Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  By this time the two main tunnels were complete. However, rather than work starting on A-4 sub-assemblies, the camp was reportedly redesignated by Hitler himself to produce tank gears. A more intriguing alternative account is that von Braun had never intended Ebensee for A-4 production. It was destined for the A-9/A-10. This was a manned intercontinental rocket developed from the A-4, which would have sufficient range to hit New York. Conceived in 1940, work on the manned two-stage rocket was prohibited in 1943 so that von Braun would concentrate his energies on the production model A-4. In practice, he managed to continue his labours in secret on his most ambitious brainchild. So he developed the thinking that would ultimately put the intended victims of the rocket – the hated Americans – on the Moon.

  Still, Ebensee was – and is – a beautiful place. Moshe Ha-Elion remembered his arrival at the camp from Mauthausen, the last part of the journey on foot.

  We walked over the next three days: Wels-Lambach, Lambach-Gmunden, Gmunden-Ebensee … on the last day of the march, far in front of us one could see the snow-capped peaks of the Austrian Alps. Nearer up, mountain ridges sloped towards a long narrow lake, the Traunsee, at the side of which we walked for some distance … in spite of my poor condition I couldn’t avoid paying attention to and being impressed by the beautiful scenery.14

  5

  In the weeks after Speer’s crisis meeting at the Berghof, these long-standing endeavours in the Reich’s Alps bore fruit. On 26 July 1944, Leutnant Alfred Schreiber of the new Me 262 squadron at Lechfeld just south of Augsburg went into action. He damaged an RAF Mosquito reconnaissance aircraft of No. 540 Squadron. It was the first victory for a turbojet fighter in aviation history. Five weeks later on 29 August 1944, the stockpile of completed V-2s was such that Hitler would order their operational deployment. At 6.43 p.m. on 8 September 1944, the first V-2 hit Chiswick in west London. It killed sixty-three-year-old Mrs Ada Harrison, three-year-old Rosemary Clarke, and Frank Browning of the Royal Engineers. The age of the ballistic missile, the weapon that defined the Cold War, had begun.

  Yet by this time, these efforts smelled of too little, too late. Early on the morning of 6 June 1944, the leaders of the German Seventh Army on the Normandy coast had realised that two American and one British airborne division were in their midst. Word was passed at once to the Berghof, where Hitler was fast asleep. Speer was in the chalet about ten o’clock that morning: ‘one of Hitler’s military adjutants told me that the invasion had begun early that morning. “Has the Fuehrer been awakened?” I asked. He shook his head. “No, he receives the news after he has eaten breakfast.”’15

  Hitler’s hunch had once been that the landings would indeed take place on the Normandy beaches. Now he had changed his mind. When the daily conference was finally convened that afternoon, the Führer maintained that the landings on the beaches designated by General Eisenhower – now Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force – Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword were merely a feint intended to divert attention from the main thrust across the Dover Strait. By the time this trail had proved false, it was too late. The D-Day bridgehead had been established, and Allied armies were back in western Europe for the first time since Dunkirk.

  Eleven weeks later on 15 August 1944 came Operation Dragoon. This was the Allied invasion of the French Riviera coast to the immediate west of the Alpes-Maritimes at Nice. Here, General Alexander Patch commanding the US Seventh Army and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny commanding the French First Army confronted Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz’s Heeresgruppe G (Army Group G). This provided little opposition to the débarquement. Churchill was observing the landings from the British destroyer HMS Kimberley. In the early afternoon, he wrote to his wife, ‘we found ourselves in an immense concourse of ships all sprawled along 20 miles of coast with poor St Tropez in the centre. It had been expected that the bombardment would continue all day, but the air and the ships had practically silenced the enemy guns by 8 o’clock. This rendered the proceedings rather dull.’16

  Soon after, the way north – the Route Napoléon, taken by the Emperor in 1815 on his escape from Elba – was open. This was the route that led from the Riviera to Grenoble, and from Grenoble to the high Alps. On 30 August 1944, US paratroopers liberated Nice, capital of the Alpes-Maritimes.

  Twenty-one months earlier on 10 November 1942, Churchill had said of the Allied landings in North Africa and Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein, ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ For the Alps, Operation Dragoon really was the beginning of the end.

  Notes

  1. Speer.

  2. Speer.

  3. Speer.

  4. Daniel Uziel, Arming the Luftwaffe: The German Aviation Industry in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).

  5. Frank Vann, Willy Messerschmitt (Yeovil: Patrick Stephens, 1993).

  6. Yechezkel Harfenes, Slingshot of Hell (Spring Valley, NY: Feldheim, 1989).

  7. Helena Waddy, Oberammergau in the Nazi Era: The Fate of a Catholic Village in Hitler’s Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  8. Waddy.

  9. Wayne Biddle, Dark Side of the Moon: Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich, and the Space Race (New York and London: Norton, 2009).

  10. Speer.

  11. Speer.

  12. Speer.

  13. Moshe Ha-Elion, The Straits of Hell: The Chronicle of a Salonikan Jew in the Nazi Extermination Camps, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk, Ebensee (Mannheim: Bibliopolis; Cincinnati, OH: Bowman & Cody, 2005).

  14. Ha-Elion.

  15. Speer.

  16. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life.

  TWELVE

  The Mayfly Republics

  The news is increasingly wonderful; and it is important now not to be killed during the next few weeks. There is still fighting in Paris, but everywhere in France our troops are making sensational advances. Rumania is on our side, Bulgaria is asking for peace, Russia marches on … The Marne, Chateau Thierry, the Allied Victories. It is so like 1918, the same names and places and forward triumphant march towards victory.

  HENRY ‘CHIPS’ CHANNON

  1

  This was the diarist and parliamentarian ‘Chips’ Channon, ten days after the Allied landings in the south of France. The note of euphoria in the wake of the initial success of Overlord in Normandy, then Dragoon on the French Riviera was infectious. There were many who thought the end of the summer of 1944 would bring the end of the war. The 20 July bomb plot to assassinate Hitler, the Russian offensive that had brought the Soviets to the steel doors of his Rastenburg HQ, General George Patton’s drive towards Paris, the pace of General Alexander Patch’s forces thrusting up from the Riviera – all had given credence to the idea. Germany would collapse abruptly, just as she had done in the autumn of 1918. It was a tempting notion, and there were all too many who gave in to temptation. Some of the Allied leaders themselves were no exception.

  As a matter of long-agreed policy, in the first days of June they had given a call to action to the Resistance throughout France to support the imminent D-Day landings: to disrupt the Wehrmacht’s lines of communication, to derail reinforcements, to bomb, to sabotage, to do everything to support the Allied débarquements. The resistance was supported by SOE and OSS teams dropped in France for this purpose. Then, within twenty-four hours of the Normandy landings, there came more specific, targeted calls. These were from the Free French leader General de Gaulle, and from the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Italy, Field Marshal Harold Alexander. The pair broadcast separate calls to the maquis and the partisans, respectively in the French and the Italian Alps. On 5 June 1944, de Gaulle declared enigmatically from London on the BBC, ‘Le chamois des Alpes bondit’.1 This was the signal for the insurrection in the Vercors outside Grenoble, the ‘capital of the maquis’. On 6 June itself, as the British, Canadian and American landing craft surged towards the Normandy beaches, Alexander broadcast from the radi
o station in newly liberated Rome: ‘To those who have arms, use them … to workers and clerks, leave your work … to peasants … do all you can to help the patriots. The Allies are supplying patriot groups with thousands of automatic weapons. Find out whether there is one for you.’2

  The results were momentous. They were also by no means what these two warlords had anticipated. The twenty Italian partisan republics declared during the ‘partisan summer’ – the largest Ossola – were an astonishing act of military and political courage from a people largely written off by the English-speaking Allies as cowards. Of the Vercors, de Gaulle’s biographer Robert Aron wrote, ‘Of all the episodes of liberation, none is more shocking, none more mysterious.’3

  2

  In early June 1944, the thirty-nine-year-old François Huet found himself the newly appointed military head of the Vercors, the great limestone table and natural fortress that lay immediately south-west of Grenoble in the Dauphiné. The plateau dominated the lines of communication, overseeing the routes through which an Allied force from the south of France from the long-heralded landings might drive up towards the Reich; likewise the lifeline along which the Wehrmacht would retreat. It was for this reason that Capitaine Alain Le Ray’s original plans for Operation Montagnards proposed supplementing the maquis established on the plateau since early 1941 with a force of regular infantry and artillery. The Vercors might then play a strategic role in the defeat of the occupying forces in south-eastern France by sallying forth to attack its lines of communication. A rising might also provide a beacon for the country as a whole. In May, Colonel Marcel Descour had told Huet, ‘The Vercors is the only maquis, in the whole of France, which has been given the mission to set up its own free territory. It will receive the arms, ammunition, and troops which will allow it to be the advance guard of a landing in Provence.’4 Under General Marie-Pierre Koenig, Descour was Chief of Staff of the newly formed Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). Created at de Gaulle’s instigation, the French Forces of the Interior were an amalgamation of the resistance into properly organised light infantry units. It was a formulation that symbolised the changing status of France from an occupied country to a resurgent nation on the cusp of liberation, of which the Vercors would be an emblem. Descour’s order meant something. The Vercors would not wait passively to be liberated. It would liberate itself. Vive la France!

  Huet’s orders were clear and the broadcast from de Gaulle himself was clarion. The commandant mobilised the Vercors on 9 June 1944, three days after the D-Day landings and just as the bridgeheads on Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah were being established more than 500 miles north in Normandy. Huet called not only those on the plateau, but all in the immediate area. Wrote the eyewitness Roland Bechmann-Lescot: ‘From all directions, from Grenoble, Romans and Die, from every district and by every means of locomotion, on foot, by car, by the busload … the volunteers, on being summoned by the leaders of the Vercors, assembled, under the very noses of the Germans.’5 To the 500 or so maquis on the plateau would soon be added twice that number; according to some sources many more. Setting up his headquarters in Vassieux-en-Vercors, Huet duly divided his forces into five companies. He needed to train, arm and suitably dispose his maquis.

  The village of St-Nizier-du-Moucherotte lay almost at the north-eastern tip of the plateau, immediately overlooking the Grenoble basin. St-Nizier was the terminus of a narrow-gauge tramline that ran the fifteen miles up from the city. The ascent here was moderately steep but of a gradient manageable by the tram: it was the one flank of the Vercors on which it was vulnerable. From here the city below could be seen: the Bastille fortifications, the square tower of the cathedral, the silvery confluence of the tumbling Drac and Isère rivers. From the city – almost from the barracks of the Wehrmacht’s 157th Reserve Division – the village could also be observed.

  There, on the afternoon of 10 June 1944, the maquis under Huet’s orders closed the tramline and raised a giant tricolour. The Vercors was declaring its freedom from the occupying forces. ‘The weather’, wrote Huet’s Chief of Staff Pierre Tanant, ‘was magnificent in this month of June. The sky was a resplendent blue. It felt deliciously good at 1,000 metres in altitude. And above all on those verdant hills one felt free.’6 When the Grenoblois spotted the tricolour billowing lazily in the Provençal breeze, they might have been excused for thinking that the hour of liberation was itself at hand. It was intoxicating. Huet himself declared to the maquis under his command, ‘The eyes of the whole country are fixed on us … We have faith in each other. We have right on our side.’ For those who had lived through the bitter days of the Fall of France in June 1940 and endured the privation, repression, deportations and terror first of Vichy, then of the Italian Fourth Army, now of Generalleutnant Karl Pflaum’s 157th Reserve, it was a day of unparalleled joy. It was a jour de fête that evoked the folk memories of the Revolution of 1789.

  Commandant Huet was human: he shared the euphoria. Yet as a professional soldier he was aware how precarious was the plateau’s position. The terrain certainly lent itself to defence. There were just eight roads up to the Vercors. Two of these rose up to passes more than 3,000 feet high. Here a child could turn back an army. The remainder were easily blocked. There were around twenty mountain tracks that scrambled up its flanks, but these too were simply defended. Only St-Nizier itself was problematic. The difficulty lay more with the resources of defence. ‘What is an army without artillery, tanks and air force?’7 Stalin would ask this of the insurgency that would erupt on 1 August 1944 more than 1,000 miles north-east of Grenoble: the Warsaw Rising. Moreover, despite the efforts of Huet’s predecessors as military commanders of the Vercors going back to Le Ray, many of the Vercors maquis were not even trained in handling light arms. They were civilians with guns. As to the weapons themselves, as the numbers of maquisards responding to Huet’s call grew, as the news from the bridgeheads in Normandy reached happy ears, these too were in short supply.

  The patron of the Vercors was its civilian leader, the fifty-year-old Eugène Chavant. Founder of the resistance group France Combat, he had been taken by the Free French submarine Casabianca to Allied headquarters in Algiers in late May 1944 to discuss the Montagnards plan. The French colony hosted the combined Allied guerrilla operations team, the Special Projects Operations Centre. This was a newly – and not very thoroughly – merged team uniting elements of SOE, OSS and their French equivalent, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA). Chavant, son of a cobbler, was supposedly ill at ease amongst the international military top brass. He was nevertheless promised not only materiel in the form of arms and ammunition, but 4,000 paratroopers. As Le Ray had known, the maquis might be expected to hold the plateau and had a good record of conducting skirmishes and running sabotage operations. It could hardly take on a professional army, especially one as professional as the Wehrmacht. Finally, as the Alpinist Pierre Dalloz, one of the civilian architects of the original Montagnards scheme, had pointed out, the combined regular and irregular forces needed to be facing an army on the edge of defeat: preferably an army that was retreating headlong up the Rhône with the Allies snapping at its heels. In 1942 he had written, ‘If the Vercors plan can be put into effect, it must be done by surprise and against a distressed and disorganized enemy … It will not be a matter of attacking an enemy in full possession of his resources’.8

  Huet understood all these points. Chavant, though he had served in the 20th Battalion of Chasseurs in the First World War and was twice decorated, perhaps understood them less well. It was Chavant, though, who had been to Algiers. He assumed that Algiers and London grasped the operation and were committed to it, though at the time they had quite a lot on their hands: Operation Dragoon, the preparations for Operation Market Garden on the Rhine, and – soon – the Warsaw Rising. Certainly the operation had been endorsed formally by de Gaulle himself, the operational head of the SOE, Brigadier Colin Gubbins, and by David Bruce of the OSS in London. These were, Chavant felt, reas
suring commitments.

  3

  The tricolour raised on the flagstaff at St-Nizier on 10 June 1944 was certainly provocative. Generalleutnant Pflaum’s 157th Reserve Division was mountain light infantry, a Gebirgsjäger formation familiar with mountain warfare. Pflaum himself was a fifty-four-year-old born and brought up in Bavaria. He was a veteran of service in mountain regiments and had an excellent understanding of mountain engagements. He appreciated the strategic threat posed by the Vercors to his lines of communication, signalled by the French flag. On 13 June his forces attacked St-Nizier. Huet had done his work well, and a relatively small force of Germans was repelled by a force of 250 maquisards. The turning point of the engagement was the arrival of maquis reinforcements singing the ‘Marseillaise’. The following day Pflaum returned with a larger force, this time to succeed. On 15 June Huet was forced to withdraw the maquisards towards the interior of the plateau. The Germans took fire-and-brimstone revenge on the village.