The news is increasingly wonderful; and it is important now not to be killed during the next few weeks. There is still fighting in Paris, but everywhere in France our troops are making sensational advances. Rumania is on our side, Bulgaria is asking for peace, Russia marches on … The Marne, Chateau Thierry, the Allied Victories. It is so like 1918, the same names and places and forward triumphant march towards victory.

HENRY ‘CHIPS’ CHANNON

1

This was the diarist and parliamentarian ‘Chips’ Channon, ten days after the Allied landings in the south of France. The note of euphoria in the wake of the initial success of Overlord in Normandy, then Dragoon on the French Riviera was infectious. There were many who thought the end of the summer of 1944 would bring the end of the war. The 20 July bomb plot to assassinate Hitler, the Russian offensive that had brought the Soviets to the steel doors of his Rastenburg HQ, General George Patton’s drive towards Paris, the pace of General Alexander Patch’s forces thrusting up from the Riviera – all had given credence to the idea. Germany would collapse abruptly, just as she had done in the autumn of 1918. It was a tempting notion, and there were all too many who gave in to temptation. Some of the Allied leaders themselves were no exception.

As a matter of long-agreed policy, in the first days of June they had given a call to action to the Resistance throughout France to support the imminent D-Day landings: to disrupt the Wehrmacht’s lines of communication, to derail reinforcements, to bomb, to sabotage, to do everything to support the Allied débarquements. The resistance was supported by SOE and OSS teams dropped in France for this purpose. Then, within twenty-four hours of the Normandy landings, there came more specific, targeted calls. These were from the Free French leader General de Gaulle, and from the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Italy, Field Marshal Harold Alexander. The pair broadcast separate calls to the maquis and the partisans, respectively in the French and the Italian Alps. On 5 June 1944, de Gaulle declared enigmatically from London on the BBC, ‘Le chamois des Alpes bondit’.1 This was the signal for the insurrection in the Vercors outside Grenoble, the ‘capital of the maquis’. On 6 June itself, as the British, Canadian and American landing craft surged towards the Normandy beaches, Alexander broadcast from the radio station in newly liberated Rome: ‘To those who have arms, use them … to workers and clerks, leave your work … to peasants … do all you can to help the patriots. The Allies are supplying patriot groups with thousands of automatic weapons. Find out whether there is one for you.’2

The results were momentous. They were also by no means what these two warlords had anticipated. The twenty Italian partisan republics declared during the ‘partisan summer’ – the largest Ossola – were an astonishing act of military and political courage from a people largely written off by the English-speaking Allies as cowards. Of the Vercors, de Gaulle’s biographer Robert Aron wrote, ‘Of all the episodes of liberation, none is more shocking, none more mysterious.’3

2

In early June 1944, the thirty-nine-year-old François Huet found himself the newly appointed military head of the Vercors, the great limestone table and natural fortress that lay immediately south-west of Grenoble in the Dauphiné. The plateau dominated the lines of communication, overseeing the routes through which an Allied force from the south of France from the long-heralded landings might drive up towards the Reich; likewise the lifeline along which the Wehrmacht would retreat. It was for this reason that Capitaine Alain Le Ray’s original plans for Operation Montagnards proposed supplementing the maquis established on the plateau since early 1941 with a force of regular infantry and artillery. The Vercors might then play a strategic role in the defeat of the occupying forces in south-eastern France by sallying forth to attack its lines of communication. A rising might also provide a beacon for the country as a whole. In May, Colonel Marcel Descour had told Huet, ‘The Vercors is the only maquis, in the whole of France, which has been given the mission to set up its own free territory. It will receive the arms, ammunition, and troops which will allow it to be the advance guard of a landing in Provence.’4 Under General Marie-Pierre Koenig, Descour was Chief of Staff of the newly formed Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). Created at de Gaulle’s instigation, the French Forces of the Interior were an amalgamation of the resistance into properly organised light infantry units. It was a formulation that symbolised the changing status of France from an occupied country to a resurgent nation on the cusp of liberation, of which the Vercors would be an emblem. Descour’s order meant something. The Vercors would not wait passively to be liberated. It would liberate itself. Vive la France!

Huet’s orders were clear and the broadcast from de Gaulle himself was clarion. The commandant mobilised the Vercors on 9 June 1944, three days after the D-Day landings and just as the bridgeheads on Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah were being established more than 500 miles north in Normandy. Huet called not only those on the plateau, but all in the immediate area. Wrote the eyewitness Roland Bechmann-Lescot: ‘From all directions, from Grenoble, Romans and Die, from every district and by every means of locomotion, on foot, by car, by the busload … the volunteers, on being summoned by the leaders of the Vercors, assembled, under the very noses of the Germans.’5 To the 500 or so maquis on the plateau would soon be added twice that number; according to some sources many more. Setting up his headquarters in Vassieux-en-Vercors, Huet duly divided his forces into five companies. He needed to train, arm and suitably dispose his maquis.

The village of St-Nizier-du-Moucherotte lay almost at the north-eastern tip of the plateau, immediately overlooking the Grenoble basin. St-Nizier was the terminus of a narrow-gauge tramline that ran the fifteen miles up from the city. The ascent here was moderately steep but of a gradient manageable by the tram: it was the one flank of the Vercors on which it was vulnerable. From here the city below could be seen: the Bastille fortifications, the square tower of the cathedral, the silvery confluence of the tumbling Drac and Isère rivers. From the city – almost from the barracks of the Wehrmacht’s 157th Reserve Division – the village could also be observed.

There, on the afternoon of 10 June 1944, the maquis under Huet’s orders closed the tramline and raised a giant tricolour. The Vercors was declaring its freedom from the occupying forces. ‘The weather’, wrote Huet’s Chief of Staff Pierre Tanant, ‘was magnificent in this month of June. The sky was a resplendent blue. It felt deliciously good at 1,000 metres in altitude. And above all on those verdant hills one felt free.’6 When the Grenoblois spotted the tricolour billowing lazily in the Provençal breeze, they might have been excused for thinking that the hour of liberation was itself at hand. It was intoxicating. Huet himself declared to the maquis under his command, ‘The eyes of the whole country are fixed on us … We have faith in each other. We have right on our side.’ For those who had lived through the bitter days of the Fall of France in June 1940 and endured the privation, repression, deportations and terror first of Vichy, then of the Italian Fourth Army, now of Generalleutnant Karl Pflaum’s 157th Reserve, it was a day of unparalleled joy. It was a jour de fête that evoked the folk memories of the Revolution of 1789.

Commandant Huet was human: he shared the euphoria. Yet as a professional soldier he was aware how precarious was the plateau’s position. The terrain certainly lent itself to defence. There were just eight roads up to the Vercors. Two of these rose up to passes more than 3,000 feet high. Here a child could turn back an army. The remainder were easily blocked. There were around twenty mountain tracks that scrambled up its flanks, but these too were simply defended. Only St-Nizier itself was problematic. The difficulty lay more with the resources of defence. ‘What is an army without artillery, tanks and air force?’7 Stalin would ask this of the insurgency that would erupt on 1 August 1944 more than 1,000 miles north-east of Grenoble: the Warsaw Rising. Moreover, despite the efforts of Huet’s predecessors as military commanders of the Vercors going back to Le Ray, many of the Vercors maquis were not even trained in handling light arms. They were civilians with guns. As to the weapons themselves, as the numbers of maquisards responding to Huet’s call grew, as the news from the bridgeheads in Normandy reached happy ears, these too were in short supply.

The patron of the Vercors was its civilian leader, the fifty-year-old Eugène Chavant. Founder of the resistance group France Combat, he had been taken by the Free French submarine Casabianca to Allied headquarters in Algiers in late May 1944 to discuss the Montagnards plan. The French colony hosted the combined Allied guerrilla operations team, the Special Projects Operations Centre. This was a newly – and not very thoroughly – merged team uniting elements of SOE, OSS and their French equivalent, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA). Chavant, son of a cobbler, was supposedly ill at ease amongst the international military top brass. He was nevertheless promised not only materiel in the form of arms and ammunition, but 4,000 paratroopers. As Le Ray had known, the maquis might be expected to hold the plateau and had a good record of conducting skirmishes and running sabotage operations. It could hardly take on a professional army, especially one as professional as the Wehrmacht. Finally, as the Alpinist Pierre Dalloz, one of the civilian architects of the original Montagnards scheme, had pointed out, the combined regular and irregular forces needed to be facing an army on the edge of defeat: preferably an army that was retreating headlong up the Rhône with the Allies snapping at its heels. In 1942 he had written, ‘If the Vercors plan can be put into effect, it must be done by surprise and against a distressed and disorganized enemy … It will not be a matter of attacking an enemy in full possession of his resources’.8

Huet understood all these points. Chavant, though he had served in the 20th Battalion of Chasseurs in the First World War and was twice decorated, perhaps understood them less well. It was Chavant, though, who had been to Algiers. He assumed that Algiers and London grasped the operation and were committed to it, though at the time they had quite a lot on their hands: Operation Dragoon, the preparations for Operation Market Garden on the Rhine, and – soon – the Warsaw Rising. Certainly the operation had been endorsed formally by de Gaulle himself, the operational head of the SOE, Brigadier Colin Gubbins, and by David Bruce of the OSS in London. These were, Chavant felt, reassuring commitments.

3

The tricolour raised on the flagstaff at St-Nizier on 10 June 1944 was certainly provocative. Generalleutnant Pflaum’s 157th Reserve Division was mountain light infantry, a Gebirgsjäger formation familiar with mountain warfare. Pflaum himself was a fifty-four-year-old born and brought up in Bavaria. He was a veteran of service in mountain regiments and had an excellent understanding of mountain engagements. He appreciated the strategic threat posed by the Vercors to his lines of communication, signalled by the French flag. On 13 June his forces attacked St-Nizier. Huet had done his work well, and a relatively small force of Germans was repelled by a force of 250 maquisards. The turning point of the engagement was the arrival of maquis reinforcements singing the ‘Marseillaise’. The following day Pflaum returned with a larger force, this time to succeed. On 15 June Huet was forced to withdraw the maquisards towards the interior of the plateau. The Germans took fire-and-brimstone revenge on the village.

Pflaum, though, had been taken aback by the strength of the Vercors’s maquis. He was also dealing with an insurrection led by the maquis, inspired by the SOE, in the neighbouring département of Ain. The General accordingly regrouped in Grenoble to consider his position, and to gather what forces he could: both air and land. Soon, reconnaissance aircraft from the local airbase of Valence-Chabeuil were overflying the Vercors, identifying concentrations of maquis and using any stragglers as machine-gun target practice.

Over the course of the next four weeks, as the Allies in the north under General Patton pushed slowly towards Cherbourg and Caen through the bocage country, Huet consolidated his defences. He was supported by no fewer than fourteen airdrops from Algiers, and the arrival of a party of French engineers to prepare a landing ground at the resistance HQ in Vassieux. This surely heralded the Allied regular forces, the 4,000 paratroops promised to Chavant. The BBC – alongside the regular bulletins on Normandy – broadcast the electrifying news of the liberation of the Vercors. It was part of a propaganda policy to destabilise the occupying forces throughout France.

Friday 14 July was Bastille Day. All France was celebrating the storming of the prison-fortress in Paris and the beginnings of the republic. The Vercors was no exception. There was a parade in Vassieux, parties all over the plateau, a gun salute, and – best of all – an airdrop. Seventy-two B-17 bombers from the Eighth Air Force overflew the half-finished airstrip in Vassieux and dropped no fewer than 860 containers of materiel. Only the Reich could rain on this parade and rain it did. No sooner had the roar of the B-17s’ Pratt and Whitneys died away than another sound was heard. It was the Luftwaffe. Focke-Wulfs from Valence-Chabeuil had been alerted to the drop and strafed Vassieux with machine guns and incendiaries, diluting the best efforts of the USAAF. Huet’s forces crept out after nightfall to scavenge what they could of the drop.

Scarcely had they recovered from Bastille Day when Generalleutnant Pflaum attacked again. Huet’s local intelligence was all too good. On 17 July he heard that German reinforcements were approaching both from Chambéry to the north and Valence to the west. By 19 July, Huet was surrounded by forces supposedly amounting to 10,000 men; some sources say 20,000. By the following day, intelligence suggested that Pflaum had turned the tables on the maquis. From a mountain fortress from which to harass a beleaguered enemy, Huet’s forces had been entrapped. If there were few ways for attackers to get onto the table, so too were there few for the defenders to get off. Pflaum had blocked all the eight main roads with infantry and artillery. On Friday 21 July the Generalleutnant launched the operation to clear the plateau. Where were the 4,000 paratroopers promised to Chavant?

In the course of that morning, some 400 maquis in Vassieux were clearing the meadows around the village to complete the makeshift airstrip. In the Alpine summer it was slow, heavy, hot work, using sickles and scythes, spades and shovels. Given the events of Bastille Day, a close watch was kept for enemy aircraft. Suddenly a cry of joy went up. There, from the south, surely from Algiers, was a formation of transport aircraft towing perhaps forty gliders. The maquis shaded their eyes against the sun. The promise made to Chavant had been fulfilled! There were whoops and shouts of joy. ‘It’s the Yanks! It’s the Yanks!’ Someone ran to the village to bring the great news to Huet.

By the time the maquis realised that the insignia on the gliders were the black crosses of the Luftwaffe, not the Stars and Stripes roundel of the USAAF, it was too late. Someone yelled, ‘It’s the Boche!’9 The Luftwaffe airlift group landed two companies of infantry on the ground painstakingly prepared for the Allied forces. In all there were over 500 troops, mixed units including some Russians fighting for the Reich. Soon they linked up with the Gerbirgsjäger mountain infantry units from Grenoble, Chambéry and Valence. The maquis were at bay.

When the news was brought to Chavant, his companion Father Martin said, ‘He roared with pain. I have never seen him before in an extreme emotional state and it was a terrible sight. He pounded the café table with his fist, swearing he’d been betrayed.’10 A desperate Huet radioed Algiers, ‘We shall not forget the bitterness of having been abandoned alone and without support in time of battle.’11 Chavant, to whom the commitments of regular forces had been explicitly and personally given, was even more vocal: ‘If you do not take immediate action, we shall be at one with the local population in saying that you people in London and Algiers have entirely failed to understand the situation in which we are placed, and we shall consider you to be cowards and criminals. Repeat, cowards and criminals.’

The appeals were to no avail. The Wehrmacht ran amok through Vassieux and the other communities on the plateau. By 23 July Huet had no choice. He ordered the maquis to disperse in what had become drenching rain.

Pflaum’s forces treated the inhabitants of the Vercors utterly without compassion, humanity or mercy. They tortured, maimed and killed without discrimination men, women and children, combatants or otherwise. They liquidated a makeshift hospital, killing all the patients and staff. They disembowelled one woman and left her to die with her entrails draped round her neck. Another girl was raped in turn by seventeen soldiers. A doctor held her hand, monitoring her pulse, lest she faint. ‘They were terrible hours during the engagement,’ wrote one German soldier. ‘How savagely we massacred these people. We completely wiped out a hospital full of partisans, with all the doctors and nurses. The wounded were dragged out and killed with machine pistols. It may have been atrocious but these dogs deserve no better.’12 When the 157th Reserve withdrew in the third week of August and the inhabitants of the plateau came out to bury their dead, they found some of the victims castrated, some with breasts sliced off, some with missing tongues, some with eyes gouged out. In all, around 630 maquisards were killed on the plateau and a further 200 from local towns and villages in subsequent Wehrmacht reprisals. German losses were put at 150. Huet and Chavant, both embittered, both survived.

As to the Allies’ ‘betrayal’, no completely convincing explanation has ever emerged. Some say that Chavant overstated the level of commitment in Algiers; others that the maquis acted prematurely in declaring the republic, egged on by Colonel Descour. Yet others blame the liaison between Vercors and the nascent Special Projects Operations Centre in Algiers; others still ambivalence on the part of de Gaulle towards a republic for which he could take little credit. ‘Were the Vercors’ maquis left to their fate by an inflexible Allied command and did they fail to receive the massive help promised by Gaullist leaders in Algiers? The bulk of evidence suggests that the Vercors was indeed a victim of both Allied and Gaullist decisions not to send last-minute reinforcements despite the most moving telegrams from the beleaguered Resistance fighters.’13

4

While the Vercors was burying its dead in August 1944, three hundred miles to the east in the Italian Alps, the partisans were planning whole handfuls of republics. They were envisaged on disturbingly similar lines to those of their counterparts in France in the Glières and Vercors. Perhaps they would fare better. The autumn of 1944 would tell.

The progress of the resistance in the Italian Alps and Apennines had been entirely unexpected. The British MP Ivor Bulmer-Thomas had told the Commons in autumn 1943 that ‘Italians have not really fought in this war because they were fighting a war which for them was hateful. Give them a good cause and they will show they can fight as well as any other soldier.’14 At the time this remark had been entirely against the grain of opinion. It had turned out to be entirely correct.

The Alps in northern Italy – as elsewhere in the range – had proved the cradle of resistance because the mountains were a haven in which those with good local knowledge could conceal themselves with ease in makeshift camps. Here they would be difficult to find and, if found, difficult to rout out. The nucleus of the partisan brigades was remnants of the Italian Fourth Army; it had been garrisoned in the Alpes-Maritimes after the Franco-Italian campaign of June 1940, and its men were familiar with Alpine conditions. Like their counterparts to the east and west in the Alps, the Italians were also inspired by the prospect of creating a new society out of the ruins of a failed political order: most leant to the left, the majority of those communists. They were also given a good deal of help by the Allies. The SOE and OSS were – albeit modest – contributors to the partisans virtually from their beginning; the Allies eventually sent more than 200 missions amounting to around 1,000 men and women to operate behind fascist lines in Italy; in 1944 the SOE delivered 513 tons of weapons to the partisans, OSS a further 290.

Reaching out from London’s Broadway, MI6 also played its part. Following a string of failures in the early years of the war, the service surprised itself with Major Brian Ashford-Russell. Born in England in 1907, educated in South Africa, a cattle buyer in Argentina then a civil administrator in Peru, he had joined 7 Commando in 1941 and was badly wounded in North Africa. Repatriated as unfit for military service, in 1941 he joined MI6: his future wife Elizabeth Todd worked for Claude Dansey in the service’s secret Broadway offices.

From the autumn of 1943 Ashford-Russell set up a series of what eventually amounted to twenty networks in northern Italy. They provided critical intelligence on politics, propaganda, economics, military logistics, civilian and military morale, and – above all – the order of battle of German and Italian fascist forces. To Sir Stewart Menzies (‘C’), the service’s Mediterranean section head Captain Cuthbert Bowlby assessed Ashford-Russell’s performance as ‘astounding … As far as I can remember, during my 6 years in your organisation, nothing much has ever been produced from Italy, which makes the results achieved all the more meritorious.’15 The Major did not entirely share the partisans’ scarlet political views. When the author first met Ashford-Russell in 1978, his opening gambit was ‘Don’t you think the Daily Telegraph is getting very left-wing?’

The upshot of these combined Allied and Italian efforts was foreseen only by Bulmer-Thomas. Not long before his Rome broadcast of 6 June 1944, Field Marshal Alexander could tell The Times that of the twenty-five German divisions in Italy, six were being held down by the partisans. There were three Allied armies fighting in Italy. The US Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army needed no introduction. The partisans, he declared, were the third.

They now numbered perhaps 100,000, and were on their way to becoming the largest resistance movement in western Europe. All the mountains – partly the Apennines, partly the Alps – in the lozenge formed by Genoa to the Po, to Bologna and down to the German front line, and the mountains south-east of Turin to the sea and south-west and north-west to the French frontier, were in partisan hands.16 As in Yugoslavia, the Germans were largely reduced to holding the main lines of communication and the principal towns. When Rome had fallen on 4 June 1944, Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring’s forces had retreated to defend the Gotenstellung (Gothic Line) in the Apennines just north of Florence. Here and to the north in the Alps his troops had nearly as much trouble with the partisans’ irregular warfare as with the British and US armies. In his memoirs he recorded, ‘It was clear to me by June 1944 that the Partisans might critically affect the retirement of my armies.’

*

In the summer of 1944 the partisans were spurred by the Normandy landings in June, Alexander’s Rome proclamation, and the Dragoon landings on the Riviera in August. As Churchill said of the Warsaw Rising that was now erupting further east in Poland, ‘The leaders of the Polish Underground Army [decided] to raise a general insurrection against the Germans, in order to speed the liberation of their country and prevent them fighting a series of bitter defensive actions on Polish territory and particularly in Warsaw itself.’17 He might have added that the rising was also to ensure that the indigenous population rather than the Soviet ‘liberators’ were in charge of the post-war country. Similarly, it was tempting for the Italian partisans to exploit the advantages of the terrain and try to establish mountain republics, both in the Alps that formed the cap to their country and in the Apennines that constituted its backbone. Rather than merely ridding themselves of the Germans, they would be pointing the way to a better post-war, post-Fascist and – for many of them – post-monarchist future. Of the twenty republics, the Ossola valley in the Alps was the keystone.

Lying to the north of Lake Maggiore, this valley’s capital was Domodossola, a handsome town of some 10,000 at the confluence of the Bogna and Toce rivers. At 620 square miles, Ossola was sizeable, with a total population of around 82,000. It boasted Italy’s only gold mine, quarries for marble and granite, engineering factories, and a hydroelectric station that lit Milan. The valley also carried the main railway line linking Switzerland with Milan through the Simplon tunnel. This gave the valley vital strategic significance as Kesselring sought to contain Alexander’s forces pushing north from Rome; like the Rhône valley, Ossola was a line of retreat for the Wehrmacht, in this case for Kesselring’s forces on the Gothic Line.

On 6 June 1944 the Alexander proclamation whipped up enthusiasm among the Ossola partisans for insurrection. The eruption of the republic would send just the right signal of defiance to Mussolini in Salò, to Badoglio’s replacement Ivanoe Bonomi and the monarchists in Rome, and to the Allies in Washington and London. It did, though, need practical support in the form of arms, men and money from the SOE and OSS, from Allen Dulles and John McCaffery.

5

Writing after the event, Dulles and McCaffery seem to have been ambivalent about the operation. The idea was contrary to the general Allied policy of pursuing military rather than quasi-political objectives; it would be costly of lives and materiel; it would certainly provoke a response from the occupying Fascists. There was also the example of Glières from the spring and – ringing in everyone’s ears – of the Vercors. Still, by August 1944 the partisans had considerable forces in the Ossola valley and in any case did not – as such – take orders from the Allies. McCaffery reported to his SOE superiors that the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (CLNAI) had been ‘bitten by the bug’ of the scheme and – supposedly reluctantly – he agreed with Dulles to provide the help of the SOE and OSS. At the time of the rising, at least McCaffery seems to have been rather more enthusiastic. Briefing Lieutenant George Patterson, a Canadian officer attached to SOE, McCaffery commented, ‘It may all come to nothing I grant you, but there is a chance it could spread … if North Italy were to rise in rebellion it would cut the German Army’s lines of supply and almost certainly force them into surrender … That’s why we have to do all we can to help them.’18

At first all went well. A coalition of partisan forces of various political shades was put together, albeit one lacking a unified command. Initial partisan strikes on 23 August 1944 succeeded, and a week later the valleys north of Domodossola up towards the Swiss border lay in partisan hands. When partisan forces reportedly numbering 3,000 surrounded the railway town, the 500-strong Fascist garrison ran up the white flag to negotiate an armistice. On 9 September the Fascists withdrew to the south, deprived of their heavy weapons but complete with their lives and – unlike the maquis of the Vercors – their genitals. On 10 September 1944 the republic of Ossola was proclaimed and the celebrations got under way. The town centre was thronged with the sort of jostling, boisterous crowd that Italy does so well. A manifesto was read out in the Piazza Repubblica proclaiming the Free Republic of Domodossola; a constitution was drafted, printed on posters and daubed over town and country; a special train arrived from Berne bearing a figurehead president: Professor Ettore Tibaldi. Soon, a provisional government was appointed and quartered in Domodossola town hall; diplomatic recognition by the Swiss followed. Community leaders sympathetic to the Fascists were removed from their posts and an open society was encouraged by the publication of free news-sheets. Trade unions – banned by Mussolini – were encouraged to re-establish themselves. The schools reopened with new textbooks that honoured faiths other than Fascism. By mid-September a regular train service was running through the Simplon to Switzerland.

Yet autumn comes early in the Alps. There were 85,000 mouths to feed and the industrial Ossola valley was not a subsistence community. Supported by the Swiss and Italian Red Cross, Dulles and McCaffery brought in food from Switzerland through the Simplon; their efforts were nullified by the Wehrmacht strangling supplies coming from the south. Bread ran out and the people were reduced to living on chestnuts and milk. On 28 September 1944 a Swiss political leader visited the republic and told a Swiss newspaper, ‘The food situation is tragic … there is no winter clothing … there’s nothing … children are starving.’19 Dissent spread. The discovery of an arms dump led to a stand-off between the communist Garibaldi brigades and those partisans of more moderate persuasion. On 10 October 1944, a month after the declaration of the republic, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Avanti under the leadership of SS-Brigadeführer Willy Tensfeld. His forces supposedly comprised 20,000 well-armed men, supported by artillery. The fragmented forces of the several partisan brigades organised themselves as best they could. Blocks of granite from the quarries were used to obstruct roads, crops cut down to create open fields of fire, barbed wire spread.

On 14 October 1944, Domodossola once again fell. Two days later the partisans elsewhere in the valley were scattering in the face of Tensfeld’s SS. The fairy tale was at an end, just as it had been in Vercors.

Here in the Italian Alps, though, there was a line of escape. Three special trains were chartered to take the republicans north through the Simplon to safety in Switzerland. About 2,000 partisans escaped and around 35,000 civilians – perhaps half of the permanent population. With some justice, the refugees feared reprisals. Earlier in the month in Marzabotto in the Apennines outside Bologna, 800 civilians who supported the partisans had been murdered by the Waffen-SS: the worst massacre in western Europe in the whole war. By 26 October 1944 the mayfly republic of Ossola was back in the hands of the Fascists. It had survived for thirty-five days.

The CLNAI at once blamed McCaffery and Dulles for failing to provide the promised airdrops of materiel and of regular forces. The pair responded that the USAAF and RAF had been all too busy in Warsaw and Arnhem and they had been against the rising in the first place. Some partisans attributed darker, political motives to the Allies. Churchill favoured the new monarchist Ivanoe Bonomi administration in Rome, and would naturally scotch the initiative of the communist brigades: Domodossola was much too close to Tito’s Yugoslavia. The partisan leader Ferruccio Parri commented sourly that the episode was ‘the most obvious and painful example of Allied lack of interest in liberating certain frontier areas’.20

6

Meanwhile, back in France, a miracle – of sorts – had come to pass.

To the north-east of the Vercors, the newly formed Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur under General Marie-Pierre Koenig had seized control of Annecy and the Haute-Savoie. On 19 August 1944, the New York Times correspondent reported that

General Koenig’s patriot army, after 36 hours’ co-ordinated operations in Haute Savoie, have driven all Germans excepting the Annemasse garrison from a rough triangle 50 miles at the base and 40 in depth, and are still fighting ahead. The Maquis thus far have cleared up the districts between Bellegarde in the west, St. Gingolph in the east, and Chamonix in the south, in a series of 133 separate engagements surpassing anything yet executed by the French patriots.21

This triumph threatened General Pflaum’s line of retreat, and he was obliged to withdraw the 157th Reserve from the Vercors and from Grenoble itself. The evacuation was completed by midnight of 21 August 1944, the division hightailing it over the passes on the Franco-Italian border to the relative safety of Fascist Italy, much harassed by the maquis.

In Grenoble the following morning, elements of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur and elements of the 36th Infantry Division of the US Seventh Army entered the city. This was the liberation of the first of the principal Alpine cities that had fallen to the Nazis; Grenoble erupted in joy.

This deliverance was far, far sooner than the planners of Operation Dragoon had expected or dared dream of; it was only a week after the Riviera landings, only ten weeks after the tricolour had been raised at St-Nizier. A recent historian of Dragoon put the breathtaking achievement of the advance on Grenoble and its early liberation down to two factors: the operation’s planners in Washington and the maquis. Regarding the latter, he says:

Yet the Vercors itself remains a source of controversy. Alain Le Ray, the Vercors’s first military commander, thought that the revolt of the plateau ‘induced in the German war machine a kind of paralysis, both moral and material … The losses were too great, for sure. But Vercors is a page of history of which France can be proud.’23 Others dwell on the death toll, the decimation of one generation of the plateau’s inhabitants, the scarring of the next, and how soon after the tragedy came liberation. Max Hastings calls the Vercors simply ‘madness’.

*

On 25 August, when Paris followed the Rhône-Alpes, the Vichy administration collapsed: with France falling to Allied control, Pétain and his ministers were seized by the Germans and taken to Sigmaringen on the Danube. The Free French, fearful of the Allied military control discussed with such ill temper by de Gaulle and Churchill during their picnic in Marrakesh in January 1944, hastily set up the Gouvernement provisoire de la République française (Provisional Government of the French Republic, GPRF). This was officially recognised by the British and the Americans on 25 October 1944.

Two weeks later, on 5 November 1944, de Gaulle, in his role as head of the new provisional government, visited Grenoble to bestow on the city a signal honour. It was the Compagnon de la Libération, so recognising the community as the inspiration of the resistance and kingpin of liberation. The General was received by the Grenoblois as a conquering hero. In his memoirs he recalled, ‘The ardour that swept over the “Allobroges” [the ancient people of Dauphiné and Savoie] in the Place de la Bastille, which I covered on foot, and in the Place Rivet, where the crowd gathered to hear speeches was indescribable.’

As to the Ossola republic and its nineteen siblings, by early December 1944 all were back in the hands of the Fascists. This does not mean they lack political and historical significance as emblems of a people recovering their self-confidence, ambition and desire for autonomy, indeed far from it. This, though, is from the comfortable armchair of hindsight.24 In the short term, the lesson for Alexander, Eisenhower at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and Churchill himself was sharper. Whatever was happening in France, the Wehrmacht would fight bitterly to keep open its lines of retreat for Kesselring’s forces on the Gothic Line.

The mainspring was Hitler. The Führer had left Berchtesgaden on 17 July 1944. As the Red Army approached the borders of Germany to the east, and as the US generals Patton and Patch drove their forces up to the Reich from the west and the south of France, the Führer thought he could best direct events from Berlin. In some respects he recognised the inevitability of defeat, certainly in his orders to destroy the Reich’s industrial and communications infrastructure ahead of the arrival of the Allies. (This was the ‘scorched earth’ policy, which has a bearing on the story henceforth.) In other respects he was obdurate. On the last day of August 1944 he told his warlords, ‘If necessary we’ll fight on the Rhine. It doesn’t make any difference. Under all circumstances we will continue this battle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our damned enemies gets too tired to fight any more.’25 The message from Warsaw was a final echo of this determination to fight to the last. On 2 October 1944, Churchill was visited by Premier Mikolajczyk, the leader of the exiled Polish government in London. The news was bad. After sixty days of fighting, his compatriots in the Polish capital were about to surrender to the forces of Generaloberst Heinz Guderian. The Warsaw Rising was over.

Chips Channon’s hopes for the collapse of the Reich and an early end to the war had been entirely dispelled.

Notes

1. Pearson.

2. Tudor, Special Force.

3. Robert Aron, Charles de Gaulle (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1964).

4. H. R. Kedward, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France, 1942–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

5. Aron.

6. Aron.

7. Churchill, Second World War, Volume V.

8. Aron.

9. Pearson.

10. Aron.

11. Aron.

12. Kedward.

13. Kedward.

14. Behan.

15. Jeffery.

16. Tudor, Special Force.

17. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy (London: Cassell, 1954).

18. David Stafford, Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy 1943–1945 (London: Bodley Head, 2011).

19. Stafford, Mission Accomplished.

20. Stafford, Mission Accomplished.

21. New York Times, 19 August 1944.

22. Steven J. Zaloga, Operation Dragoon 1944: France’s Other D-Day (Oxford: Osprey, 2009).

23. Kedward.

24. Laurence Lewis, Echoes of Resistance: British Involvement with the Italian Partisans (Tunbridge Wells: Costello, 1985).

25. Speer.