The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance, D-Day and the Battle for the Vercors 1944
From the bestselling and prize-winning author of ‘A Brilliant Little Operation’ comes the long neglected D-Day story of the largest action by the French Resistance during WWII, published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings.In early 1941, three separate groups of plotters – one military, one political, one intellectual – began to organise and plan on and around the forbidding mountainous plateau near Grenoble – the Vercors. The aims of the groups were the same: to hasten the departure of the German occupiers; to restore the pride of France after its fall and the humiliations of the puppet Vichy government which followed; and to build a new France. The overwhelming desire to get rid of the Germans would unite them. Their different views of the France they hoped for in the future would divide them.Over the next three years these sparks of resistance would grow to challenge the might of the hated German occupiers. As the Allied troops stormed the D-Day beaches, the Vercors rose up to fight the Nazis in a planned rearguard action. It was to prove not only the largest Resistance action of the entire war but also, in the severity of the German response, the most brutal crushing of resistance forces in Western Europe.For the men and women of Vercors, aided and abetted by the Free French forces of General de Gaulle and SOE operatives from London, the events on the Vercors took them on a journey from early idealism through hope, misjudgement, folly, despair, sacrifice and slaughter to a kind of cruel victory. The tragedy drew the attention of those at the highest level of the Allied war effort and placed the Vercors deep into the heart of the history of modern France in a way which resonates still in the country’s daily life and politics.Long overlooked by English language histories, this magnificent book sets the story in the context of D-Day, the muddle of politics and many misjudgements of D-Day planners in both London and Algiers, and – most importantly – it gives voice to the many Maquisards fighters who fought to gain a voice in their country’s future.
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William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers,
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London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014
Copyright © Paddy Ashdown 2014
Maps by Harriet McDougall
Paddy Ashdown asserts his moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
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Cover photographs © Musée départmental de la Résistance du Vercors, Vassieux-en-Vercors
Maps by Harriet McDougall
Source ISBN: 9780007520800
Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007520824
Version: 2014-11-28
To the boy in the white shirt
CONTENTS
1 The Vercors before the Vercors
2 France from the Fall to 1943: Setting the Scene
7 Expectation, Nomadisation and Decapitation
8 Retreat, Retrenchment and Reconstruction
15 Weapons, Wirelesses, Air Drops and Codes
19 The First Five Days of June 1944
22 The First Battle of Saint-Nizier
23 The Second Battle of Saint-Nizier
32 The End of Dreams: Friday 21 July 1944
33 Fighting On: Saturday 22 July 1944
34 The Final Battles: Sunday 23 July 1944
In this text I have not included dialogue unless it comes from a source who I have reason to believe might have been present at the time or it has been noted down as dialogue in the course of taking testimony from a living witness.
Since this story concerns primarily military operations, I have used the twenty-four-hour clock throughout. In 1943 and 1944 all British forces in the European theatre used Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) plus one hour (UK Single Summer Time) from 16 August to 3 April, and GMT plus two hours from 4 April to 15 August (UK Double Summer Time). The time used in all German-occupied western European territories was Central European Time (CET), which in that era was UK Single Summer Time plus two hours. Since this story takes place primarily in France, all times in the text are given in, or adjusted to be consistent with, CET.
For a similar reason, units of measurement have been converted, where appropriate, to the metric scale.
Readers may want to know what the wartime franc was worth. Prices more than doubled during the four years of the German occupation of France, and inflation was very much worse on the black market. But one can get a rough idea of money values if one thinks of 1,000 francs in 1943–4 as the equivalent of 250 euros or £200 today.
Except where otherwise stated the translations of French source documents into English are those of the author. Where the original French was in a written formal document I have tried to make the translation as precise as possible. Where the original source is oral (for example, the oral evidence of witnesses) I have allowed myself greater latitude to cope with the differences in sentence formation between spoken French and English in an attempt to preserve the original sense and colour, while conveying this to the English reader in the most readable fashion.
The word ‘maquis’ has subtly different meanings in English and French. The word originates from the Corsican term for the dry scrub which covers the hills of southern and Mediterranean France, but even more so from a Corsican expression prendre le maquis, which means to shelter in the woods to escape the authorities or a vendetta (to go underground). Even today, the word is used by the French primarily to describe those who resisted the Germans by going into the countryside and especially the wilder places. They formed into groups which sometimes took the name of the area they operated in – for instance, le maquis du Vercors
