Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (13 page)

Defying the weather, which grew crueller as they climbed, the two volunteers were eventually challenged by a sentry and directed, with a Sten poking them in the back, to the HQ where Major Thivollet made a point of telling them how bad conditions were and what their lives would be like on the plateau. As a foretaste of this, one of their first tasks the following day was to melt masses of snow to be used for cooking and drinking, the farm in which they were staying having no other water supply in winter.
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The growing numbers of
maquisards
in the Vercors attracted the first reprisals on 22 January after a band based near the village of Baraques in the south of the plateau kidnapped two German military policemen and a Dutch journalist, thus provoking a rescue mission by a column of thirty trucks towing mountain artillery. Picirella describes it thus:

The road being open again, a column of 300 Germans in trucks and armoured cars gained the plateau by the pass of Grands Goulets. Maj Thivollet sent several men armed with sub-machine guns under Lt François, who set an ambush near Echevis. Hidden in the rocks, our men laid down a harassing fire until their ammunition was running out, when they slipped away. Having lost 25 men in the operation, the Germans took their revenge by burning down the village of Baraques-en-Vercors.
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Malleval is a tiny hamlet situated at 3,000ft above sea level in the north-west of the plateau and accessible by a single road, difficult in summer and impassable for much of the winter. Officers, NCOs and men from 6th Battalion of the Chasseurs Alpins came to Malleval as a suitable base from which to harass the German enemy, recreating there military discipline, with smartness of dress, saluting and daily fatigues taking priority. The considerable quantity of arms and ammunition they had brought with them was not shared with local Maquis bands, despised by these regular soldiers as ignorant amateurs. The commanding officer Lieutenant Eysseric decided that the Germans could attack only by coming up the single road from the plain below, so that there was no need for security apart from two sentries at an outpost overlooking the road.

On 29 January 1944, just one week after the attack on Baraques, German troops, guided there by Vichy paramilitaries who knew the country, succeeded in ascending the road unobserved. They killed the two sentries and cut the field telephone line. On a routine check, Eysseric noted the cutting of the line and sounded the alarm. It was too late. By then, the main German force had encircled the hamlet and heavy machine-gun fire cut down Eysseric and twenty-three of his men. Only five men escaped. To punish the civilians nearby, eight adults were thrown alive into a burning barn and seven others deported, to die in camps in Germany. The Germans also took possession of the intact arms and ammunition store.

Picirella’s diary describes the occasional action. On 10 February a group of
maquisards
was sent down into the valley to ‘liberate’ a supply of petrol. The garage owner was expecting them and offered no resistance, but an informer had warned the local gendarmes, loyal to Vichy. They mingled with the crowd of sympathisers before opening fire, knowing that the
maquisards
could not fire back without killing their human shield. In the brief skirmish one man was seriously wounded and had to be hospitalised.

In late February a senior officer in OAS named Didier Cambonnet sent a message to BCRA:

… in the Vercors, two types of scenarios are possible:

1. Should the enemy decide to use all his resources to liquidate the [Maquis] camps, there is no doubt as to the outcome. Given the odds, it would be overwhelmingly unfavourable to us. The plateau would be cleared and its population massacred.

That analysis was to prove fatally accurate. Cambonnet continued:

2. Should the enemy fear a confrontation and decide to block the exits from the plateau, they would turn it into a sort of concentration camp. If we choose locations that are easy to defend, they will also be easy for the enemy to isolate.
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It seemed that no one was listening in London. On 27 February the BBC French Service transmitted the message ‘
Les Montagnards doivent continuer à gravir les cimes
’ – ‘the mountaineers must continue to climb the peaks’. This was the green light for Operation Montagnards, summoning more young and untrained
maquisards
up to the Vercors. The RAF flew night-time drops of weapons, but there were never enough to go round. Alerted by a number of daylight airdrops by American B-17s, a Fieseler Storch spy plane overflew the plateau and located the farms, shepherds’ huts and hamlets where the
maquisards
were hiding by following tracks in the snow leading back to them from the drop zones.

Picirella’s description of the routine was: guard duty two hours on and two hours off, plus drill, instruction on use and cleaning of weapons, practice ambushes and preparation of beacon fires for an airdrop at the village of Vassieux. Recovering the containers dropped took all day. In some were Allied battledress jackets and trousers, much coveted by the ragged men who discovered them until a formal order was given that French soldiers must not wear foreign uniforms. It was almost a relief to be sent on patrol on 18 March, when a German force attacked and blew up the base at St Julien with a savagery that was going to become worse with each raid on the plateau:

I was stationed near Mme Gauthier’s farm, lying full length in the snow with orders to observe, but not open fire. Mme Gauthier was chased out of her farmhouse and forced to kneel in the snow. She was only twenty metres from me, alternately putting her hands together to pray and clutching her head, thinking she was going to be shot. I whispered to Yves, next to me, ‘If they take aim at her, I’m going to fire anyway!’ Side by side in the snow, we waited, but the search ended and the Germans set off past us, running. There was only a dozen of them and it was hard not to fire. Three other farms were burned down that day. Passing by our camp, I took the opportunity to destroy the address of my mother on a parcel I had received.

Twenty-four hours in the snow. Cémoi had frozen feet. We learned that Marc Leroy, who was only twenty, let himself be burned alive in a hayloft so as not to cause problems for the farmer who was sheltering him. André Couderc was killed. Hubert Levacque from Paris managed to shoot two Germans before they shot him. Furious, the Germans took their revenge on the farmer’s son, but his father offered himself instead and was gunned down in front of his horrified wife.

In this enemy raid, we lost three officers and three men.
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Captain Jacques Bingen, one of the first French officers to answer de Gaulle’s call of 18 June 1940, took over the NM (non-military) section of BCRA in London about this time, replacing Jean Moulin. He warned that the great limitation of any plan for using the Maquis as a military force was the complete dependence for arms drops on British and American aircraft. The influential Major Buckmaster of SOE supplied those groups that conformed with SOE policies and withheld arms from other groups, of whose agenda he disapproved or was uncertain. In part, Bingen’s report read:

In the southern zone (formerly the Free Zone), everything is prepared for a massive arming of the French resistance networks, but it seems as if Britain or de Gaulle does not want to arm the Resistance. We need the weapons. We are counting on the loyalty of the Allies.
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That same month Cammaerts returned with the acting rank of lieutenant colonel, to give him the status to deal with liaison officers of de Gaulle’s Free French forces, who were to be parachuted in. SOE also placed him in nominal control of all irregular forces in Maquis zones R1 and R2, disregarding the fact that the
maquisards
owed no allegiance to Britain and several Resistance factions were openly hostile to British policy. Cammaerts radioed SOE that he believed several thousand men could be assembled on the Vercors plateau and welded into a sort of army, if supplied with Stens, automatic pistols, sniper rifles and anti-tank weapons. The request was ignored since SOE and OSS both considered that this would lead to over-confidence and the sort of disaster that occurred in Yugoslavia when 20,000 partisans under Josip Broz Tito, with 4,500 sick and wounded comrades, were trapped at the Neretva river in January–April 1943 and suffered huge casualties. BCRA’s concern was simpler: de Gaulle did not want sniper rifles and bazookas falling into the hands of FTP and other communist factions, possibly to be used by them in a coup d’état against his provisional government when it was eventually installed in France.

Between 16 and 24 April the village of Vassieux was attacked by Vichy paramilitaries under Raoul Dagostini, who looted and burned down farms, torturing the inhabitants for information and afterwards deporting a number of them and shooting three people dead on the spot. It was a foretaste of what was to come.

One wonders what sort of men the
miliciens
were, to track down, torture and kill their fellow countrymen. The answer is that while some of the senior officers were politicians who had made no secret of their right-wing inclinations before the war, many of the rank and file were simply misfits, grabbing power for the first time in their frustrated lives and exercising it viciously against anyone who fell into their hands. Dagostini made a fitting commander for such men, having served as an officer in France’s pre-war repression of independence fighters in Morocco, where he earned a reputation for excessive brutality and perpetration of atrocities against the civilian population in a campaign where brutality was the norm. Enlisting in Vichy’s Légion des Volontaires Français to fight in German uniform on the Eastern Front, he had the unusual distinction of being sentenced to death there by a Wehrmacht court martial for massacring twenty civilians living near the scene of an ambush that cost the lives of some of his men. For political reasons, the sentence was not carried out.

After being sent back to France in disgrace, he joined the Milice, where his record of atrocities during the Vercors campaign was so gross that Milice commander Joseph Darnand relieved him of his functions. He was particularly remembered by the people of Vassieux for bringing his mistress Maude Champetier de Ribes to torture sessions, where she gloated over the victims and terrorised any children who omitted to greet her with a smile.
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One of Dagostini’s alleged tactics in the Vercors was to infiltrate
miliciens
into the ranks of the Maquis bands. These traitors were said to have turned their weapons on the men beside them during the German attacks. Since they knew their fate if unmasked, such men must have been very brave, but it is impossible to know whether this story was true or invented like the rumour of the ‘fifth column’ supposed to have been responsible for the French defeat in 1940. The probable explanation is that the
miliciens
wore a tricolour armband similar to that of the Maquis. In some close combat situations, this caused fatal confusion.

In between actions, both provoked by German intrusions and Maquis raids to obtain food and petrol, Picirella recorded the stultifying boredom of his quasi-military life during and after the thaw: fatigues, long treks to obtain fresh milk from farmers, sprucing up for parades and memorial masses for the dead. The first dandelion shoots were harvested. For days on end, they were cooked and eaten without bread because the flour had run out. Water at many camps was so bad as to give stomach problems all round.

On 22 April Picirella was woken at 0400hrs with the news that another camp had been surrounded by a detachment of the GMR – the toughest of all the Vichy anti-terrorist forces. After thirteen hours of marching through difficult wooded country, avoiding several Milice patrols, his group arrived at the camp, where he was nearly shot by mistake after returning from a reconnaissance. At 0600hrs the signal was given to attack the GMR base.

Picirella’s captain walked up to the old monastery where the GMR men were sleeping while the single sentry was answering a call of nature. The alarm given, the captain called out, ‘Surrender. You are surrounded by 150 of my men.’ In reality there were only thirty
maquisards.
The
miliciens
were convinced by the sight of Picirella with a grenade in each hand and were, in his words, ‘very friendly’ from then on, sharing their, by Maquis standards, excellent breakfast with their captors, who did not even bother to disarm them. To avoid having to feed their captives on the plateau, the
maquisards
freed them and returned to camp – a hard march, even in daylight, that took over six hours.

Not everybody could take the hard life on the plateau. The following day, Cémoi – the man with frozen feet – deserted, but this was not the last his comrades would see of him. The day after, three others also slipped away, hoping to return home without being arrested, followed by three more the day after that. The numbers of Picirella’s squad became so depleted that it had to be merged with another squad. And still more men deserted, fed up with a diet of boiled dandelions, with neither clean water to drink nor bread to fill their empty stomachs.