Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (3 page)

Two other members of Bardonnie’s tight-knit
réseau
were Freemasons working as pilots for the port of Bordeaux, who conned the U-boats up the treacherous Gironde estuary into port at the end of each foray and guided them out to sea again. To begin with, the information of this traffic which they sent to London was considered ‘too good to be true’ and not acted upon. Their greatest frustration was that the immense U-boat pens being built by the Organisation Todt in Bordeaux were never bombed during construction because, once completed in autumn 1942, they were bombproof – and still stand today, indestructible. Grand Admiral Doenitz considered the British failure to destroy the pens along the Atlantic coast while they were still vulnerable one of the greatest mistakes of the RAF bombing campaign in the entire war.
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However, Bardonnie’s pilots were eventually able to claim the credit for eleven U-boats destroyed by Allied aircraft after leaving the Gironde estuary, having diverted suspicion from themselves by the daring expedient of repeatedly telling their German employers that the losses must be due to a spy inside their own port administration!

Like the Bardonnie-Rémy operation, all Resistance networks were organised groups of men and women who shared a particular political or religious orientation but, for security reasons, had little or no contact with other groups or individuals likely to take unwarranted risks. At the time of the blitzkrieg invasion in June 1940, Hitler had dismissed his generals’ fears of organised resistance to the occupation of France by telling them that the French nation was so irrevocably divided by class, politics and religion as to be unable to create a unified resistance to anything. How close he was to being right is borne out by the many occasions on which different Resistance networks worked against each other to the advantage of their common enemy.

Eventually the most tightly, indeed punitively, disciplined Resistance networks were the various communist factions. Because of its very efficient propaganda machine, Le Parti Communiste Français (PCF) was later believed by many to have been an important force in the Resistance from the first day of the occupation. In fact, far from opposing the arrival of German troops on occupation duties, it obeyed the spirit of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in August 1939 and supported Hitler for the first twenty months of the Second World War. The PCF’s daily
L’Humanité
had been banned for its anti-war stance during the phoney war of September 1939 to June 1940 – as had the British Communist Party’s organ
The Daily Worker
in Britain. When the German occupation authorities re-authorised publication of
L’Humanité
, editorials followed instructions from Moscow by dubbing the recent conflict ‘an imperialist war’, for which the capitalists of Britain and France were mostly to blame. De Gaulle was labelled a lackey of the international banking interests in the City of London and readers were urged to regard German soldiers in France as fellow workers far from home, for whom works committees should organise picnics, to make them feel welcome.

On 22 June 1941, Hitler showed what he thought of the paper on which the pact was written by launching Operation Barbarossa, his invasion of the USSR. The Comintern in Moscow immediately ordered the PCF to go underground – its secretary general Maurice Thorez was safely installed in Moscow, working with the Comintern – and execute a 180-degree turn vis-à-vis the occupation forces. Going underground was not too difficult for many members because, when the party was banned during the phoney war, its elected
députés
who were not immediately arrested went underground, as did many less well-known activists. There was thus already a cell structure in which no one member could betray more than a few colleagues.

Reversing the previous love affair with the occupation troops was a more bloody business: orders came swiftly from Moscow to launch a campaign of terrorism, assassinating German military personnel and civilians. This had nothing to do with the French war effort, but was intended to oblige the German forces in France to take reprisals by shooting hostages and thus drive a wedge between themselves and the previously passive population. This in turn would force Hitler to keep in France on garrison duties whole divisions which could otherwise have been transferred to the Eastern Front. Their presence there could have proved critical during the German advance on Moscow when the Soviet armies, badly trained, poorly equipped and purged of most of their commanders from colonels upwards, were collapsing like a house of cards.

Initially, PCF activists worked under a number of banners, but the party’s perpetual paranoia regarding individual initiative forced a unification at the beginning of 1942 under the apparently patriotic name Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), a title borrowed from the patriotic militias that had fought against the German invaders during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Although the PCF propaganda machine portrayed its killers as heroic patriots fighting the German enemy, few people outside the party thought the assassinations heroic or even of any value. For example, after a Wehrmacht captain was shot dead on the Boulevard de Strasbourg in Paris on 16 September 1941, journalists of all shades except the communists reflected the mood of the population and publicly deplored the assassination. Author Pierre Audiat summed up their views to this and previous assassinations:

It is by no means clear how the elimination of a German soldier who is only here in obedience to military discipline might influence the outcome of the war. Had some truly heroic gesture been at stake, the murderer should have fulfilled his patriotism by staying right out in the open, to pay the price.
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From London, de Gaulle condemned the assassination campaign as militarily useless.
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Most other factions in the Resistance regretted the PCF assassination campaign because it achieved nothing for France and simply made life more difficult for everyone. So, the largest single element of the Resistance was frequently at odds with the others from June 1941 onwards.

De Gaulle therefore used a number of politically astute figures in efforts to unite the various groups in the Resistance under his overall control. Socialist politicians Pierre Brossolette and Christian Pineau played their parts but most credit is usually given to a brilliant administrator named Jean Moulin. Parachuted into France in January 1942, this former prefect of Chartres had by the end of the year drawn the three main Resistance networks of the Free Zone – COMBAT, LIBERATION-SUD and the communist FTP – into a loose federation titled ‘Les Mouvements Unis de la Résistance’ (MUR). As the plurality of the title indicates, command was divided. Charles Frenay, the hard-line escaped POW ex-officer who had founded COMBAT with a core of other military men, refused to collaborate with FTP, with whose pro-Moscow politics he strongly disagreed, while both FTP and LIBERATION-SUD claimed that Frenay was a militaristic dictator. The differences between the various leaders were deliberately played up by the infiltration into the other networks of undercover communists nicknamed ‘submarines’.

Frenay, as befitted his military background, sought approval from his superiors – in this case, General de Gaulle. In September 1942 he had travelled to London and met de Gaulle, who gave him a solemn assurance that organised groups in France who wanted to fight the Germans would be supplied from London with arms and other provisions. Although this was in accord with Churchill’s desire to ‘set Europe ablaze’, the Allied military commanders mistrusted the idea of arming civilians in an occupied country where the weapons might fall into German hands and one day be used against Allied soldiers. They also mistrusted the political motivation of many Resistance networks, particularly the communist-dominated ones. Implementation of de Gaulle’s undertaking was thus inadequate, irregular and subject to assessment of the recipients by London’s Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Since none of the various movements’ leaders agreed to work with the others, Moulin harnessed them loosely to his troika by astute manipulation and by doling out subsidies from funds parachuted to him with arms drops – and then withdrawing financial support when someone became too difficult. In the first five months of 1943 his subsidies totalled 71 million francs.
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As to what was done with this money, researchers run into blank walls, since it was simply written off back at base, with no records kept of the disbursements, and most Resistance operations at this point cost no more than a few bullets or some plastic explosive.

Although Moulin’s brief from London ran only in the Free Zone initially, he also made contacts with the PCF hard core in Paris, working directly for Moscow. Shortly thereafter, ‘Col Passy’, whose intelligence operation was now called Le Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), defied all the canons of intelligence work by parachuting into France at the end of February 1943. Moulin chose the moment to return to London and did not return to France until 21 March.

There was considerable friction between BCRA officers and those of Major Maurice Buckmaster’s Section F of SOE, on whom BCRA depended for clandestine pick-ups in France and the return of agents to the field, for arms and other supply drops and for finance and communications links. BCRA was, however, kept at arm’s length by SOE’s creation of Section RF (standing for République Française) whose main function was to separate the two organisations, allegedly because BCRA was riddled with double agents reporting to Vichy. Seemingly justifying SOE’s caution, on 9 June 1943 in Paris the Gestapo arrested Moulin’s military counterpart General Charles Delestraint, code name ‘Vidal’. He was a man so unsuited for the clandestine life that he was caught after signing his true name in a hotel register. Once arrested, there could be no question of denying his mission or using an alibi because he was carrying identity papers in his own name. Detained with him was one René Hardy, who was liberated a few days later with no marks of ill treatment, but did not tell his Resistance comrades that he had been arrested.

The major breakthrough in unifying the many Resistance movements came on 27 May 1943, when the first meeting was held, in Paris, of the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR). Three of the movements were those of the Free Zone, co-existing uneasily thanks to Jean Moulin; the other five were from the Occupied Zone, brought together by fellow Gaullist Pierre Brossolette, and represented six political parties and two national trade unions.

On 21 June 1943 Moulin committed a fatal error. Although well aware that he was being hunted all over France by the Gestapo and its French collaborators, he called a meeting in Caluire, a suburb of Lyon, of the heads of the eight Resistance networks in the CNR. Any one of the attendees was likely to be under surveillance and thus unwittingly to lead his shadowers to the meeting. It is hard to find a sane reason for such a major error, which may have been due to a disarming sense of triumph at getting this group of powerful men to set aside their internecine conflicts in a common cause.

The venue for the meeting in the afternoon of 21 June was in the house of dental surgeon Dr Dugoujon, chosen because Moulin thought they could enter and leave unnoticed among the coming and going of Dugoujon’s patients. Frenay, in London for a briefing, was represented by his deputy Henri Aubry, who brought along René Hardy. Representing LIBERATION-SUD was a PCF member named Raymond Aubrac.

The dentist’s house was already staked out before they arrived and the meeting had no sooner begun than Gestapo agents burst in and handcuffed everyone, including genuine patients awaiting treatment. As they were all being herded into closed vans, Hardy made a run for it. Despite several Gestapo men turning automatic weapons in his direction, he escaped with only a slight leg wound – a remarkable achievement for a man running with his wrists cuffed behind the back.

The job of eliciting information from those arrested fell to the infamous SS Obersturmführer Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo boss in Lyon, who earned the title ‘The Butcher of Lyon’. In his torture chambers at the Ecole de Santé Militaire, Moulin claimed he was Jacques Martel, an art dealer from Nice, and gave the address of a genuine art gallery there, of which he was the legal owner. Barbie brushed this alibi aside, calling him by his Resistance code name, ‘Max’. What happened in the following thirty hours is best left to the imagination. The local French police noted the arrest routinely, between reports of ID cards stolen from a town hall and an increase in thefts of vegetables from private gardens. On the evening of 23 June the ‘trusty’ prison barber in Montluc prison was ordered to shave an unconscious man, who had obviously been severely tortured and whose flesh was cold to his touch. Moulin mumbled something in English and asked for water. The guard rinsed out a shaving mug and the barber held it to Moulin’s mouth, but he could only swallow a few drops before losing consciousness again.

Driven to Paris, he was lodged for two weeks in a cell at No. 40 Boulevard Victor Hugo, a suburban villa in Neuilly used by the Gestapo as an interrogation centre. Delestraint and another prisoner were brought there from Fresnes prison to be shown Moulin lying on a stretcher. Noting that his skin had turned yellow and his respiration was hardly noticeable, the dignified Delestraint, who could speak German, replied coldly to the guards’ questions with, ‘How do you expect me to identify a man in that condition?’

Officially, Jean Moulin died in a train taking him to Germany on 8 July 1943, aged 44. General Delestraint was transferred to the concentration camp at Natzwiller
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in Alsace and from there in September to Dachau, where he was shot and cremated on the morning of 19 April 1945, aged 64. In one successful operation the Gestapo had neutralised both the military and the political leaders of the Gaullist Resistance.