The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (28 page)

But POWs were an encumbrance, and he sought to hand them over to the American military. On a road to the northeast of Grenoble, he saw a sign indicating the field HQ of an American unit, and followed it, driving a truck flying the Cross of Lorraine, flag of the Résistance. A second truck carrying the prisoners and their commando guards brought up the rear.

America, with its ideals of individual liberty and democracy, had inspired and given hope to Michel throughout the war. The Constitution, and the human values and aspirations contained in it, was close to his heart. ‘I was impressed that the US was not only fighting
against
evil, but for a better world.’ Now, finally, after years of suffering and combat, he was to meet his first American. He prepared himself for an emotional encounter.

‘We drove up to the unit and there was an officer standing there, a captain. He was not in combat fatigues, but very neat and well turned out. I stepped down from the truck and introduced myself and explained that I had come to hand over prisoners.’

The captain looked Michel up and down contemptuously, and then cast a dismissive glance in the direction of the motley collection of men who made up his force. ‘Who the hell are
you
?’ he exclaimed. It was true that at first glance the
résistants
resembled pirates more than soldiers. They were dressed in the uniform of the FFI, or a bedraggled version as close to it as they could achieve, and sported the skull and crossbones patch of Résistance commandos. ‘I can’t be bothered with prisoners,’ the American captain added curtly. He went on to make disparaging comments about the commandos’ uniforms and patches, and ignorantly questioned the validity of the Cross of Lorraine, the flag under which so many of the Maquis had died.

At first Michel remained silent, incredulous at the unexpected reception, and then his anger began to build. None of his group understood English, but the American’s tone of contempt, redolent of the arrogance of officers of the German occupying army, did not need translation.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Michel yelled, his anger boiling over. ‘What the hell are you doing in that American uniform? You don’t belong in it!’ He pointed towards the stunned POWs in the truck. ‘You talk like a German - you belong with them! You should be in an SS uniform!’

He lunged at the American, grabbed his coat and began to tear it from him. The commandos watched the assault in mute confusion before a couple of GIs pulled Michel from their captain and took him to the commander. ‘He was a very different man and apologised. He took the prisoners and made everything all right. But I was still furious.’

In Grenoble, the Biviers Commando was formed into a Special Police Group, and Michel was put in charge of the investigation and arrest of Milice, Vichy officials and criminal collaborators. He also served with the Deuxième Bureau (French Army intelligence).
[118]
It appealed to his sense of irony that the hunted had finally become the hunter. In the days following liberation, there were hundreds of arrests and Michel’s unit was especially active. Those captured were taken before a judge and formally charged, but retribution was not always so measured as the population took its revenge all over the country. Members of the Milice in particular often met with rough and ready justice. They were hanged from lamp-posts, made to dig their own graves and even burned alive. ‘I had nothing to do with that sort of thing and regretted it. I was not seeking revenge but intent on doing a job that I considered important. I wanted to see these people brought to justice.’

There were also swift reprisals on the day of liberation for the cruelty of the Germans in Grenoble. The populace remembered with bitterness the fate of ten young non-combatant hostages taken in the Vercors after two Germans had been killed. They were jailed for months until the SS took them from their cells, telling them they were to be set free. The hostages were driven in a truck in the early hours of the morning to the Cours Beriat and killed one by one with a shot to the neck. Their bodies were left on the pavement until noon as an example. Now, in an act of revenge, nine young French militiamen who had served beside the Germans were taken to the same place, tied to posts and shot before a jeering crowd.

Others harshly treated were the
collabos horizontales
(horizontal collaborators), the name given to French girls who had slept with German soldiers. Their heads were shaved and they were dragged through the streets, mocked and beaten. The strength of feeling against them can best be judged by a comment made by the FFI chaplain-general, a man who later became an advocate of forgiveness and reconciliation. He recorded an incident in his diary of entering a café full of German soldiers accompanied by French girls. He stared hard at one and she blushed to the roots of her hair. ‘Those girls could be dipped in tar and burned in the public square and it would affect me no more than a fire in a fireplace of a neighbour’s house.’
[119]

Gertrude Stein, the American writer, who spent the entire war in the mountains north of Grenoble in the village of Culoz, was similarly hard-hearted to the breed. ‘Today the village is excited terribly excited because they are shaving the heads of girls who kept company with the Germans during the occupation. It is called the coiffure of 1944, and naturally it is terrible because the shaving is done publicly... Life in the Middle Ages, it certainly is most interesting, and logical it certainly is.’
[120]

One of the
horizontals
came under Michel’s jurisdiction when he was asked to deliver her to the authorities. She sat meekly beside him in the jeep as she was driven to her fate. He looked across at her, a young, attractive girl apart from her crudely shaved head. ‘I was tempted to let her go. And I think that any appeal or explanation on her part would have swayed me. But as I looked at her I realised she was psychologically gone. She expected punishment and was resigned totally to it. Perhaps she even welcomed it. She had no urge to escape and reminded me of those at Les Milles who had succumbed to the Siren Song, or the last man chasing the tumbril to take him to the guillotine. Had I stopped the jeep and let her go she would not have understood. She expected to be delivered, so I delivered her.’

His new role as policeman put him in constant contact with the US military and he found he got along well with Americans despite his disastrous first encounter. ‘The more I met, and liked, the more I thought of how influenced we are by first impressions. They can change our lives. The captain might have turned me into an anti-American for life. I hope not, but it could have happened.’

The American Army was preparing to move on and fulfil their mission of pursuing the retreating Germans through France and into Germany itself. For the men and women of the Résistance in Grenoble, and the mountain area surrounding it, the war was finally over. But for Michel it had simply entered a new phase, and he was now detached from the FFI to join the American Army as a liaison officer.

He was attached to the S-2 (Combat Intelligence) section of the 1st Battalion, 180th Infantry, of the 45th Division - known as the Thunderbirds - US Seventh Army. Although it was highly irregular for a foreign national to work in combat intelligence, the Americans were more than happy to have him. His French and English were fluent, and he spoke German like a native. From now on he would wear the uniform of the American Army, but he refused to take any pay because he felt that would make him a mercenary. ‘It was all most unusual, but it was also in the midst of war. I had already established good relations with American combat intelligence. I didn’t need money because everything was provided and the cigarette ration was like hard currency.’

He particularly liked the cheerful, battle-hardened ‘citizen soldiers’ of the Thunderbirds, and the more he learned about them and their combat record for the previous year, the more he admired them. The 45th was a National Guard infantry division, headquartered in Oklahoma City, and originally made up of non-professional ‘citizen soldiers’ from the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Its recruits were mostly tough young country boys who had been brought up in the hard times of the Depression. Its history was tough too, stretching back to the taming of the Wild West. Although the American Army was segregated from the time of the Civil War throughout the Second World War, the Thunderbirds included many thousands of Native American Indians from tribes such as the Cherokee, Apache, Sioux, Osage and Comanche.
[121]

The fifteen thousand men of the Thunderbirds, fresh from Stateside training camps, had experienced their first taste of enemy fire as they waded ashore on the southern beaches of the island of Sicily on 10 July 1943. It was a date the green troops would come to remember as well as their birthdays. The amphibious landings on Sicily were a success, casualties were relatively light, and the Thunderbirds moved quickly across the island. The men faced their first real test when they ran head on into the newly raised Herman Goering Panzer Division, the elite of the Luftwaffe’s ground troops, but after little over a month of combat the island of Sicily was taken. The performance impressed the commander of the Seventh Army, General George S. Patton: ‘The 45th Division, a green outfit, went into combat with two veteran outfits, and asked no favours, made no excuses... I’m damned proud of every officer and man in the division.’
[122]

Italy sued for an armistice on 3 September 1945, switching sides in the war, but the Germans dug in and committed themselves to defending every inch of territory. The Thunderbirds now landed at Salerno, south of Naples, in the face of well-planned and determined German Résistance. The enemy finally withdrew to its defensive mountain line further north and took up winter positions. The Allies would be forced to fight their way up the Italian boot in one of the toughest struggles with the Wehrmacht on any front in the Second World War. The terrain favoured the defence, and advancing troops had to endure heavy rains which washed away bridges and turned motor pools and bivouac areas into marshes.

At the end of January 1944 an infantry battalion of the Thunderbirds landed on the beach at Anzio, and the entire division became committed to what was to prove a savage and costly campaign, one of the bloodiest battles in US military history. The plan called for an amphibious landing to the rear of the Germans’ forward winter position, just thirty miles south of Rome. The attack caught the enemy by surprise, but the Allies spent too long landing men and equipment and became trapped on the beachhead. The Germans launched a furious counter-attack with the intention of liquidating the confined force. Elements of seven German divisions, with full air support from the Luftwaffe and the heaviest artillery bombardment of the Italian campaign, were brought to bear. The conflict raged over four months, involved hundreds of thousands of men, and was more akin to a First World War battle, with massive artillery bombardments and human-wave assaults. Casualties were heavy on both sides, but the tenacity of the Thunderbirds saved the beachhead.
[123]

The Thunderbirds then faced months of slogging battle through Italy until they reached the south bank of the Tiber, entering Rome across a blown bridge on 5 June. A month later the division was back in the Salerno area for intensive amphibious training. And after a further two weeks they were wading ashore at St Maxime on the French Riviera. The men Michel now came across had been in combat for more than a year and displayed a battle-hardened confidence he recognised. It felt good to be among them. ‘I grew to love the men of the 45th. These were combat troops from Oklahoma, a long way from home, who faced heavy fighting with great individual courage. I developed enormous respect for the capabilities and fighting spirit of the US Army.’
[124]

The Americans moved north out of Grenoble. The German Army in southern France had been ordered by Berlin to conduct an orderly fighting retreat, and the military command in Lyon was ordered to hold the city until the Xlth SS Panzer Division had passed through. The Wehrmacht was threatened with encirclement as the Allied armies coming from Normandy and the south moved closer to joining up. General Patton reached Orleans at the same time as the Americans reached Grenoble. Lyon found itself trapped in an ever-tightening vice.

German control of the city had been on the verge of break-down since the liberation of Grenoble, and it now drifted towards anarchy as members of the Résistance erected barricades and mounted a sustained campaign of sniping. But the Wehrmacht held on, ruthlessly demolishing whole blocks of apartments thought to shelter snipers. German soldiers continued to patrol the streets as retreating units from infantry divisions, as well as the Xlth Panzer Division, passed through unhindered.

At Gestapo headquarters, Klaus Barbie gave the order to destroy archives and begin the final ‘cleansing’ operation. More than twenty French collaborators complicit in Gestapo crimes were murdered in order to remove witnesses. Barbie then turned his attention to the large prison population in Montluc.

On 17 August, one hundred and nine prisoners, half of whom were Jewish, were taken to Bron airport on the outskirts of the city. They were told they were going on a work detail to fill bomb craters made by an Allied raid a few days earlier, and they were given shovels to unload a truck full of earth. A German-speaking Alsatian, who had been taken along as interpreter, tried to intercede with the adjutant on behalf of a Jewish prisoner, who had both arms in bandages.