The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (31 page)

But the drop had taken place in daylight, the ‘parachutes clear as hell against the sky’, Francis commented bitterly.
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Within half an hour a German reconnaissance plane flew over and strafed the drop zone. Everyone ran for cover except Christine who, looking up at them with her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, ‘seemed so serene and unconcerned’, according to Sylviane, that those around her almost questioned their own reactions.
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Half an hour later two more fighters appeared, this time heading for the hills. ‘Les Amerlots!’ the cry went up.
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It was only when the planes’ swastikas were clearly visible that the maquisards realized these were not more Allies. The planes flew low, skimming the roofs of the Vercors towns to empty their machine guns. Seven hours of bombing followed. In Vassieux-en-Vercors the town’s schoolchildren were caught among incendiary bombs that sent flames thirty metres into the air, but most managed to hide in cellars and the local caves. When they dared to come out again, at eleven that night, ‘the town had been destroyed’, rubble and bodies lying in piles where houses, church and boulangerie had stood that morning, and the Vercors plateau was surrounded by Wehrmacht troops.
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The Vercors is an immense, blue-grey limestone plateau in the shape of an arrowhead, about forty miles long, eighteen wide, and in places reaching heights of 1,000 metres. Sitting between the departments of the Drôme and the Isère, this high plain marks the connection of four major communication routes from Grenoble to Aix, Marseille and Nice. Breathtakingly beautiful, on most sides the plateau is bounded by sheer chalk cliffs; elsewhere the landscape is almost Alpine. Its huge river gorges and dense beech and pine forests, full of wild chamois, protect several small villages with rich orchards and farmlands, and its many rocky outcrops hide extensive caves below. It is hard to imagine better territory in which to shelter a growing clandestine army.

By early 1943 Germany’s diminished labour force was straining to meet its production requirements. The Nazis had already brought over Polish workers, who were doing a good job of limiting their useful output while, wherever possible, sending supplies back to the Polish underground. On 15 February 1943 Germany put into action the Service du Travail Obligatoire, or STO, in France, to tap into French labour resources. The Vercors, which had already been used as a training base for local resistance groups, now became a magnet for thousands of young Frenchmen avoiding conscription for forced labour in Germany or even dispatch to the Russian front. Many set up camps among the dense forests on the Vercors plateau. They were not paid and had no false papers or ration cards, so they, and the families they had left behind, somehow had to be supported. Most were dressed in civilian clothes, with heavy-duty boots, baggy trousers and jumpers over open-necked shirts, and blue berets or flat caps on their heads. Others wore faded pinstripe suits, or a few bits of uniform kept from the last war. Some had no shoes and had to make moccasins out of tough parachute silk. At first they also had very few arms. Nevertheless they formed into units with strong chains of command and communications, arranged supplies of food, clothes and equipment through local farmers and existing resistance networks, and trained their dogs to bark at strangers from further down the slopes. The French Maquis had been born.

By May 1943 there were several hundred Maquis in the hills. ‘Vercors has a finely organised army,’ Francis reported to London, ‘but they need long-distance and anti-tank weapons.’
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The response was ambiguous. Experience in Yugoslavia had already demonstrated the Wehrmacht’s ability to deal effectively with guerrilla forces, and yet there were clearly the makings of a significant resistance army in the Vercors, one that could be hugely valuable in hampering Nazi communications and troop movement in the run-up to the Allied invasion. As a result, light arms were dropped, and carried into the camps by foot or in farm carts but, to intense French frustration, no heavy weapons followed.

Francis too had mixed feelings about the Maquis. On the one hand he recognized their potential as a guerrilla army which, if organized into small groups, armed and trained, could mount effective sabotage and ambush attacks. To this end he joined local leaders from the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, or FFI, the well-organized French resistance loyal to de Gaulle, to give advice, and instruction in the use of Sten sub-machine guns and revolvers. He even loaned them Albert and his radio. But Francis was also critical of this army-in-waiting, believing it was more useful, if more dangerous, to stay at home, derailing trains by night and returning to work as usual the next day, ‘than to sit in the woods and behave like a boy scout’.
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Nonetheless, by the end of 1943 there were eight large camps, each with eighty to a hundred men, sleeping in hastily constructed huts, lean-tos or tents made from parachute silk, and hundreds more living in shepherds’ huts, in the villages, or on local farms across the Vercors.

As far as possible Francis was determined to keep his Jockey sabotage network separate, while encouraging the Maquis to develop along similar lines. He felt that the value of the Vercors plateau lay mainly in its potential as an Allied landing site, and as a shelter for a shadow army able to attack German forces repeatedly in small ways, in a hundred different places, without ever showing where they could be attacked in turn. The basic tenet of guerrilla warfare was, after all, never to try to hold a position, but to do as much damage as possible and disappear. Furthermore, SOE agents had been directed to take ‘particular care … to avoid premature large-scale risings of patriots’.
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However, by the autumn of 1943 the French had started working on a grander plan. The Vercors plateau was now being referred to as ‘an impregnable citadel’, to be championed as free territory before Allied reinforcements arrived.
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In the spring of 1944 news came, via a BBC radio ‘personal message’, that General de Gaulle had personally approved the idea, and that up to 4,000 paratroops would be dropped into the Vercors.

Over a few optimistic weeks, dropping zones were prepared on the plateau, code-named, strangely, after articles of stationery. ‘Pencil sharpener’ was to serve parachute deliveries from Algiers, ‘dividers’ was to receive those from Britain, and ‘paper-weight’, ‘gummed paper’ and ‘paper-knife’ were all made generally available. At the same time, emboldened by the sanction of de Gaulle as much as by the sheer cliffs that formed a natural protective barrier between the Vercors interior and the surrounding countryside, the Maquis’s sabotage operations were becoming increasingly daring. Not only were consignments of food and fuel being captured, train tracks, bridges, telephone and telegraph cables were sabotaged, power pylons brought tumbling to their knees, and key roads blocked by felling the most strategic of the thousands of trees planted by Napoleon to provide shade for his marching soldiers over a hundred years before.

Horrendous reprisals then began. After one attack on a convoy on the Route Nationale that left nearly sixty Wehrmacht soldiers dead, a captured maquisard was tied to a village post to be made an example of. He insisted that he was a regular soldier with an American unit, which saved the village, but then his eyes and tongue were torn out before he was bayoneted in front of the villagers. Despite such atrocities, by the early summer of 1944 the plateau was home to an irregular army of over 3,000 men, with more streaming in from across the region and some from as far as Paris.

FFI leaders, and Francis and his Jockey circuit, were now stockpiling supplies in preparation for the major push to support the Allied invasion, but there was still great confusion around the timing of that invasion. At the start of June, Colin Gubbins, his American counterpart Colonel David Bruce, and the French hero General Pierre Koenig, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of the FFI, were still in London discussing the plans. The original intention was to mount two concurrent assaults: a major invasion on the north-west coast and a secondary operation in the south. When the southern invasion was delayed Koenig assumed that the resistance rising in the south would be put back correspondingly. Now he reluctantly agreed that, to prevent warning the enemy where they should concentrate their battalions, the resistance should be called into action simultaneously across the country, at least for a few vital days.

On 5 June, as the ‘Overlord’ armada neared the Normandy beaches, the BBC broadcast seventy coded messages mainly for the circuits operating in the north of France, such as ‘Giraffe, why do you have so long a neck’ and ‘The cats mate in the front garden’.
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The next day the resistance swept into action with nearly a thousand acts of sabotage undertaken in twenty-four hours. The precise date for ‘Dragoon’, the Allied invasion of the south, was still under wraps, and further south there was some dispute as to whether the specific call to the Vercors, ‘The Alpine chamois leaps’, had been included.
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But there was no doubt that a nationwide rising had been signalled and Francis had received the call to action for the Jockey network.

After years of bearing the humiliation of defeat and occupation, and witnessing the arrest and execution of friends, the desire to make a stand proved irresistible for men impatient for action across France. Among them were the leaders of the Vercors Maquis. ‘The supreme battle is being fought…’, De Gaulle broadcast to the French nation the following night, laying their fears to rest. ‘For the sons of France, wherever they are, whoever they are, the simple and sacred duty is to fight the enemy by every means at their disposal.’
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In a bold statement of intent, a tricolore flag bearing the Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the resistance, was raised over the Vercors plateau on 7 June.

On hearing of the Allied landings in Normandy, Francis and his friend Gilbert Galletti, a resistance leader in the Hautes-Alpes, had trekked into the hills to recover hidden munitions and prepare for action. A few days later Francis was informed that his circuit was now officially part of the French Forces, and he was in effect deputy to Colonel Henri Zeller, the FFI regional commander for the south-east and one of the ‘moving spirits’ of the French resistance.

A series of what Brooks Richards called ‘increasingly pathetic and desperate calls’ to Algiers for heavy artillery, anti-aircraft guns and anti-tank weapons followed.
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None were available, and in any case it would have been impossible to supply sufficient ammunition for a sustained battle for anything heavier than a bazooka. ‘They had got the impression that paratroop reinforcement might be expected within a very short time’, Brooks Richards said later, avoiding any notion of conceding Allied responsibility. ‘Well, of course it was quite irresponsible … No one had consulted the US or Great Britain as to whether they could supply the Vercors.’
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The extent of the breakdown in communications between field and HQ became apparent not when Brooks Richards replied to Francis, blaming atmospheric conditions for preventing sorties, but when Koenig in London defied all expectations with the order, ‘Send the men home because mobilised prematurely’.
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The thousands of Maquis would be arrested immediately if they went back home, and in any case they were already far too committed to stand down. London clearly had little understanding of the situation on the ground, while the expectations of the Maquis were hopelessly unrealistic.

That same week a group of men working with Francis received an order to hand over all their recruits, arms and explosives for the defence of Barcelonnette, a medieval town in the Basses-Alpes that was strategically placed on the principal route in and out of Italy. As the note was not signed by anyone they knew, Francis told his men not to comply. He received an immediate response informing him that if he did not obey orders he would be ‘court-martialled and shot’.
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Nerves were fraying, but an apology soon followed, with a request that Francis himself come to Barcelonnette.

Francis was amazed to find the tricolore decorating Barcelonnette’s faded stone town hall. The local German garrison had been temporarily overcome and the town was now being defended by the FFI. Colonel Zeller, just arrived from Lyon, met Francis on the town hall steps, along with local resistance leaders and Captain Hay, a British officer recently dropped from Algiers. Hay believed the Allied landings in the south were due within a week, and liberating columns could be expected in less than ten days. The town was being held by 600 men, all in high spirits and some in uniform, with 600 tricolore armbands, but arms and equipment for only 250, some of which were the men’s own hunting rifles or relics from the Great War. They had just twenty rounds of ammunition each. It was a pitifully small force with which to face Nazi tanks, regardless of anticipated reinforcements. To make matters worse, neither Francis nor Zeller was expecting the southern invasion imminently.

Francis was astonished when Zeller demanded that he hand over his stock of arms and explosives. It was, he said, impossible. The arms had been distributed, some to people who had been waiting years for them. ‘If you have a nice but fierce dog and you give him a bone,’ Francis argued, ‘you don’t put your hand out and take it away again.’
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In any case he felt that they would have been giving up all their equipment, simply ‘for the Germans to capture’.
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Seeing that the situation was critical he did, however, agree to send a small force across the mountains to attack from the rear. He also sent urgent signals to Algiers resulting in the drop of over a hundred containers of anti-tank arms on 11 June. Unfortunately many of these supplies were collected by enemy troops. Four days later the Germans moved in – too fast for Francis to bring his reserves to bear. 150 men were killed defending Barcelonnette, including Captain Hay, who was mown down by machine-gun fire during a heroic bid to take out a third German tank with the only PIAT anti-tank weapon that Francis had been able to provide.