de Gaulle was an officer who had distinguished himself in the First World War in the trenches, in the thirties as an exponent of motorised warfare, and in combat once again during the brief period of fighting before the Fall of France in June 1940. In those torrid weeks he was promoted first to brigadier general, on 5 June 1940 to under-secretary of state for war. A fervent patriot, he was horrified by Pétain’s proposal to seek an armistice with the Reich. On 17 June 1940 de Gaulle and a handful of other senior French officers flew to London. The following day the General issued his great rallying cry on the BBC from his London exile, the appel du 18 Juin. This called on the French people to reject the proposed armistice, to fight on, and to form the Free French Forces which – very soon – would oppose those of collaborationist Vichy. ‘Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ Few heard this bidding in the darkness of France’s Occupied Zone, and fewer still responded.
In the French Alps, the range that ran from Nice to Geneva, the appel fell on rather more fertile ground. North of the Jewish sanctuary of Nice and the Alpes-Maritimes lay the Alpine province of Dauphiné; further north beyond Dauphiné, the Alps that reared up to Mont Blanc overlooking the southern shores of Lake Geneva. This was the Haute-Savoie, where in 1943 Guido Lospinoso’s Jewish charges would find sanctuary in Megève and St Gervais. From July 1940 these eastern borders of France had been designated part of the Zone Libre. Here homage was nominally paid to Vichy, but Pétain’s way of collaboration was by no means to everyone’s taste, and political persecution had proved scarcely less virulent under Vichy than under the Nazis in the Occupied Zone. Moreover, in the same way as Switzerland lived under the constant threat of Nazi invasion, so too did France’s Zone Libre – something that throughout France was more conducive to resistance than passivity. In the Alps the people were also of an independent spirit, not always as regardful as they surely should have been of directives from Vichy or Paris or Berlin.
After the initial shock of t
he events of 1940 had subsided, the Alpine people began to stir. If not all had heard or registered de Gaulle’s original appeal of 18 June 1940, many now began to listen to his regular broadcasts from London on the BBC; in August 1940 it had done the General a power of good to be sentenced by Vichy to death for high treason. In Savoie, the Dauphiné and the Alpes-Maritimes the people also began to realise how admirably their surroundings lent themselves to the purpose of the réfractaires: those who refused to submit to the Vichy regime. They might be combed out in street-to-street, house-to-house searches in France’s towns and cities; they were far more difficult to track down in her mountains. These offered levels of cover that made it very difficult for the Wehrmacht to find, let alone to attack any erring réfractaires. They were bandit country.
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One day in the summer of 1941 – it was the glory days of Operation Barbarossa when the Wehrmacht swept the Red Army before it – a small group of men gathered in the Café de la Rotunde near Grenoble station. Its immediate environs were grubby, but beyond lay the inspiration of the great mountains of the Rhône-Alpes towering over the Alpine city: the Chartreuse to the north, the Belledonne to the east, and to the south-west the Vercors. This was a limestone plateau sixty miles long and thirty broad, the size – say – of the county of Surrey: less populous, though, less stuffy, more rugged, more wooded, and at the time still supposedly the home of wild bears.
Among the men in the café were a forty-one-year-old engineer called Pierre Dalloz, and forty-seven-year-old Eugène Chavant. Dalloz was a distinguished Alpinist and pioneer of winter mountaineering who had climbed extensively in the Vercors. Chavant was a cobbler’s son, born in Colombe just north of Grenoble. Both saw the plateau as a sanctuary, for it was accessible only by a few steep and narrow roads, easily blocked and readily defended. The pair’s idea was to turn this to advantage. They would set up camps to provide refuge for those persecuted by Vichy.
Like most of the resistance in occupied Europe, they also had an ulterior motive. The Third Republic had failed. Chavant was a socialist who wanted to build a more just society on its ruins. The Soviet spy H. A. R. ‘Kim’ Philby, who had worked briefly for SOE before joining MI6, commented that the aim of the SOE, ‘in Churchill’s words, was to set Europe ablaze. This could not be done by appealing to people to co-operate in restoring an unpopular and discredited old order.’5
Chavant screened candidates for the haven. Those selected were then taken up to the plateau. By the beginning of 1942 there were around a hundred distributed in makeshift camps situated in the woods within reach of the scattered villages. They came to be known as the Montagnards, a subspecies of the rural resistance throughout France beginning to be called the maquis. Funding was obtained through the SOE in London’s Baker Street, a system of food distribution set up, and a sentinel system arranged using the plateau’s electricity station. If the lights went on and off three times, trouble was on its way. Many of the Montagnards were French and foreign Jews who would otherwise be bedded down in Auschwitz.
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Three events added impetus to the affairs on the plateau.
First came Operation Anton, the invasion by Axis forces of the Zone Libre. As we have seen, in the south and west of France this had meant takeover by the Wehrmacht; on the eastern Alpine border by General Vercellino’s Italian Fourth Army. The Pusteria Alpine Division detrained in Grenoble in November 1942. The result might have been anticipated: the eruption of a plethora of resistance organisations of various political shades: Combat, Franc-Tireur, Armée secrète, Organisation de résistance de l’armée. Second came the perception that – with victory at El Alamein and the Allied landings in North Africa that had precipitated Operation Anton – the tide of the war was now turning against the Reich. Third, in the New Year of 1943, there came Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO). Set up by the Vichy government on 16 February 1943 to provide workers for German industry, STO entailed dispatching skilled workers to the Reich in exchange for French prisoners of war in Germany. It proved an excellent agent of recruitment for the maquis among those presented with the choice of working for the Nazis or joining the resistance, of turning themselves in or escaping to the mountains. This, it should be said, was no casual choice. As the senior SOE liaison officer Max Salvadori later put it, ‘Guerrilla warfare is even more cruel than conventional war, the chances of surviving slimmer. Whoever joined up as a patriot or partisan signed their own death warrant.’6 In the first few months of 1943, the numbers in the Vercors camps nevertheless doubled or tripled.
The Pusteria Division soon realised that they had a problem on their doorstep. From the maquis established in the Vercors, the Belledonne and the Chartreuse came a steady drip of sabotage and subversion throughout the Dauphiné. Les Allobroges – the ancient term for the Alpine inhabitants of both the Savoie and the Dauphiné – was the resistance news-sheet started in the spring of 1941. Eighteen months later, explosives were being stolen, power lines and transformers being destroyed, and the personal details of prospective STO victims were being seized and burned. Something needed to be done. During winter, with snow on the narrow roads that accessed the plateau, the Vercors was virtually inaccessible, an island more than a plateau. With the spring thaw of 1943 came calling the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo (the Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism or OVRA). Founded in 1927, this was Mussolini’s equivalent of the Gestapo, indeed the organisation that provided a model for Heinrich Himmler’s Secret State Police.
In mid-March 1943 the OVRA seized fourteen of the Montagnards on the Vercors. They talked, one of them induced to do so by being forced to sit on a red-hot frying pan. A second series of raids followed in which the OVRA headed straight for the secret camps. The electricity station warning system worked, and in each case the Italians found the camps deserted. In May, disaster followed. An attempt by the Montagnards to seize a petrol tanker at Pont de Claix, at the bottom of the plateau’s eastern escarpment, was botched. A dozen men were seized, tortured, and talked. In the purge that followed the plateau’s unofficial system of administration collapsed, six tons of explosive were seized, a number of the camps were broken up, and the survivors had to retreat to the most remote parts of the Vercors.7 The Montagnards needed professional help.
This came in the form of Capitaine Alain Le Ray.
Born in 1910 in Paris, Le Ray was an ambitious young officer and an expert skier and mountaineer. Once commissioned, he was attached to the elite Chasseurs Alpins mountain light infantry, headquartered in Grenoble. Captured in northern France in June 1940, he had escaped from his first POW camp and was sent to Colditz. The legendary ‘escape-proof’ castle in Saxony held him for three weeks. Following his flight on 11 April 1941 he became the first Colditz prisoner to make it to freedom, to achieve a ‘home run’. Le Ray’s track record and his familiarity with Grenoble made him a good choice as the first military leader of the Vercors. He was also good-looking, bold and courageous, and he had the impeccable social credentials of being the son-in-law of François Mauriac. He took charge in May 1943, just as the plateau lurched into crisis. In summer 1943, as the maquis emerged once again from their refuges, Le Ray began turning them into a fighting force.
He also did something more. For Operation Montagnards, as it would soon be called, was little less than a secret plan to turn the whole course of the war in Alpine France.
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At the same time, the maquis further north in the Rhône-Alpes were acting under the same stimuli in similar ways.
In the Savoie, the maquis leader was Colonel Jean Vallette d’Osia. Born in 1898, Vallette d’Osia was a professional soldier who had been decorated in the First World War, wounded three times, and ended up graduating from the elite military academy at Saint Cyr. Captured during the Battle of France in 1940, he escaped twice. He then turned to General Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin as the French military leader too late in the day to prevent the Fall of France. Wey
gand persuaded d’Osia to follow the call of de Gaulle and take a hand in the renaissance of the French nation. In August 1940 d’Osia became commanding officer of the 27th Mountain Infantry Battalion in Annecy. This was part of L’armée d’armistice, a force of 100,000 that Vichy retained under the armistice terms. The post was a cover that enabled the Colonel to establish links with the nascent maquis in Savoie.
After Operation Anton in 1942 and the dissolution of L’armée d’armistice that Anton entailed, d’Osia became the formal leader of the resistance in Savoie. A small, fiery man and a fierce disciplinarian, he conceived the idea of creating a secret Alpine army as a response to the occupation of the Zone Libre. This meant not simply assembling the maquis – as had been done in the Vercors – but properly training them in the way that his colleague Alain Le Ray would soon be doing on the Grenoble plateau. For this purpose d’Osia set up an instruction camp on the Col des Saisies, a 5,436-foot pass close to what is now the skiing resort of La Saisies. This dated from March 1943, the very beginnings of STO. It was the germ of a series of training camps in the Savoie and Haute-Savoie where maquis leaders were inculcated into the theory and practice of mountain warfare. To many of the recruits brought up in the highlands of Savoie on the flanks of Mont Blanc, the basics of climbing and skiing were second nature. They were now taught how to deal with glaciers, cut steps in ice slopes, use ice axes and crampons: to become proficient, professional mountaineers. Once again, this maquis was armed and funded by the Allies, both by the SOE and, later, its fresh-faced US equivalent, the OSS – the story of which appears in the next chapter.