Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  As part of the horse-trading at Tehran, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had agreed that Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia should be supported with supplies and equipment to the greatest possible extent. At the beginning of December 1943, British support was also withdrawn from Mihailović. At much the same time the Wehrmacht opened the sixth anti-partisan offensive. Operation Kugelblitz was a drive by the V SS Mountain Corps to destroy partisan units in eastern Bosnia. Most of Tito’s forces slipped through the closing SS ring, but at the price of some 9,000 casualties. Hard on its heels came Operation Schneesturm: two drives from Bosnia, one towards Italy and the other to the Adriatic coast. When the operation was called off in late December 1943 the partisans had lost another 2,000 men, but had still survived as a fighting force.

  These events seemed to justify the wisdom of the British decision and the accuracy of Maclean’s observations. Mihailović – and with him the young King Peter and the monarchy in Yugoslavia – would soon be consigned to the tides of history.

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  It was in the light of these lessons – both political and military – from Yugoslavia that Churchill chaired the London meeting on 27 January 1944.

  The agenda was D-Day. When the Anglo-American forces landed in France, Churchill believed they would need all the help they could get. That month the PM had noted, ‘It is to my mind very unwise to make plans on the basis of Hitler being defeated in 1944. The possibility of his gaining a victory in France cannot be excluded. The hazards of battle are very great. The reserves of the enemy are capable of being thrown from point to point with great facility.’12 Plans for the Second Front called for two amphibious operations, Churchill explained to the meeting. The principal thrust was to be on France’s Channel coast, the secondary on the Mediterranean coast in Provence. What help could the French resistance provide to support these operations?

  *

  From the fragmentary and largely spontaneous movement that had begun in 1941, the resistance in France had coalesced by 1943 into a body unified by the persuasive powers of General de Gaulle and the legendary resistance leader Jean Moulin. A senior civil servant, the forty-four-year-old Moulin had met de Gaulle in London in September 1941. The General had briefed him to fuse the various French resistance groups into what became the Conseil National de la Résistance (National Council of Resistance or CNR). Moulin succeeded. His arrest in Lyons in June 1943 and subsequent murder by the Gestapo monster Klaus Barbie was a major setback for the stripling CNR. Yet seven months later, by January 1944, the French resistance could smell victory. The advance of the Red Army on a 4,000-mile front, the steady progress of Eisenhower’s forces in Italy, and the presumption that a great Allied army would soon return to the western shores of the Continent all whetted the appetite of those who had hitherto held back. Recruits flocked to the colours at every turn. Nowhere was this more so than to the east of the Rhône in the French Alps: in Savoie, Dauphiné and the Alpes-Maritimes.

  It was here that in June 1940 the French Armée des Alpes, fighting on the border with Italy, had put to shame its peers caving in to Hitler’s blitzkrieg further north; it was here, too, that the terrain played into the hands of the rural resistance or maquis. From Annecy, twenty-five miles south of the western tip of Lake Geneva, in a line south via the hornets’ nests of Chambéry, Grenoble and Barcelonnette to Nice, the resistance sprang up. Supplied from the Alpine towns and cities, the maquis secreted themselves in mountain redoubts. Their numbers had been swelled by the onset of Service du Travail Obligatoire in February 1943, and by the increasing levels of support in terms of both money and materiel from the SOE in Baker Street and – in 1943 – Allen Dulles’s OSS. Despite the vicious attempts by the Italian OVRA – and subsequently its French and German equivalents – to smoke out the maquis, under leaders like Capitaine Alain Le Ray and Colonel Jean Vallette d’Osia, the work of subversion and sabotage mushroomed. The blowing of a bridge or railway junction, harassing troop movements, even simply cutting telephone lines were now beginning to pay dividends. Following massive demonstrations on 11 November 1943 – Armistice Day – on 13 November the maquis in the Dauphinois capital of Grenoble blew up the Polygon arsenal. The reprisal killing by the Seventh Army of eleven resistance members was called the city’s Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Now Grenoble was celebrated by de Gaulle and his Free French Forces as the ‘capital of the maquis’. There was a similarly inspiring demonstration in Oyonnax in the Haut-Jura. Here, the maquis took possession of the town and paraded to the war memorial, laying a wreath of the cross of Lorraine, and singing the ‘Marseillaise’.

  The effect of all this activity was cumulative. In his memoirs, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, then in charge of the Wehrmacht’s defence of the west, recorded that ‘From January 1944 the state of affairs in southern France became so dangerous that all commanders reported a general revolt … Cases became numerous where whole formations of troops … were surrounded by bands for many days and, in isolated locations, simply killed off.’13

  *

  Obviously there was little scope for such maquis forces to support the D-Day Channel landings hundreds of miles north-west in the Pas-de-Calais or Normandy. The proposed landings in the south of France, where the Alpes-Maritimes ran right down to the Mediterranean at Nice, were quite another question. Here the strategic goal was of course not the coast itself, pleasant though it is to linger in Villefranche, Cannes, Antibes, St Raphael and St Tropez. The prize was the road north along the Rhône valley to the western marches of the Reich. Here the maquis really could help: or so claimed one of the participants at Churchill’s January meeting, the splendidly named Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie.

  D’Astier was a dashing forty-three-year-old with a background in the French navy, in journalism, as a poet, as an opium-eater, and as the leader of the French resistance group Libération. A handsome, hawk-nosed charmer with a long face and a penchant for bow ties, in 1943 de Gaulle had made him Commissioner to the Interior of the Free French government in exile. This figure of fantasy reassured Churchill that properly arming the resistance would not exacerbate political rivalries – as it had done so unfortunately in Yugoslavia.14

  For Churchill, this was the critical question. For surely to support the resistance was to point to de Gaulle as future leader of France, much as supporting the partisans meant endorsing Tito. Was this desirable?

  To support the existing government, the Pétainists, was of course unthinkable, at least for Churchill. The Allies’ intention, once France was rid of the Nazis, was to impose the formula of Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT). Mooted in Tehran, this would have to be discussed with de Gaulle in his capacity as leader of the Free French. The General had been a notable absentee from the top table at the conference. Although he now had a force of around 400,000 Free French servicemen at his disposal, he had no democratic mandate, he was notoriously intransigent, and he had made himself politically and personally unpopular with both Roosevelt and Churchill. ‘He had to be rude to the British’, Churchill later reflected, ‘to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet. He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance.’15 The Americans had had too many dealings with generals in politics in Latin America to find de Gaulle particularly palatable. Roosevelt himself preferred to deal with Pétain’s Vichy administration: he supposed for some time that the Pétainists might be detached from the Reich.

  After his illness in Carthage, Churchill had made his way to Marrakesh in Morocco. Here, on 31 December 1943, he had met Eisenhower and Rommel’s nemesis, General Bernard Montgomery, to develop the plans for the French landings. On 12 January 1944 the Prime Minister entertained de Gaulle to a picnic lunch to discuss both these and post-war France. The General proved bitterly opposed to AMGOT and – as far as Churchill was concerned – recklessly divisive. The Prime Minister urged the General to avoid actions against former Vichy supporters that would see ‘so wide a schism in France that the resultant friction in an
y territory that might be liberated would hamper our military options and therefore be a matter of concern to us’. Accommodation and at least a degree of conciliation were required. ‘Look here,’ Churchill declared over the couscous. ‘I am the leader of a strong, unbeaten nation. Yet every morning when I wake my first thought is how I can please President Roosevelt, and my second is how I can conciliate Marshal Stalin. Your situation is very different. Why then should your first waking thought be how you can snap your fingers at the British and Americans?’16 Yet as with Tito, it was perhaps in supporting de Gaulle and the maquis that lay the best chance of supporting the Riviera landings and freeing France. It was a conundrum.

  *

  At the 27 January meeting Churchill was certainly mindful of these considerations and so too was he mindful of Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie. What was he to do?

  Ever the Francophile, ever the romantic and ever struck by personalities as much as arguments, the conclusion of the conference was that Churchill would laud d’Astier and double the supplies of materiel to the maquis in the south-east of France, the area proximate to the site of the planned landings on the French Riviera. As to d’Astier himself, Churchill enthused to Roosevelt:

  This is a remarkable man of the Scarlet Pimpernel type … He has made very strong appeals to me to drop more arms by air for their resistance movements. I hope to be able to do more in February. He says that in Haute Savoie, south of Geneva between Grenoble and the Italian frontier, he has over 20,000 men all desperate, but only one in five has any weapon. If more weapons were available, very large numbers would take to the mountains. As you know, I am most anxious to see a guerrilla à la Tito started up in the Savoie and in the Alpes Maritimes.

  In this way the die was cast – and was immediately to be tested.

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  For in the meantime, von Rundstedt and his colleagues in OKW had also been contemplating the impact of the maquis in the French Alps, the ‘general revolt’ as the Generalfeldmarschall called it. They decided that something concerted should be done. News of this leaked and on 2 February 1944 the BBC broadcast a warning:

  Attention the maquis! Attention the Haute-Savoie! Calling the Haute-Savoie maquis, SOS, SOS. The Oberführer Joseph Darnand has decided to launch a massive attack tomorrow, 3 February, against the patriots hiding out in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie. There is not a minute to spare – you must take up your defensive positions.17

  The forty-seven-year-old Darnand was a right-wing Frenchman with a taste for irregular warfare. A decorated veteran of the First World War, in 1941 he had set up a collaborationist militia, the Service d’ordre légionnaire, to do Vichy’s dirty work. In January 1943 this evolved into the Milice. This was a vicious paramilitary force devoted to fighting the maquis. It worked under the formal leadership of the Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval, to whom Darnand was ‘a fine soldier with about as much political intelligence as a kerbstone’.18 In August 1943, Darnand joined the SS and was given the rank of Sturmbannführer (equivalent to major). By the French maquis, his men now became even more feared than the Gestapo: the Milice recruited the maquis’ own compatriots who were fluent in the French language, and who also possessed the local knowledge that usually kept the maquis one step ahead of the Germans. In his new role Darnand threatened that the maquis themselves or anyone helping them would be court-martialled and executed; and he now believed that the maquis were a soft target because they were poorly supplied with arms, ammunition and the wherewithal of survival in the mountains and sabotage in the valleys. Hence the idea of a ‘massive attack’.

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  By the time of Churchill’s meeting with d’Astier in January 1944, plans were in fact already in hand to arm the Haute-Savoie maquisards. An SOE mission from London comprising Lieutenant Colonel Richard Heslop of the SOE itself and Captain Jean Rosenthal of the Free French Forces had been sent out to the Savoie in September 1943. They were given a good sense of progress in the département by Colonel d’Osia’s maquis colleagues, the Colonel himself having just been seized by the Gestapo. On their return to London on 16 October, Heslop and Rosenthal reported very favourably on the possibilities of the Savoie: more than two thousand men were ready to fight. Of course they needed arms. The two of them had accordingly inspected half a dozen possible dropping zones, and selected the plateau of Glières, close to Annecy, as the most suitable. Returning on 18 October to the Alps, the pair got in touch with the head of the maquis in the département neighbouring the Haute-Savoie: Ain. This was Colonel Henri Romans-Petit, the forty-seven-year-old French army officer who had led the Armistice Day demonstration in Oyonnax in November 1943. He in turn appointed Lieutenant Théodose (‘Tom’) Morel to collect the parachute drops that would be made by the RAF on the Glières plateau in the New Year of 1944 – duly urged on Churchill.

  Morel was a twenty-nine-year-old officer of the mountain light infantry. He had distinguished himself in the Alpine Franco-Italian campaign of June 1940, leading two operations around the tiny skiing resort of Val d’Isère and the nearby Little St Bernard Pass, winning decorations for both: the Croix de Guerre and Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. He was a fine leader who established his authority with ease amongst those from the very varied social and political backgrounds that characterised the maquis. His motto was uncompromising: ‘Vivre libre ou mourir’ – ‘Live in freedom or die.’

  A man of his word, he led his men up to the Glières on the last day of the month, 31 January 1944. It was just four days after Churchill’s meeting.

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  The Glières was a limestone plateau high above the Haute-Savoie capital of Annecy, much the size of the Isle of Wight. It was chosen for the airdrop because the lake at the head of which Annecy stood was a clear landmark for the RAF, and the ample size of the plateau meant it was easy to ensure the arms fell into the right hands: parachute drops are not very accurate.

  Now it was also in the nature of these drops that they ran without the precision timing of the Great Western Railway. Wind, weather, low cloud, the waxing and the waning of the moon might all affect the ability of the RAF to make the drop. Morel and a number of maquisards – according to the differing accounts anything from 100 to 250 – were accordingly obliged to set up camp on the plateau in the first days of February and await events. This was easier said than done. With a mean altitude of around 4,000 feet, it was described by one of the maquis with some accuracy as an icy desert. It was a difficult place to survive, particularly in winter: all food consumed there had to be brought up from the valley or supplied by air. There was also very little shelter: a few mountain chalets fit for occupation only in the summer, and an old sawmill.

  The very day of the maquis’ arrival on the plateau – 31 January – Darnand declared a state of siege on the maquis in the Haute-Savoie. This made the refuge – of a sort – represented by the Glières the more attractive, and over the next few days Morel’s forces were gradually supplemented by other maquis. They included eighty French communists and around sixty Spanish lumberjacks, a number of whom had seen action in the Spanish Civil War.

  At the same time the Free French staff in Ain, possibly on the advice of Captain Rosenthal, came up with the idea that rather than simply collecting the arms dropped by the RAF, Morel’s group should base itself on the plateau for a longer period and use it as a camp from which to sally forth on missions of subversion and sabotage. The argument was that as there were – clearly and justifiably – doubts in the Allied political and military high command about the value of the French resistance, the Glières group could be used for a strategic purpose: to demonstrate that the maquis could significantly disrupt the German military machine. This idea ran contrary to received resistance wisdom for its formations to stay in one place. Experience had proved it was wiser to give battle where the opportunity arose and then disperse: melt away into hills and valleys – much as Tito and the Yugoslav partisans had always done.

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  Ten days into his mission, the
numbers of Morel’s maquis had swelled to around 400, a motley force that needed food, arms and training. By this time the RAF had succeeded in finding a window in the weather that allowed its transports to drop some 220 containers of arms onto the plateau; on the other hand, the maquis were also coming under pressure from Darnand’s Milice, supposedly numbering two thousand. The original idea was that the maquis should now withdraw to the valley with their arms. Instead they would have to give battle.

  Honours at first were even. There were dozens of skirmishes around the plateau in which neither Darnand’s Milice nor the maquis gained an upper hand. On 2 March 1944, Morel decided to take the battle to the enemy by raiding a Milice base at the Beau Séjour Hotel at Saint-Jean-de-Sixt, to the south of the plateau. This was a success, and spurred a more a more ambitious raid on the Hôtel de France at Entremont, four miles north of Saint-Jean. The hotel was successfully seized by Morel’s maquisards, and the Milice apparently disarmed. Their commander had in fact concealed a gun. He shot Morel dead and was at once shot dead himself by the maquis. Morel’s body was brought back up to the plateau. In the presence of his parents, he was buried at the foot of a flagstaff from which streamed the defiant tricolour. ‘Vivre libre ou mourir!’

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  Inexperienced and largely untrained, the maquis were ill-equipped to cope with his loss. Morel’s replacement, the forty-three-year-old Capitaine Maurice Anjot, declared, ‘On our side we will do our duty, but we must have help.’19 Anjot, of the 27th Battalion Chasseurs Alpins, knew that his ill-fed and demoralised forces could not engage professional soldiers; he also knew that the evacuation of the plateau would be bad for the morale of the maquis locally and nationally, send the wrong signal to the Allied high command, and allow such weapons as had been dropped to fall into the hands of the Milice. From London, he heard the BBC proclaiming: ‘Trois pays résistent en Europe: la Grèce, la Yugoslavie, la Haute-Savoie.’20 The political stakes were high, and for the present Anjot felt he must remain rather than withdraw from the plateau. On 12 March the RAF dropped more supplies, and the maquisards beat off a series of Milice attacks.