B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  How these conflicts in the Provence region were resolved at departmental level depended on the allegiances of the departmental commanders. In the Alpes-Maritimes, the departmental FFI commander, Chatel, wanted to hold his guerrilla forces in reserve for the landings, but his chief of staff, Malherbe, who was from ORA, obeyed Lecuyer, and tried to bring the Maquis over to him. Chatel gave orders that Malherbe was not to be obeyed, but many ORA officers ignored him. As for Rossi, his orders had little effect on the ground, even on the FTP, and in the Basses-Alpes many FTP troops fought with the ORA. This situation was further complicated by Rossi’s arrest on 17 July, and then almost immediately afterwards by that of his replacement Renard. When the Allies did land in the South in August, the Provençal Resistance had no functioning regional command. In such circumstances, it was remarkable that the Resistance was able to make any contribution at all.23

  In general, the fate of FFI operations, in the seven weeks between D-Day and the moment when the Allies broke out of the Normandy bridgehead, depended on the Germans. Where the Germans decided to crush the Resistance, they could always do so. Where this was not worth their while, the innumerable local Maquis operations, especially in the South, helped destroy what was left of Vichy’s authority. In the Aveyron, high in the Massif Central, the prefect reported on 12 June that the ‘the Maquis had reduced prefectoral authority to impotence’; all the département of the Lot was in the hands of the Maquis except for the town of Cahors; in the Haute-Savoie, the FTP were in total control of Thonon and Bonneville, where ‘they make their own laws’; the situation was similar in much of the Ain, Savoie, Gard, and Lozère.24

  Nowhere did the Resistance enjoy greater success than in the small town of Mauriac in the Cantal, away from all major communication axes. The Resistance took control of Mauriac on 6 June. The commissaire de la République arrived; the CDL came out into the open and began to run the town; and the MLN installed its Southern headquarters there. Vichy and the Germans were fully aware of the situation, but given Mauriac’s lack of strategic importance, the Germans did nothing, allowing it to become a sort of free enclave in occupied France. While the inhabitants of Oradour were being massacred, those of Mauriac could read, from 9 June, the first openly produced Resistance paper in France, L’Homme libre.25

  Entirely different was the fate of the plateau of Vercors, south-west of Grenoble. This huge natural fortress had been designated by the Montagnards Plan of 1943 as the site of a Resistance army big enough to hold down substantial numbers of German troops. After Glières and Mont Mouchet, it proved to be the third, and bloodiest, proof that the Resistance could never win a pitched battle with the Germans. After D-Day, the number of maquisards on the plateau swelled to almost 4,000. On 3 July, they declared the re-establishment of the Republic. The Allies dropped large quantities of supplies, but no weapons. Nor was there any sign of an Allied landing in the South. German attacks intensified during July. On 21 July, the Maquis leaders sent a desperate telegram to London begging one last time for help. It ended by saying that if no help arrived, the defenders of Vercors would conclude that the leaders in London and Algiers were ‘criminals and cowards’. On the same day, forty gliders appeared in the sky. The maquisards cheered until they realized the planes were German. By 23 July, the Germans had eliminated the Maquis. Some 640 maquisards and 201 local inhabitants were killed.26

  De Gaulle in Bayeux

  While sporadic fighting was occurring throughout France, where liberated pockets, like Mauriac, coexisted with pitched battlefields, like Vercors, or scenes of carnage, like Oradour, the Allies remained penned up in Normandy, unable to break through the German lines. It was in Normandy, therefore, that de Gaulle was obliged to test his popularity for the first time, although he might have preferred to choose another area for such an exercise. Normandy had suffered so badly from bombing that the Allies were far from popular. The Normandy peasantry anyway had the reputation of being prudent and conservative. The DMR reported at the end of 1943 that he found an apathetic population of black marketeers terrified of ‘terrorists’.27 The official report on the Tortoise Plan stated: ‘Everywhere we came up against inertia and the feeling that we threatened the interests of the Norman peasant…Even after the invasion, the peasants preferred to sell their butter to the retreating Germans than to our men who were considered suspect.’28 In their bridgehead, the Allies found no popular demand for a purge of the Vichy authorities. In Bayeux, liberated on 7 June, Allied commanders met with co-operation from the Vichy sub-prefect.

  De Gaulle decided to intervene before this became a pattern for the future. On 14 June, he landed at Courselles in Normandy, with a small entourage. Having paid his respects to General Montgomery, he set off for Bayeux. Two policemen met en route were told to go ahead and announce the arrival of General de Gaulle—whom they had not recognized. De Gaulle commented to an aide: ‘see the State is restored; they have obeyed me when they didn’t even know they were going to meet me’.29 Having allowed long enough for people to gather, de Gaulle arrived in Bayeux where, in his words, he was greeted with ‘extraordinary emotion’. Having visited the sub-prefect, who scrambled on to a chair to remove the portrait of Pétain which he had forgotten to take down, he spoke to a crowd of about 2,000. The Bishop of Bayeux, who expected to see de Gaulle surrounded by red scarved bandits, was reassured to find that his entourage included Thierry d’Argenlieu who had been at the same seminary with him, and Colonel de Boislambert, who was the nephew of a major benefactor to the Catholic Church in Normandy.30

  Having visited two other localities, de Gaulle returned to England at the end of the day, leaving behind François Coulet as commissaire de la République. Coulet promptly dismissed the Vichyite mayor and sub-prefect. But his authority was not officially recognized by the Allies: visiting Normandy on 20 June and 11 July Churchill avoided meeting him.31 The Allied administrators on the ground, however, although finding the Gaullist nominees less accommodating than their Pétainist predecessors, were happy to co-operate with them once it was clear that the population was ready to accept their authority. This de facto recognition of Gaullist power, which suited Eisenhower and Montgomery, made it increasingly difficult for Roosevelt to persist in ignoring de Gaulle. On 11 July, after de Gaulle had paid a visit to the United States, Roosevelt finally recognized the GPRF as ‘the working authority for civilian administration in the liberated areas of France’.32

  De Gaulle had successfully presented the Allies with a fait accompli, and his bluff had paid off. Although the crowds had cheered him, Allied intelligence reports described a population without strong political preferences, and in some areas even anti-Gaullist.33 Jacques Kayser, a journalist travelling around liberated Normandy, and hoping to find Gaullist enthusiasm, was struck by the indifference of the population to politics in general and de Gaulle in particular. After one week he noted that no one had asked him any questions about de Gaulle. He was also amazed at the lavish meals he was served compared to his experience of wartime London: the Norman peasants were faithful to their reputation.34 But Kayser was also struck by the fact that it seemed as if Vichy had never existed. De Gaulle had not arrived as a long-awaited Messiah; he had simply inserted himself into a void. The same was observed by the American historian Crane Brinton, reporting to the OSS. Having noted ‘little spontaneous enthusiasm’ for de Gaulle—no one had even mentioned de Gaulle’s name to him in four days—Brinton went on: ‘Vichy has faded away like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, but not even the leer has remained…I need hardly tell you that the question as to whether the de Gaulle government is accepted simply does not exist.’35

  The Last Days of Vichy

  At the top, however, the Vichy government continued to go through the motions. In June, Admiral Fernet was still working on the powers to be exercised by the governors of the regions. Bonnard, who had been told by a medium in April that there would be no Allied landings, was worrying whether the baccalaureate examinations could go ahead as normal. As France
spiralled into violence, he sent a memorandum to the examiners asking them to be generous in their marking so as to demonstrate ‘the spirit of friendship which should govern the relations between the French’. He also quarrelled with Bichelonne over whether those who had spent more than a year in prisoner-of-war camps should be exempted from the entry exams to the civil service.36

  Despite this serene indifference to reality, the final manoeuvring of the Vichy factions became ever more acrimonious. On 28 June Philippe Henriot was assassinated by the Resistance. He was given a near State funeral in Notre-Dame, conducted by Cardinal Suhard. The ultra-collaborationists felt that Laval had not paid sufficient respect to Henriot’s memory, and they launched a final attack on him. Admiral Platon went to see Pétain on 9 July bearing a manifesto signed by, inter alia, Déat, Bichelonne, de Brinon, Bonnard, Benoist-Méchin, Drieu, Luchaire, Rebatet, and Chateaubraint. It called for Laval to be replaced by a head of government fully committed to the German war effort. The instigator of this plot was Déat who had visited Pétain in May, and came away convinced that he had won the Marshal over. Pétain’s faculties may have been failing, but he was still sharp enough to outwit the incorrigibly credulous Déat. Hearing of the plot against him, Laval called a cabinet meeting on 12 July, the last to be held at Vichy. He rounded on his critics, and accused them of wanting to plunge France into civil war.37

  If Laval clung to power, it was in the hope of presiding over the transition between Vichy and the post-Liberation regime. Pétain harboured the same ambition, and the two of them tried to outflank each other in the race to be in at the end. First, they tried to distance themselves from the ultra-collaborationists. Laval did so by publishing the minutes of the 12 July cabinet meeting. Pétain did so on 6 August in a long letter to Laval, belatedly condemning the excesses of the Milice.38 In August, Laval conceived the idea of reconvening parliament. His idea was to win its support for the formation of a government which would present the Americans with an alternative to de Gaulle when they arrived in Paris. The key to this plan was Édouard Herriot, president of the lower house of parliament in 1940, whom the Germans had interned in Lorraine. With Abetz’s approval, Laval had Herriot released and brought to Paris. Herriot did not entirely rule out Laval’s proposition, and the two men resumed the camaraderie of two old parliamentary stagers of the Third Republic. Herriot, who was not without suspicions of de Gaulle, procrastinated, possibly in the hope of ensuring that such an arrangement would profit him not Laval. In the end, the whole scheme was sabotaged by the Germans themselves. On 17 August, three days after Herriot’s release, Himmler ordered him to be reinterned. This was the history of collaboration in a nutshell: Abetz misreading the intentions of his masters, and Laval believing him.

  During the negotiations Laval rang Pétain urging him to come to Paris and back the Herriot plan. Pétain refused to leave Vichy, not because he opposed the idea of organizing a smooth transition of power to the Allies, but because he wanted to be the beneficiary of such a plan. To this end, on 11 August, Pétain sent Admiral Auphan to Paris to represent ‘the principle of legitimacy I embody’, and be ready to negotiate on his behalf with the Allies or de Gaulle. But on 20 August the Germans arrived in Vichy and took Pétain forcibly to Belfort where he joined Laval who had been taken there two days earlier. Pétain had two messages ready. In the first, he protested against his abduction, and declared that he was no longer ready to continue as head of State; in the second, drafted by Henri Massis, he defended his actions since 1940, and expressed the hope that his sacrifice had paved the way towards ‘the sacred union for the renaissance of the patrie’.39

  Liberation and Insurrection

  By now the Liberation of France was well under way. On 31 July, the Allies finally broke out of Normandy. The Third Army under General Patton swept through Brittany while the rest of the Allied forces headed eastwards towards the Seine. On 15 August, the Allies landed on the Riviera coast. Operation Anvil, as this was called, included seven divisions of the First French army under General de Lattre de Tassigny. The Allied advance along the south coast was extraordinarily rapid: troops arrived at Toulon on 23 August, twelve days earlier than planned; Marseilles fell on 28 August, twenty-six days earlier than planned. Moving up the Rhône valley, troops from de Lattre’s army joined up with troops from Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division, coming from the north, at Langres on 13 September.

  The military contribution of the Resistance to this stage of the Liberation was more important than during the period immediately after D-Day. In Brittany, the Allies had planned for the Maquis to intervene when the Americans broke through from Normandy. The ground was prepared in July when eleven Jed-burgh teams were sent to join Bourgoin’s SAS groups. Substantial arms drops occurred, and by the end of the month there were 30,000 armed FFI fighters poised to act. Their contribution was so effective that when the Americans marched west to the naval bases of Lorient, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire, they encountered little German opposition.

  This success encouraged Allied planners to upgrade the role of the Resistance in the Anvil operation. Fifty-two more Jedburgh missions were despatched in August. Originally the Allies had not intended to pursue the Germans up the Rhône valley before establishing a secure bridgehead on the Riviera coast. But the strength of the Resistance in the lower Alps led to a modification of these plans: a force was sent immediately to Grenoble in the hope of cutting off the German retreat in the lower Rhône valley. This plan worked so well that Allied troops reached Grenoble on 22 August, seven days after the landings, instead of three months as originally intended. The clearing of the road to Grenoble was one of the major strategic achievements of the Resistance although the size of the force sent to Grenoble was too small for the encirclement operation to succeed entirely.40 In the Rhône valley itself, the Resistance helped to disrupt communications. The destruction of the bridge at Livron on 16 August, at the confluence of the Drôme and Rhône rivers, allowed the Allies to inflict terrible damage on the German troops escaping north. Had the Allies been able to arrive in greater numbers before the Germans restored a crossing over the Drôme, the entire German Nineteenth Army might have been destroyed.41

  In the south-west, the role of the Resistance was less important because the Germans had spontaneously started to withdraw on 16 August in order to avoid being cut off by the armies advancing up the Rhone.42 As they retreated, the Germans had to face the Resistance groups ‘yapping at their heels like angry terriers closing on a fox’, as M. R. D. Foot puts it. One hundred thousand Germans were cornered near Limoges and forced to surrender.43

  Quantifying the contribution of the Resistance to France’s liberation is difficult. One historian of French intelligence is sceptical about the importance of the Resistance, as is the economic historian Alan Milward. When Milward interrogated Speer about the effects of the Resistance on German war production, the reply was: ‘What French Resistance?’44 Certainly there were few Resistance operations which had any strategic impact on the outcome of the war. One exception might be the extraordinary exploits of André Jarrot and Raymond Basset (the ‘Armada’ team) working for BCRA and the RF section of SOE. Their sabotage operations caused major damage to the canal network of north-eastern France at a time when the Germans were desperately trying to send small craft down to Italy to prevent the Allied landings.45

  In the period immediately after D-Day, the colour-coded plans were successfully implemented, but their impact has often been exaggerated. It is possible that the 11th German Armoured Division, which took twenty-three days to get from Strasbourg to Caen, was delayed by the disruption to communications, but more important was the fact that the German High Command had hesitated when and where to send the troops.46 It is certainly not true, as was once alleged, that the Maquis delayed the progress of the Das Reich Division from Toulouse to Normandy, prolonging a journey of three days to two weeks. German sources show that the Division’s orders were to terrorize the Maquis of the south-west as it moved north. T
he victims of Oradour could not even have the posthumous satisfaction of having diverted this force from its real mission; they were its real mission.47

  In many cases, however, the Allies reported that the FFI’s contribution to the Liberation had been greater than expected, and could have been greater still if it had been adequately armed.48 Eisenhower later paid fulsome tribute to the role of the Resistance after the Allies broke out of Normandy:

  Great assistance was given us by the FFI in liberating Brittany…As the allied columns advanced, these French forces ambushed the retreating enemy, attacked isolated groups and strong-points, and protected bridges from destruction. When our armour had swept past them, they were given the task of clearing up the localities where pockets of Germans remained, and of keeping open Allied lines of communication…Not least in importance, they had, by their ceaseless harassing activities, surrounded the Germans with a terrible atmosphere of danger and hatred which ate into the confidence of the leaders and the courage of the soldiers.49

  In his memoirs, Eisenhower concluded, probably over-generously, that the total contribution of the Resistance to the Liberation was the equivalent of fifteen divisions. In the end, such estimates can only be speculative, but one can offer three incontrovertible propositions about the military role of the Resistance: if there had been no Resistance, France would still have been liberated; if there had been no Resistance, the Liberation would have cost the Allies significantly higher casualties; if the Allies had had more faith in the potential of the Resistance, its contribution to saving Allied lives could have been greater. The Resistance was always desperately short of arms, and despite Churchill’s order to increase arms drops to southern France at the start of 1944, France never received the quantities of supplies which went to Yugoslavia or Italy. Between 1943 and 1945, the Yugoslav Resistance received 16,470 tons of supplies, Italy 5,907 tons, and southern France 2,878.50