On the night of 19/20 March, another Lysander flew Moulin and Delestraint back to France, where the flame of resistance was beginning to take hold. This change of mood was due, principally, to three factors.
The first was the increasing severity of German reprisals. In the beginning, hostages were taken at random, held against some required action by the French civil authorities and then released. But when Germans started to be assassinated, things took a much darker turn. On 20 October 1941 the German military commander of Nantes was shot dead. The Germans responded by taking fifty hostages from the local community and summarily executed them. As this practice became more and more widespread French outrage and anger deepened and the ranks of the Resistance swelled.
The second event which transformed the nature of the Resistance movement in France began at dawn on 8 November 1942, when Allied troops stormed ashore on the beaches of French North Africa. The strategic consequences of Operation Torch were very quickly understood by the Germans. Now the defeat of their forces under Field Marshal Rommel and the Allied occupation of the whole of the North African coast were only a matter of time. Germany’s hold on continental Europe could now be threatened not just from the Channel in the north, but also from the Mediterranean in the south. Three days after Torch, the Germans swept aside the barriers on the Demarcation Line and, amid squeals of protest from the Vichy government, sent their armoured columns surging south to complete their occupation of the whole of metropolitan France. This destroyed the Vichy government’s constitutional legality and laid bare the bankruptcy of their claim to be the protectors of what remained of French pride and sovereignty.
It also had another, even more powerful effect. The Vichy Armistice Army, or Armée de l’Armistice, created from the broken elements of France’s defeated armies, was immediately disbanded, causing some of its units to take to the maquis. Some dispersed individually and reassembled under their commanders in the forests, taking with them their structures, their ranks, their customs and even their regimental standards. From about January 1943 onwards, senior ex-Armistice Army officers, including two who will be important in our story, Henri Zeller and Marcel Descour, began to work more closely with Delestraint’s Secret Army. To start with, both forces, though co-operating closely with each other, maintained their separate autonomy. But in December 1943 they agreed to fuse together to form a single military structure, the FFI – the French Forces of the Interior, or Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur – under de Gaulle’s command.
The third and arguably greatest factor which turned many French men and women from relative apathy to armed resistance was Germany’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for resources and manpower. The Germans demanded 60 per cent of all France’s agricultural production, amounting to some 600,000 tonnes of food and equipment a month, causing severe rationing and acute food shortages, especially in the cities. Inevitably this in turn gave birth to an extensive, all-pervasive (and all-providing) black market. It was, however, Germany’s demand for labour which, more than anything else, provided the French Resistance with the recruits it needed to become a genuine popular movement.
It all began with a bargain which seemed, given the exigencies of war and France’s position as a subjugated nation, reasonable enough. With so many of her male population under arms, Germany was desperate for labour to run her industries and work her farms. Programmes to attract workers from France were implemented. These included a Sauckel/Laval scheme initiated in June 1942 (known in France as La Relève – the levy)under which the Germans would exchange prisoners of war for specialised volunteer workers on a ratio of 1 to 3. But by late summer 1942 La Relève had produced only some 40,000 new workers – nothing like enough for Germany’s needs; Sauckel demanded more.
To fulfil these new German demands, Pétain and Laval signed a law on 4 September 1942 requiring all able-bodied men aged between eighteen and fifty and all single women between twenty-one and thirty-five ‘to do any work that the Government deems necessary’. By these means the Sauckel/Laval deal was completed, albeit a month late, in November 1942. But this merely encouraged the Germans to demand even more. This time, in exchange for 250,000 French workers, an equal number of French PoWs would be given, not their freedom, but the status of ‘free workers’ in Germany. Laval agreed, but soon found that he could not keep his side of the bargain without adopting new measures of coercion. A law was passed on 16 February 1943 which required all males over twenty to be subject to the Compulsory Labour Organization (known as the STO after its French name – Service du Travail Obligatoire) and regulations governing the STO were issued the same day, calling up all those aged twenty to twenty-three for compulsory work in Germany. In March 1943, Sauckel again upped the stakes, demanding a further 400,000 workers, 220,000 of whom would go to Germany while the remainder would be handed over to Organisation Todt, the German-run labour force in France.
Of all the events in the early years of the German occupation which helped turn France against her occupiers, undermined the Vichy administration and boosted the cause of the Resistance, none did so more, or more quickly, than the establishment of the STO. The German Ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, later remarked: ‘If ever the Maquis were to erect monuments in France, the most important should be dedicated to “Our best recruitment agent, Gauleiter Sauckel”.’
There were public demonstrations against the STO across France, one being in the little market town of Romans under the western edge of the Vercors. Here, on 9 and 10 March 1943, the entire population occupied the railway station shouting, ‘Death to Laval! Death to Pétain! Long live de Gaulle!’ and stood in front of the train taking their young men away to Germany. Huge numbers of young men, now known as réfractaires, took to the maquis to avoid being sent to Germany. SOE agents reported to London on 12 March 1943 that the number of young men who had gone into hiding in the Savoie and Isère departments alone had reached 5,000 and was rising at an increasing rate every week.
These young men fled to the maquis for a complex set of reasons, not all of them to do with patriotism. For some it was simply a matter of avoiding being sent to Germany. For others it was seen as a form of civil disobedience. For many it was the romance of living the clandestine life in the mountains and the forests. Down there on the plain, men and women lived lives which were inevitably tainted by the daily exigencies of coexistence with the enemy. But up there in the high places and the forests the air was clean and freedom was pure and uncompromised.
But whatever their motives, all now lived as outlaws who had to rely on the already established Resistance movements for their food, shelter and protection. London recognized the opportunity and sent huge sums of money, mostly through Jean Moulin, to pay for food and shelter for the réfractaires. The French Resistance movements now found themselves with a growing of pool of young men whom they quickly set about turning into fully trained, armed and committed Maquisards.
It was probably in response to the new threat posed by this rise of the Resistance that, on 30 January 1943, Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval created – with help from the Germans – a new and much hated paramilitary force, the black-shirted Milice Française or French Militia, whose exclusive task was to fight the Resistance. Made up chiefly of Frenchmen who supported fascism, but including many from the criminal fraternity, the Milice by 1944 achieved a total strength in Vichy France, including part-time members, of perhaps 30,000. Although they worked very closely with both the Italians and the Germans, they were largely autonomous from any Vichy authority outside their own line of command, often operating outside the law and beyond its reach when it came to the torture, summary execution and assassination of their fellow French men and women.
And so it was that, by the early months of 1943, the forests and fastnesses of places like the Vercors had become home and refuge to a polyglot collection of the broken elements of defeated France: its new generations, its old administrators, its competing political parties, its heterodox communities and the scattered fragments of its once proud army. With the United States now in the war, with the Allied landings in North Africa and, just ten days later, the German defeat
