by Geert Mak
Unlike the official Resistance, the Maquis was and remained a spontaneous movement taken part in primarily by young people. They formed something like Robin Hood clans, each with its own subculture, its own jargon and its own leader, always on the move, always busy surviving. Each group carried out its own war against Vichy and the Germans. Most of them were hardly involved in any coordinated resistance activities, such as espionage for London, systematic sabotage or support for the Allies.
The leader of the Maquis in the Drôme, L'Hermine, wandered the countryside in a black cape decorated with his own coat of arms. When the British philosopher A. J. Ayer arrived as an undercover agent in southwest France just before the liberation, he found the region, in his own words, to be ‘in the hands of a series of feudal lords whose power and influence were strangely similar to that of their fifteenth-century Gascon counterparts.’
In January 1943, the Vichy regime launched the Milice Française, a large countermovement of at least 30,000 blackshirts. Their oath of honour made no bones about the true business at hand: ‘I swear to fight against democracy, against the Gaullist revolt and against the cancer of Judaism …’ From the start to the very finish, of course, the Maquis and the Milice Française were arch-enemies, although it became increasingly unclear who was hunting whom. As it had in Italy, all this rage and desperation finally resulted in a civil war of unknown cruelty, la guerre franco-française.
A total of some 30,000 French Resistance fighters were executed between 1940–5. About 60,000 were sent to concentration camps, and 20,000 disappeared without a trace.
After more than half a century of utter silence, what remains of a real, live French village from 1944? A morning's drive from Vichy is the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Between the charred walls lie bedsteads, rusted bicycles and the remains of a sewing machine. Grass grows on the torched boulangerie of the Bouchoule family, the wrecked cars in the garage that belonged to the family Désourteaux, the petrol station of M. Poutaraud. On summer evenings the village danced at l'Avenir Musical, while the tram peeped and squeaked down the street and Dr Désourteaux raced off in his Renault to a late house call. The overhead tram lines still hang above the street, even the doctor's Renault stands rusting beside the road, but otherwise everything here came to a dead halt on 10 June, 1944.
In the local museum you can see a brief film of the village made in 1943. It contains the following scenes: a laughing couple pushing a pram; people swimming in the River Glane, lovers kissing in the grass; a picnic – a man points jovially at the camera; a child chases a running dog, and turns for a moment to look back. That is the last movement from Oradour that has been preserved.
Zamość, Anogia, Putten, Lidice, Marzabotto – throughout the twentieth century echoes the weeping and wailing of collectively punished villages, and since Srebrenica we know that things can get even worse. But Oradour is about more than that. Oradour symbolises the impotence and discord within France itself. Soldiers of the SS Das Reich Panzer Division encircled the peaceful village in the afternoon of 10 June, took the children from the classrooms, herded all the villagers together and suddenly began shooting. By midnight they had liquidated almost the entire population: 191 men, 245 women, 140 schoolchildren, 67 babies, toddlers and young children: 643 souls. The men were shot and killed, and women and children driven into the church and burned alive. The oldest was Marguerite Foussat, ninety years old. The youngest Maurice Vilatte, three months.
The reason behind the massacre remains unclear. Today people suspect that the SS made a mistake: forty kilometres from here was the village of Oradour-sur-Vayres, a hotbed of resistance. During the trial, held in February 1953, the full facts of the case became painfully clear: of the twenty-one defendants, fourteen were from France itself, from Alsace. They had been conscripted into the German Army, they said, and had only been following orders. After the verdict was handed down – two were sentenced to death, the others to hard labour – so many protests poured in from Alsace that the French government finally granted amnesty to all the murderers.
Infuriated, the handful of survivors from Oradour-sur-Glane sent their medals and their Légions d'honneur back to Paris, and refused to have anything more to do with the French state.
A number of highly successful public relations campaigns were carried out after the Second World War. The Austrians succeeded in transforming themselves from enthusiastic co-culprits into fellow victims. The cautious Dutch suddenly became robust heroes of the resistance, every one of whom had hidden an Anne Frank in their attic. But what the French got away with borders on the unbelievable. Whenever the war was discussed in France, it was always in terms of glory and triumph, as though there had been no defeat, chaos, starvation, despondency or collaboration.
That image is due to General de Gaulle and his 300,000 Free French Forces, to the heroes of the Resistance and to courageous bands of Maquisards. They fought bravely all over Europe, they gave France a new dignity and a new face, and their incredible courage is justly applauded. Yet it remains astounding to see how, after 1944, all of France suddenly emerged victorious from the wings. Vichy, after all, remained the legitimate government of France till the very end: the National Assembly granted Pétain its full mandate on 10 July, 1940. At the casino in Vichy there now hangs a plaque commemorating the 80 representatives who voted against him, but nothing is said about the 569 (with 17 abstaining) who actually did vote for Pétain.
In Fascist Italy, the persecution of the Jews was sabotaged everywhere. From the French town of Drancy, on 17 August, 1944, eight days before Paris was liberated, a train was still able to leave for Auschwitz with 700 prisoners. A little more than a week later, de Gaulle was welcomed by at least a million cheering Parisians. What is forgotten is the hundreds of thousands who had enthusiastically welcomed Pétain only four months earlier, when he visited the city on 26 April, 1944 to commemorate the victims of war. Of 1.5 million French public officials, only around 30,000 were ever penalised in any way for their collaboration, including their assistance in the deportation of Jews. Papon, the Jew-hunter of Bordeaux, was able to build a new and glorious career in post-war France; he became the chief of police in Paris under de Gaulle, and ultimately even a cabinet minister. In 1953 almost all of the collaborators were granted amnesty. By 1958, fourteen former Vichy officials were already back in the French parliament.
After a series of complicated manoeuvres, de Gaulle was finally able to make his triumphal entry into Paris on 26 August, 1944. ‘Paris, Paris abused, Paris broken, Paris martyred but Paris liberated by her own people with the help of the armies of France!’ he shouted, with characteristic rhetoric. And everyone cheered, even though not a single French battalion had taken part in the heroic landings on D-Day, even though de Gaulle himself had not worked on the preparations, even though only a single division of the Free French Forces had fought along with the total of 39 in Normandy, and even though only a small portion of the population of Paris – according to reliable estimates, no more than 15,000 men and women – had taken an active part in the Resistance. None of that mattered. De Gaulle's conceptual France had won, and after 1945 would even oversee one of Germany's occupied zones.
For what France needed was a grand historical account, to get back on its feet again and to redefine itself as a nation. The Resistance, the Maquis and the Free French Forces made great sacrifices. But all over the country the war cemeteries are full of ‘perfidious’ Englishmen and ‘decadent’ Americans, ‘dirty’ Jews and ‘stinking’ Spanish refugees, and countless Poles who were never given credit for a single victory.
Chapter FORTY-FOUR
Bénouville
Cigarette Break
The skirmish was suddenly over.
We stopped to roll a smoke
and the Germans did too and
so there we stood,
insane, across from each other –
barely on our feet still.
‘Cigarette break,’ someone said hoarsely.
> The German nodded understandingly: ‘Ja, Pause. Sofort!’
We sat down, them and us, in the grass
five paces away from each other;
we laid our rifles at our feet
and plucked
tobacco from our bags.
Yes, the things one sees in war!
Pass it along, not a soul in hell
will believe you. Then calmly, silently
– cautiously looking each other in the eye –
we ground out the final roll-ups, they their cigarettes,
and the same voice rasped, raw and bloodshot:
‘End of cigarette break!℉
Yuri Belash, veteran, Moscow
Normandy. The 84th Field Company of the British Royal Engineers at Sword Beach on the morning of 6 June, 1944. The two men in the foreground, a worried-looking soldier and a shouting corporal, are already walking on the sand. It may be the last picture ever taken of them, for the chances of survival on Sword Beach were at that point slim indeed. But it is the foreground of this first invasion photograph in particular that tells the story like a medieval painting: the landing craft in the morning mist, the men wading onto the beach – one bent double, another being helped along, a third running.
Ernie Pyle described the situation two days later: ‘Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead.’ Beneath the waves lay hundreds of trucks and landing craft, often with crew and all, that hadn't made the beach. Of the thirty-two amphibious tanks, twenty-seven had sunk like bricks in the rough seas. The beach was covered in wrecked vehicles, and an entire set of office equipment had even spilled from one tracked vehicle, complete with hanging maps and crushed typewriters. ‘There is nothing left but the remains: the lifeless rubbish, the sun and the flowers, and the complete silence,’ Pyle wrote. ‘Everything was dead – the men, the machines, the animals …’
Now I am walking those same beaches. All that is left to the naked eye are the concrete remains of two floating harbours, plus dozens of half-buried bunkers and turrets from the former Atlantic Wall. But beneath the cold, green water of the coast lies a complete graveyard. These days enthusiasts sometimes winch whole Sherman amphibious tanks from the water, full of crustaceans that have attached themselves through the years. In the museums the tourists crowd past the corroded soup spoons, motor-bikes, telephones, amphibious jeeps, boots, rifles and punctured helmets. At a special theatre at Arromanches they can experience ‘the total D-Day emotion’ in only eighteen minutes. At the Pointe du Hoc – sticking up against the sky like a blade – they are amazed (and who is not?) at the mad courage of over 200 commandos of the American 116th Infantry Regiment who scaled this steep rock with ropes and ladders under heavy machine-gun fire, and conquered it on the second day. Only seventy-five of them lived to tell about it. In the countless souvenir shops the tourists rush to buy buttons, buckles and books of photographs, they search for bullet holes in the bunkers, point at the famous dummy of a paratrooper that still hangs on the steeple at Sainte-Mère-Église.
I make a little pilgrimage to the Pegasus bridge at Bénouville, along the Orne, the first patch of Western European ground taken by the Allies. In the early hours of 6 June, 1944, three Horsa gliders – enormous wooden aircraft towed from England by heavy Stirlings – landed here under cover of night. On board were ninety men of the 6th Airborne Division, linked together arm and leg to absorb the impact of the landing, singing loudly to calm their nerves. The two German sentry posts were taken entirely by surprise, within ten minutes the strategic bridgehead was in British hands.
The dance café of the Gondrée family, on the corner, was the first house to be liberated in Western Europe, and their daughter Arlette was the first liberated child. Today Arlette runs her parents’ business, and does so with dignity and flair. Hanging in the bar are dozens of photographs: Arlette with General X, with Admiral Y, the crew of the British royal yacht saluting in front the door of Café Gondrée, it is all on record.
Gondrée pére was a member of the Resistance, and spoke fluent English. Just before D-Day a British agent had urged him not to leave the house; something was brewing and he might be needed. Arlette has a few more things to tell me about that night. ‘I was four at the time, and I remember the enormous shooting and thundering in the darkness. My father sent us down into the cellar. We heard the Germans pounding on the front door. We didn't react. A little later the back door opened, we heard footsteps above our head, someone tripped over a chair, and then we heard someone cursing. “Damn it, Tommies!” my father whispered. By the next day our house was already full of wounded men.’
The veterans of D-Day still come back here, and Arlette knows them all. ‘This is where they meet up again. This is their home. When you've been through something like that you always stick together. But they don't talk much about the fighting itself. “He fell beside me,” they'll say, but they never go into detail, not even to their families. They keep that to themselves.’
Does she still remember her liberators? ‘Do I! They came down the stairs, and I started crying right away. “It's all right, chum,” that was the first thing they said to my father. Their faces were blackened and they had camouflage netting on their helmets, my mother ran and hugged them, but it was still terribly frightening. They were monsters, our liberators! They picked me up, too, and then they brought out the chocolate, and everything was all right after that.’
Operation Overlord, as the Normandy invasion was officially called, was a military operation the likes of which had never been seen before. The preparations had taken two years. A total of almost three million men had been assembled in southern England, divided over thirty-nine divisions: twenty American, fourteen British, three Canadian, one Polish and one French. Among them there were also units from New Zealand, Australia, India and other parts of the British Commonwealth, as well as assorted French, Belgian, Norwegian, Polish, Czech and Dutch squads.
The invasion itself was carried out by an army of 150,000 men, with 7,000 ships, 20,000 vehicles and 11,000 planes. On the first day, 4,500 of those men were killed: approximately 2,500 Americans, 1,641 Britons, 359 Canadians, 37 Norwegians and 19 Frenchmen. Not only was the taking of the beaches a huge task, but the invasion also had to be synchronised to keep all those army units from getting in each other's way. The whole thing was planned to the minute: the military engineers were to land at zero hours plus two, supply troops at zero hours plus thirty, and the first journalists were allowed to come ashore at zero hours plus fifty-seven.
The weather remained disastrous, even after the landing. Between June 18–21 there was actually a hurricane in the Channel, the worst storm since 1900, which swallowed up 800 ships and landing craft. Four times as much military material was lost during that storm as on D-Day itself, and the Allies continued to feel the effects all summer. Still, one month after the invasion there were already a million men on the continent.
Two huge artificial harbours were towed across the Channel, one of them went down during the storm on 18 June. The third port on which the Allies had their eye, Cherbourg, was initially blocked with mines and hundreds of wrecked ships; within a few weeks, working day and night, the American 333rd Engineer Special Service Regiment succeeded in restoring the harbour installations to something like working order. Then the flood of troops and war material began rolling onto the continent.
The Belgian and French Resistance had been closely involved in the preparations for D-Day, ever since May 1942 when a French Resistance fighter was able to purloin a German map of the Atlantic Wall, an invaluable source of information for the Allied planners. At 9 a.m. on 5 June, the BBC began broadcasting lines of poetry by Verlaine, the signal that told the Resistance groups that the invasion would take place the next day, and they could begin taking their own measures. Later, Eisenhower estimated – perhaps a bit too flatteringly – that they had contributed at least fifteen div
isions.
‘The place of the invasion was no surprise, but the moment of the invasion was,’ said Winrich Behr, Rommel's adjutant at the time. ‘Those of us on the Western staff had always suspected that there would be a landing at Normandy, but Hitler and his strategists were taken completely by surprise. For a long time they believed it was a tactical feint. They refused to send reinforcements for the first three or four days, convinced as they were that the main body of the invasion would arrive at Calais.’
The meteorologists of the Kriegsmarine had predicted that, in view of the weather and the tides, an Allied landing during the first days of June could virtually be ruled out. Rommel, therefore, saw no reason not to go on holiday on 5 June. He had to return in very short order.
Behr: ‘Of course, our intelligence was flawed. Remember, it had been four or five months since a German reconnaissance plane had been able to cross the Channel. We were blind. The radio broadcasters on both sides were constantly playing games with misleading information via news reports, radio plays, music programmes, all peppered with codes and messages. Later on I heard that a Scottish station had accidentally broadcast the pre-recorded announcement of the invasion, one day early. Our intelligence people picked up on that as well. But they didn't do anything with it. They thought it was just another ruse.’
Once the Allies had finally established their bridgehead, they still had to penetrate the German defence. That went much slower than expected; the German resistance was tough, experienced and effective, the Allied losses were huge, the destruction in the countryside and the cities – Caen, Bayeux, Cherbourg, Saint-LÔ – enormous. The battle for Normandy lasted two and a half months, rather than the three weeks originally planned. It was not until 21 August that the road to Paris and the rest of Western Europe was clear.