Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  Pflaum, though, had been taken aback by the strength of the Vercors’s maquis. He was also dealing with an insurrection led by the maquis, inspired by the SOE, in the neighbouring département of Ain. The General accordingly regrouped in Grenoble to consider his position, and to gather what forces he could: both air and land. Soon, reconnaissance aircraft from the local airbase of Valence-Chabeuil were overflying the Vercors, identifying concentrations of maquis and using any stragglers as machine-gun target practice.

  Over the course of the next four weeks, as the Allies in the north under General Patton pushed slowly towards Cherbourg and Caen through the bocage country, Huet consolidated his defences. He was supported by no fewer than fourteen airdrops from Algiers, and the arrival of a party of French engineers to prepare a landing ground at the resistance HQ in Vassieux. This surely heralded the Allied regular forces, the 4,000 paratroops promised to Chavant. The BBC – alongside the regular bulletins on Normandy – broadcast the electrifying news of the liberation of the Vercors. It was part of a propaganda policy to destabilise the occupying forces throughout France.

  Friday 14 July was Bastille Day. All France was celebrating the storming of the prison-fortress in Paris and the beginnings of the republic. The Vercors was no exception. There was a parade in Vassieux, parties all over the plateau, a gun salute, and – best of all – an airdrop. Seventy-two B-17 bombers from the Eighth Air Force overflew the half-finished airstrip in Vassieux and dropped no fewer than 860 containers of materiel. Only the Reich could rain on this parade and rain it did. No sooner had the roar of the B-17s’ Pratt and Whitneys died away than another sound was heard. It was the Luftwaffe. Focke-Wulfs from Valence-Chabeuil had been alerted to the drop and strafed Vassieux with machine guns and incendiaries, diluting the best efforts of the USAAF. Huet’s forces crept out after nightfall to scavenge what they could of the drop.

  Scarcely had they recovered from Bastille Day when Generalleutnant Pflaum attacked again. Huet’s local intelligence was all too good. On 17 July he heard that German reinforcements were approaching both from Chambéry to the north and Valence to the west. By 19 July, Huet was surrounded by forces supposedly amounting to 10,000 men; some sources say 20,000. By the following day, intelligence suggested that Pflaum had turned the tables on the maquis. From a mountain fortress from which to harass a beleaguered enemy, Huet’s forces had been entrapped. If there were few ways for attackers to get onto the table, so too were there few for the defenders to get off. Pflaum had blocked all the eight main roads with infantry and artillery. On Friday 21 July the Generalleutnant launched the operation to clear the plateau. Where were the 4,000 paratroopers promised to Chavant?

  In the course of that morning, some 400 maquis in Vassieux were clearing the meadows around the village to complete the makeshift airstrip. In the Alpine summer it was slow, heavy, hot work, using sickles and scythes, spades and shovels. Given the events of Bastille Day, a close watch was kept for enemy aircraft. Suddenly a cry of joy went up. There, from the south, surely from Algiers, was a formation of transport aircraft towing perhaps forty gliders. The maquis shaded their eyes against the sun. The promise made to Chavant had been fulfilled! There were whoops and shouts of joy. ‘It’s the Yanks! It’s the Yanks!’ Someone ran to the village to bring the great news to Huet.

  By the time the maquis realised that the insignia on the gliders were the black crosses of the Luftwaffe, not the Stars and Stripes roundel of the USAAF, it was too late. Someone yelled, ‘It’s the Boche!’9 The Luftwaffe airlift group landed two companies of infantry on the ground painstakingly prepared for the Allied forces. In all there were over 500 troops, mixed units including some Russians fighting for the Reich. Soon they linked up with the Gerbirgsjäger mountain infantry units from Grenoble, Chambéry and Valence. The maquis were at bay.

  When the news was brought to Chavant, his companion Father Martin said, ‘He roared with pain. I have never seen him before in an extreme emotional state and it was a terrible sight. He pounded the café table with his fist, swearing he’d been betrayed.’10 A desperate Huet radioed Algiers, ‘We shall not forget the bitterness of having been abandoned alone and without support in time of battle.’11 Chavant, to whom the commitments of regular forces had been explicitly and personally given, was even more vocal: ‘If you do not take immediate action, we shall be at one with the local population in saying that you people in London and Algiers have entirely failed to understand the situation in which we are placed, and we shall consider you to be cowards and criminals. Repeat, cowards and criminals.’

  The appeals were to no avail. The Wehrmacht ran amok through Vassieux and the other communities on the plateau. By 23 July Huet had no choice. He ordered the maquis to disperse in what had become drenching rain.

  Pflaum’s forces treated the inhabitants of the Vercors utterly without compassion, humanity or mercy. They tortured, maimed and killed without discrimination men, women and children, combatants or otherwise. They liquidated a makeshift hospital, killing all the patients and staff. They disembowelled one woman and left her to die with her entrails draped round her neck. Another girl was raped in turn by seventeen soldiers. A doctor held her hand, monitoring her pulse, lest she faint. ‘They were terrible hours during the engagement,’ wrote one German soldier. ‘How savagely we massacred these people. We completely wiped out a hospital full of partisans, with all the doctors and nurses. The wounded were dragged out and killed with machine pistols. It may have been atrocious but these dogs deserve no better.’12 When the 157th Reserve withdrew in the third week of August and the inhabitants of the plateau came out to bury their dead, they found some of the victims castrated, some with breasts sliced off, some with missing tongues, some with eyes gouged out. In all, around 630 maquisards were killed on the plateau and a further 200 from local towns and villages in subsequent Wehrmacht reprisals. German losses were put at 150. Huet and Chavant, both embittered, both survived.

  As to the Allies’ ‘betrayal’, no completely convincing explanation has ever emerged. Some say that Chavant overstated the level of commitment in Algiers; others that the maquis acted prematurely in declaring the republic, egged on by Colonel Descour. Yet others blame the liaison between Vercors and the nascent Special Projects Operations Centre in Algiers; others still ambivalence on the part of de Gaulle towards a republic for which he could take little credit. ‘Were the Vercors’ maquis left to their fate by an inflexible Allied command and did they fail to receive the massive help promised by Gaullist leaders in Algiers? The bulk of evidence suggests that the Vercors was indeed a victim of both Allied and Gaullist decisions not to send last-minute reinforcements despite the most moving telegrams from the beleaguered Resistance fighters.’13

  4

  While the Vercors was burying its dead in August 1944, three hundred miles to the east in the Italian Alps, the partisans were planning whole handfuls of republics. They were envisaged on disturbingly similar lines to those of their counterparts in France in the Glières and Vercors. Perhaps they would fare better. The autumn of 1944 would tell.

  The progress of the resistance in the Italian Alps and Apennines had been entirely unexpected. The British MP Ivor Bulmer-Thomas had told the Commons in autumn 1943 that ‘Italians have not really fought in this war because they were fighting a war which for them was hateful. Give them a good cause and they will show they can fight as well as any other soldier.’14 At the time this remark had been entirely against the grain of opinion. It had turned out to be entirely correct.

  The Alps in northern Italy – as elsewhere in the range – had proved the cradle of resistance because the mountains were a haven in which those with good local knowledge could conceal themselves with ease in makeshift camps. Here they would be difficult to find and, if found, difficult to rout out. The nucleus of the partisan brigades was remnants of the Italian Fourth Army; it had been garrisoned in the Alpes-Maritimes after the Franco-Italian campaign of June 1940, and its men were familiar with Alpine condition
s. Like their counterparts to the east and west in the Alps, the Italians were also inspired by the prospect of creating a new society out of the ruins of a failed political order: most leant to the left, the majority of those communists. They were also given a good deal of help by the Allies. The SOE and OSS were – albeit modest – contributors to the partisans virtually from their beginning; the Allies eventually sent more than 200 missions amounting to around 1,000 men and women to operate behind fascist lines in Italy; in 1944 the SOE delivered 513 tons of weapons to the partisans, OSS a further 290.

  Reaching out from London’s Broadway, MI6 also played its part. Following a string of failures in the early years of the war, the service surprised itself with Major Brian Ashford-Russell. Born in England in 1907, educated in South Africa, a cattle buyer in Argentina then a civil administrator in Peru, he had joined 7 Commando in 1941 and was badly wounded in North Africa. Repatriated as unfit for military service, in 1941 he joined MI6: his future wife Elizabeth Todd worked for Claude Dansey in the service’s secret Broadway offices.

  From the autumn of 1943 Ashford-Russell set up a series of what eventually amounted to twenty networks in northern Italy. They provided critical intelligence on politics, propaganda, economics, military logistics, civilian and military morale, and – above all – the order of battle of German and Italian fascist forces. To Sir Stewart Menzies (‘C’), the service’s Mediterranean section head Captain Cuthbert Bowlby assessed Ashford-Russell’s performance as ‘astounding … As far as I can remember, during my 6 years in your organisation, nothing much has ever been produced from Italy, which makes the results achieved all the more meritorious.’15 The Major did not entirely share the partisans’ scarlet political views. When the author first met Ashford-Russell in 1978, his opening gambit was ‘Don’t you think the Daily Telegraph is getting very left-wing?’

  The upshot of these combined Allied and Italian efforts was foreseen only by Bulmer-Thomas. Not long before his Rome broadcast of 6 June 1944, Field Marshal Alexander could tell The Times that of the twenty-five German divisions in Italy, six were being held down by the partisans. There were three Allied armies fighting in Italy. The US Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army needed no introduction. The partisans, he declared, were the third.

  They now numbered perhaps 100,000, and were on their way to becoming the largest resistance movement in western Europe. All the mountains – partly the Apennines, partly the Alps – in the lozenge formed by Genoa to the Po, to Bologna and down to the German front line, and the mountains south-east of Turin to the sea and south-west and north-west to the French frontier, were in partisan hands.16 As in Yugoslavia, the Germans were largely reduced to holding the main lines of communication and the principal towns. When Rome had fallen on 4 June 1944, Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring’s forces had retreated to defend the Gotenstellung (Gothic Line) in the Apennines just north of Florence. Here and to the north in the Alps his troops had nearly as much trouble with the partisans’ irregular warfare as with the British and US armies. In his memoirs he recorded, ‘It was clear to me by June 1944 that the Partisans might critically affect the retirement of my armies.’

  *

  In the summer of 1944 the partisans were spurred by the Normandy landings in June, Alexander’s Rome proclamation, and the Dragoon landings on the Riviera in August. As Churchill said of the Warsaw Rising that was now erupting further east in Poland, ‘The leaders of the Polish Underground Army [decided] to raise a general insurrection against the Germans, in order to speed the liberation of their country and prevent them fighting a series of bitter defensive actions on Polish territory and particularly in Warsaw itself.’17 He might have added that the rising was also to ensure that the indigenous population rather than the Soviet ‘liberators’ were in charge of the post-war country. Similarly, it was tempting for the Italian partisans to exploit the advantages of the terrain and try to establish mountain republics, both in the Alps that formed the cap to their country and in the Apennines that constituted its backbone. Rather than merely ridding themselves of the Germans, they would be pointing the way to a better post-war, post-Fascist and – for many of them – post-monarchist future. Of the twenty republics, the Ossola valley in the Alps was the keystone.

  Lying to the north of Lake Maggiore, this valley’s capital was Domodossola, a handsome town of some 10,000 at the confluence of the Bogna and Toce rivers. At 620 square miles, Ossola was sizeable, with a total population of around 82,000. It boasted Italy’s only gold mine, quarries for marble and granite, engineering factories, and a hydroelectric station that lit Milan. The valley also carried the main railway line linking Switzerland with Milan through the Simplon tunnel. This gave the valley vital strategic significance as Kesselring sought to contain Alexander’s forces pushing north from Rome; like the Rhône valley, Ossola was a line of retreat for the Wehrmacht, in this case for Kesselring’s forces on the Gothic Line.

  On 6 June 1944 the Alexander proclamation whipped up enthusiasm among the Ossola partisans for insurrection. The eruption of the republic would send just the right signal of defiance to Mussolini in Salò, to Badoglio’s replacement Ivanoe Bonomi and the monarchists in Rome, and to the Allies in Washington and London. It did, though, need practical support in the form of arms, men and money from the SOE and OSS, from Allen Dulles and John McCaffery.

  5

  Writing after the event, Dulles and McCaffery seem to have been ambivalent about the operation. The idea was contrary to the general Allied policy of pursuing military rather than quasi-political objectives; it would be costly of lives and materiel; it would certainly provoke a response from the occupying Fascists. There was also the example of Glières from the spring and – ringing in everyone’s ears – of the Vercors. Still, by August 1944 the partisans had considerable forces in the Ossola valley and in any case did not – as such – take orders from the Allies. McCaffery reported to his SOE superiors that the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (CLNAI) had been ‘bitten by the bug’ of the scheme and – supposedly reluctantly – he agreed with Dulles to provide the help of the SOE and OSS. At the time of the rising, at least McCaffery seems to have been rather more enthusiastic. Briefing Lieutenant George Patterson, a Canadian officer attached to SOE, McCaffery commented, ‘It may all come to nothing I grant you, but there is a chance it could spread … if North Italy were to rise in rebellion it would cut the German Army’s lines of supply and almost certainly force them into surrender … That’s why we have to do all we can to help them.’18

  At first all went well. A coalition of partisan forces of various political shades was put together, albeit one lacking a unified command. Initial partisan strikes on 23 August 1944 succeeded, and a week later the valleys north of Domodossola up towards the Swiss border lay in partisan hands. When partisan forces reportedly numbering 3,000 surrounded the railway town, the 500-strong Fascist garrison ran up the white flag to negotiate an armistice. On 9 September the Fascists withdrew to the south, deprived of their heavy weapons but complete with their lives and – unlike the maquis of the Vercors – their genitals. On 10 September 1944 the republic of Ossola was proclaimed and the celebrations got under way. The town centre was thronged with the sort of jostling, boisterous crowd that Italy does so well. A manifesto was read out in the Piazza Repubblica proclaiming the Free Republic of Domodossola; a constitution was drafted, printed on posters and daubed over town and country; a special train arrived from Berne bearing a figurehead president: Professor Ettore Tibaldi. Soon, a provisional government was appointed and quartered in Domodossola town hall; diplomatic recognition by the Swiss followed. Community leaders sympathetic to the Fascists were removed from their posts and an open society was encouraged by the publication of free news-sheets. Trade unions – banned by Mussolini – were encouraged to re-establish themselves. The schools reopened with new textbooks that honoured faiths other than Fascism. By mid-September a regular train service was running through the Simplon to Switzerland.


  Yet autumn comes early in the Alps. There were 85,000 mouths to feed and the industrial Ossola valley was not a subsistence community. Supported by the Swiss and Italian Red Cross, Dulles and McCaffery brought in food from Switzerland through the Simplon; their efforts were nullified by the Wehrmacht strangling supplies coming from the south. Bread ran out and the people were reduced to living on chestnuts and milk. On 28 September 1944 a Swiss political leader visited the republic and told a Swiss newspaper, ‘The food situation is tragic … there is no winter clothing … there’s nothing … children are starving.’19 Dissent spread. The discovery of an arms dump led to a stand-off between the communist Garibaldi brigades and those partisans of more moderate persuasion. On 10 October 1944, a month after the declaration of the republic, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Avanti under the leadership of SS-Brigadeführer Willy Tensfeld. His forces supposedly comprised 20,000 well-armed men, supported by artillery. The fragmented forces of the several partisan brigades organised themselves as best they could. Blocks of granite from the quarries were used to obstruct roads, crops cut down to create open fields of fire, barbed wire spread.

  On 14 October 1944, Domodossola once again fell. Two days later the partisans elsewhere in the valley were scattering in the face of Tensfeld’s SS. The fairy tale was at an end, just as it had been in Vercors.

  Here in the Italian Alps, though, there was a line of escape. Three special trains were chartered to take the republicans north through the Simplon to safety in Switzerland. About 2,000 partisans escaped and around 35,000 civilians – perhaps half of the permanent population. With some justice, the refugees feared reprisals. Earlier in the month in Marzabotto in the Apennines outside Bologna, 800 civilians who supported the partisans had been murdered by the Waffen-SS: the worst massacre in western Europe in the whole war. By 26 October 1944 the mayfly republic of Ossola was back in the hands of the Fascists. It had survived for thirty-five days.