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by Jackson, Julian

  The Communists never missed an opportunity to remind people that de Gaulle himself had declared in a speech on 18 April 1942: ‘Liberation is inseparable from national insurrection.’ At that time, de Gaulle was in his most radical phase, and although he used the term insurrection on other occasions,56 he was never again so unequivocal. In a document produced on 16 May 1944, specifying the military role of the Resistance during liberation, de Gaulle personally changed the words ‘generalized insurrection’ to ‘generalized actions of force’.57 Exactly what de Gaulle wanted is not certain, but his sense of the political dimension of the Resistance, and the profit he could draw from it, suggests that he was not averse to the idea of a short-lived insurrection—in a speech on 25 July 1944 he preferred the term ‘national uprising [soulèvement]’—providing the moment was right, and order was quickly restored.

  How quickly order was restored would depend on the effectiveness of the administrative structures prepared by the CFLN. But it was unclear how much influence the Allies were prepared to allow the CFLN in the liberated areas. In September 1943, the CFLN submitted a draft memorandum to the Allies distinguishing between a combat zone, where the military would have full control, and an interior zone, where the ‘competent French authority’ would be in charge. This document received no acknowledgement because the British and Americans had different views. Roosevelt was unrelenting in his hostility to de Gaulle. In fact, even many Americans were starting to find Roosevelt’s attitude increasingly unsustainable, among them Eisenhower, who arrived in London, in January 1944, to take up his post as Supreme Allied Commander. Taking matters into his own hands, Eisenhower authorized discussions with Koenig. He was tartly reminded by Roosevelt that all arrangements worked out with the CFLN were tentative, and told that he should feel free to consult with other authorities. In fact, the Eisenhower-Koenig talks were ended on 4 May by de Gaulle, who was furious that the British had, for security reasons, imposed a ban on communications between London and Algiers.58

  De Gaulle further annoyed Roosevelt by announcing on 26 May that the CFLN was now to be known as the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF). Eisenhower, however, remained anxious for de Gaulle’s cooperation after the landings, and Roosevelt agreed that de Gaulle could be invited to London on the eve of D-Day. De Gaulle arrived on 4 June, but a furious row broke out over the wording of the proclamation which Eisenhower intended to make on D-Day. This made no allusion to any French authority, and invited the French people to ‘execute his orders’. De Gaulle was also enraged that his own message was to be broadcast last, after those of Eisenhower and the heads of state of the other countries of occupied Europe.

  De Gaulle riposted that he would broadcast at an entirely different time from everyone else and that he would not allow Free French liaison officers to land with the Allied troops. This threw Churchill into such a fury that on 6 June he fumed that de Gaulle should be sent back to Algiers, ‘in chains if necessary’. Cadogan commented on 5 June: ‘we always start by putting ourselves in the wrong and then de Gaulle puts himself more in the wrong. He deserves to lose the rubber.’ In the end, a compromise was reached: 20 liaison officers would depart out of the full quota of 120. Even so, on the eve of the landings, relations between de Gaulle and his allies could hardly have been worse and it still remained to be seen who would win the rubber.59

  23

  Liberations

  On 6 June 1944 at 5.30 p.m., eight hours after Eisenhower, General de Gaulle broadcast to the French people. Ordering them to obey the orders given by the ‘French government’, and making no mention of the American troops, he proclaimed: ‘the supreme battle is engaged… it is France’s battle and it is the battle for France…It is a battle which the French will fight with fury.’ He knew of course that there were no French troops among the forces landing in France on D-Day.

  On the same day Pétain broadcast a message which had been recorded three months earlier, following tough negotiations with the Germans. He summoned the French people not to obstruct the Germans in their defensive preparations or take any action that might invite German reprisals. To the end, Pétain clung on to French neutrality. In a subsequent message to the Legion, he appealed to the French to avoid ‘fratricidal warfare’: ‘the French must not rise up against each other, their blood is too precious for the future of France and hatred can only compromise the unity of the country’.1 As he spoke these words, the French conflict was entering its final and bloodiest stages.

  Uprisings and Massacres

  De Gaulle’s D-Day message warned against ‘premature insurrection’. But on the previous day the BBC had broadcast coded messages instructing the Resistance to implement all the prearranged colour-coded plans. This break with caution, which took Koenig by surprise, was decided by SOE in order to confuse the Germans about where the real attack would come.2 During the first week after D-Day, the colour-coded plans were implemented with great success: 960 out of 1,055 planned operations of railway sabotage took place. Every train leaving Marseilles for Lyons after D-Day was derailed at least once during its journey; in the département of Indre, site of the railway line from Paris to Toulouse, there were eight hundred cases of railway sabotage in June alone.3

  The BBC’s call to action, however, had consequences which went beyond these careful plans. Thousands of new recruits flocked to the Maquis: in the Jura, the number of maquisards rose from about 1,000 in May to 8,000 in mid-June, in the Doubs from 100 to 5,000.4 Often there were insufficient arms to go around, and volunteers had to be turned away.5 In two cantons of Haute-Garonne, over 900 people, ‘sent into a frenzy by the Allied landings’, left their villages to join the Maquis in the woods. But they were so unprepared for the existence awaiting them that they were soon all sent home.6

  Sometimes these new recruits are dismissed as ‘resisters of the last hour’ or ‘mothball resisters’—referring to those who had got their uniforms out of four-year storage. But people who joined the Maquis in June 1944 did not know how soon the end would come: three months, remarks François Marcot, passes faster for a historian than it will have done for the maquisards.7 Joining the Maquis in 1944 was more dangerous than ever before. These sudden concentrations of men excited German attention, often with tragic consequences. On the night of 6 June, seventy volunteers from Capestang, in the Languedoc, west of Béziers, set off in two lorries to join the Maquis. On the road, they fortuitously met a German lorry. Five were killed, and eighteen others arrested and shot the next day. A few days later, the Germans arrested 183 people in Capestang as a reprisal.8

  The dangers of overconfidence were illustrated on a vaster scale in the forest of Mont Mouchet in the Auvergne. On 20 May, the regional AS commander, Émile Coulaudon (Gaspard), had ordered a mobilization of all able-bodied men of the region. Up to 6,000 volunteers answered the call, creating the largest-ever concentration of resisters. The Germans attacked on 10 June, and after four days the Maquis dispersed, at the cost of high casualties among fighters and local civilians. Coulaudon’s motives in launching this operation are unclear. He may have been influenced by the ‘Caiman plan’ in which the Auvergne was given the role of a liberated enclave, pinning down German troops. He had announced, ‘The Liberation Army is now constituted in the Auvergne.’ One village erected a banner proclaiming ‘Here begins Free France’. If Coulaudon had consciously provoked a military confrontation with the Germans, he gravely miscalculated. Mont Mouchet was both a tactical failure—the 350 French deaths vastly outnumbered German ones—and a strategic one—the troops who suppressed the rising had never been intended for the Normandy front. At best, Mont Mouchet was, like Glières, a sort of symbolic victory: the Resistance had challenged the Germans in the heart of Vichy France.9

  There was no symbolic victory in the events at Tulle in the Corrèze. On 7 June, the FTP arrived. The small German garrison surrendered, and for fifteen hours Tulle was liberated. When the prefect expressed his fear that the Germans might return, he was told: ‘Rest a
ssured M. le Préfet, you won’t see any more Boches in the Corrèze. France is in revolt.’ This confidence did not last long. Hearing that a contingent from the heavily armed SS Division Das Reich was making its way to Tulle, the FTP withdrew on 9 June, following its orders not to engage in set battle with the Germans. On the next day, the Germans inflicted terrible reprisals on the civilian population: ninety-nine men were hanged from balconies, trees, and lamp-posts in the main square.10

  In neighbouring Creuse, the town of Guéret also enjoyed a two-day liberation. In that case, however, there was no massacre after the Germans arrived. The difference in the treatment meted out to the two towns lay in the fact that in Tulle the resisters had executed some German prisoners alleged to belong to the Gestapo. At this stage of the war, the Germans were not usually so discriminating. On 10 June, the day after the Tulle massacre, the Das Reich Division descended on the town of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Haute-Vienne and massacred everyone they found: 642 people were killed. The men were machine-gunned; the women and children were burnt alive in the church; then the town was razed to the ground.

  COMAC v. London

  To prevent further carnage, on 10 June Koenig called for a ‘maximum brake on guerrilla activity’. This provoked an immediate protest from COMAC which declared on 14 June: ‘the national insurrection is a vital necessity for the country’.11 Koenig’s message caused a lot of confusion, and he backtracked on 17 June, calling on the Resistance to ‘continue elusive guerrilla action to the maximum’ while avoiding excessive concentrations of force. In practice, Koenig’s revised message was not so different from COMAC’s order on 21 June, to ‘intensify everywhere mobile guerrilla action’.12 But this was the beginning of two and a half months of acrimonious wrangling between COMAC and London. In COMAC’s view, Koenig was in no position to give orders from London because the situation on the ground was changing so rapidly. It also rejected the idea of confining the FFI to a purely military role: the political (the insurrection) and the military were inseparable. COMAC pushed for full command authority; in telegram after telegram, Koenig repeated that only he could issue orders to the FFI; Chaban-Delmas, de Gaulle’s national military delegate (DMN), was caught in the middle. Koenig’s own authority within the Allied camp was precarious because the Americans had been slow to recognize him as commander of the FFI. Only towards the end of June was Koenig’s status confirmed with the setting up of a tripartite Franco-Anglo-American general staff (ÉMFFI), but this did not acquire real authority until August.13

  The CNR was divided. The two Communists supported COMAC, and so did Pierre Hervé, representing the MLN. Given Hervé’s Communist affiliations, it is tempting, but once again misleading, to see this simply as a conflict between the Communists and de Gaulle. Among the members of COMAC, de Vogüé sided with the Communists, although he was quite capable of opposing them on other matters like the Patriotic Militias. On the other hand, CDLL, CDLR, OCM, and Libération-Nord, which had always been readier than the Southern movements to view resistance in purely military terms, supported Koenig. Vogüé was much criticized by his own movement, the CDLR. A compromise was finally reached in mid-August. This conceded much ground to COMAC.14

  In fact, the conflict was academic because neither COMAC nor London controlled the situation on the ground. Nor, in many cases, did the regional and departmental FFI commanders. The truth was that the integration of the military forces of the Resistance into the FFI was often very notional. After the arrest of Delestraint in June 1943, the organization of the AS had proceeded very slowly. When the first DMRs arrived from London in September, they found no accredited military leaders with whom they could work. As Serreulles reported to London in March 1944:

  It took the DMRs several months to make contact in their respective regions with the military leaders of the Movements who often didn’t know each other… When the DMRs wanted to carry out the orders they received from London, they had to address the regional leaders of the different movements present in the region; these regional leaders then turned to their respective central leaders to ask for orders; some received an answer and others did not… The result was a situation of total anarchy…In some regions the DMRs tried to contact independent elements who might be willing to work directly for them… but that caused vehement protests from the other movements who claimed that the DMRs were suborning their members.15

  Many of these organizational deficiencies had been overcome in the early months of 1944, but in many places the FTP and ORA jealously guarded their independence.16 They continued to resent the DMRs, who had no hierarchical authority over the FFI commanders but enjoyed direct radio contact with London, and the SAP officers who had responsibility for parachute drops and controlled the arrival of precious supplies from London. Resistance leaders saw the DMRs and SAPs as outsiders imposed on them by London, ‘local tyrants’ who took too little account of the Resistance.17 But Coulaudon in the Auvergne recalled that in his case the DMR had played almost no role: ‘He had no importance; I hardly remember anything about him.’18

  Although resented by the Resistance, the DMRs themselves frequently felt that their own position was undermined by other BCRA envoys or British agents who had been sent to France on specific missions. The various agents parachuted directly into France by the Allies included members of the SAS (Special Air Services), of the American Operational Groups (OG) and the ‘Jedburgh teams’. The last were three-man units—British, American, and French—parachuted behind German lines to make contact with the Resistance, locate landing spots for parachute drops, and instruct the Maquis in the use of arms: 82 of them were dropped into France in June, July, and August 1944. Their ability to order arms directly from London enabled them to arbitrate between FTP, ORA, and AS leaders. Technically the Jedburgh teams were under the authority of the ÉMFFI, but in practice they acted on their own initiative, to Koenig’s irritation.19

  COMAC complained that these Allied missions were stealing forces from the Resistance,20 and the Communists complained they were being discriminated against. But although the Jedburgh teams were wary of the Communists’ political ambitions, they were not systematically anti-Communist; their main priority was military effectiveness. FFI commanders who had been in place for a long time could suddenly find their authority undercut. For example, an SAS unit of 175 men, commanded by the one-armed Commandant Bourgoin, was parachuted into Britanny on 5 June. The number of maquisards grew too large, and after a German attack on the Maquis camps at Saint-Marcel in the Morbihan, Bourgoin decided on 18 June to disperse his men to avoid a repetition of the events of Mont Mouchet. The regional FFI commander, Jaeger (Michelin), trying to pursue the COMAC policy of insurrection, reported his inability to impose his authority on the local FFI leaders who had welcomed Bourgoin like the Messiah.

  Micro-Histories

  The resolution of these conflicts depended on the local balance of forces between resistance organizations, on the authority of individual leaders, on chance arrests, and on the proximity of Allied forces. The situation was so fragmented that it is as difficult for the historian to tell a coherent national story as it was for COMAC or Koenig to control events—even to know what was going on. The General Staff of the FFI noted on 14 July: ‘For many regions we are almost totally ignorant of not only the numbers and movements of the enemy, but even the state of our own forces and the operations they have undertaken.’21 COMAC controlled less of France than the early Capetians. The military history of the Liberation can only be written as a series of micro-histories, different from département to département, valley to valley, village to village.

  In the Seine-et-Oise, for example, Philippe Viannay the departmental FFI commander was in conflict with the DMR, Pierre Sonneville, a former naval officer. Sonneville had strictly military priorities: to win time for the Allies. Viannay had political priorities: ‘to solder the country to the Resistance…and bring the mass of the population to participate in the struggle’. Sonneville complained to COMAC that Vianna
y was too reckless. In July, however, Viannay’s relations with Sonneville improved when they both came under fire from the Communists. Viannay could not get the FTP to obey his orders, and far from being backed up by the regional FFI commander, Rol-Tanguy, he was the target of an unsuccessful attempt by Tanguy to have him replaced by a Communist. Tanguy also tried to remove Sonneville, and COMAC would have supported him but for the intervention of Chaban-Delmas. The situation was summed up by a letter to Viannay from one of his comrades in Défense de la France which speaks volumes about the conflicts within the Resistance:

  I am absolutely in agreement with you about defending the rights of the metropolitan Resistance against the Anglo-Saxons and the émigrés of Algiers [a revealing indicator of how the CFLN was perceived]…If COMAC was differently composed, there would only be one policy to follow. But unfortunately there are the facts which distort everything… COMAC is today purely and simply an instrument of the Communists. The real conflict is not France against Algiers or France against the Allies, for in that case how could one hesitate? The real conflict is a struggle between the Communists and de Gaulle…To take a stand against de Gaulle’s National Military Delegate is to take a stand against de Gaulle.22

  In Provence, there were conflicts between the regional military commanders of the Resistance. The regional ORA commander, Jacques Lécuyer, was unhappy about Koenig’s countermanding order of 10 June because his men had successfully liberated the lower Alps. He moved his headquarters into the mountains in order to build an Alpine retreat able to hold out against the Germans. Lecuyer’s superior, the regional FFI commander, Robert Rossi [Levallois], also contested Koenig’s view, but from an FTP perspective. He opposed the idea of a static Alpine redoubt and wanted to encourage resisters not to head for the mountains but to stay in the cities and launch insurrectional strikes. The regional CFL/AS commander Juvenal opposed both views, and wanted to postpone action until the Allies had landed in the south.