26
Friedrich Dohse had long ago given up hope that his successes would mean a quiet D-Day in the Bordeaux region. But the scale of sabotage Aristide was able to achieve on the morning of 6 June 1944 must have come to him as a shock.
At 23.15 on the evening of Monday 5 June the BBC French Service broadcast 187 messages to Resistance groups across the whole of France. They were all different – but they all meant the same thing: ‘D-Day is this morning. You have your tasks. Strike!’
Among these messages were three ‘strike’ signals for Roger Landes. Each instructed him to launch his prepared sabotage plans immediately: ‘The flood team does its work’ (rail sabotage); ‘Don’t be tempted by Venus’ (guerrilla attacks on German command centres); and ‘This poisoned arrow causes death’ (attack communications installations). Landes passed the orders swiftly to each of his groups. They all knew what they had to do.
That night, while Allied landing craft made their way through darkness and choppy seas to the Normandy beaches, the towns and villages across France were alive with flitting shadows and the sound of muffled knocks on doors and whispered orders. Weapons were slid from secret places to be checked and loaded; young men and women pulled on boots, hitched up rucksacks and said goodbye to their loved ones; country roads resonated with the quiet rumble of unlit cars and lorries bearing dark shadows to their appointed targets.
Though the weather on the beaches of Normandy was blustery and cold for June, in southwest France, thanks to approaching high pressure, the morning broke bright, clear and cloudless. A thin mist hung over the marshes of the Gironde and the sea lapped, quiet and azure, against the beaches of the Aquitaine coast. In the sunlit forests of the Landes, insects buzzed among tall pines standing as lonely sentinels on the black earth. The grape buds in the ancient vineyards of the Gironde hung contentedly in anticipation of another day of ripening sun. And in Bordeaux, under its habitual summer haze, people stirred in their beds and contemplated another Tuesday.
Since the very smallest hours of that morning, Landes’s men had been busy on railway cuttings, under bridges and beneath road culverts, preparing ambushes and planting charges. Over the next two days, seventy-six successful sabotage operations would be carried out. The detonations were heard in every corner and community of the region – and everyone knew what they meant. France’s hour of liberation had at last arrived.
From now on, the pace of life for Landes’s Maquis began to quicken as his fighters came out into the open. Increasingly, speed and aggression became more important than cover and security. Attacks by Landes’s forces on 6 and 7 June included ambushing a German convoy heading north along the Route Nationale 137 for the Normandy beaches; cutting all the main rail lines out of Bordeaux; dynamiting eleven locomotives in the Bordeaux suburb of Pessac; blowing up the main telecommunications cables running north from the city; attacking the headquarters for the port; severing fifteen high-tension electricity cables across the region and cutting the main telephone line serving the château which acted as the headquarters of the German First Army, under General von der Chevallerie. Chevallerie sent a panicky (and wildly exaggerated) message to Army Group G headquarters in Toulouse: ‘The Departments of Dordogne and Corrèze are held by terrorists.’
Landes spent most of the period immediately following D-Day at his headquarters in Rue Guynemer sending regular situation reports to London, based on the messages he was receiving by courier from his commanders. On 8 June, he sent to Baker Street:
GERMAN TROOP TRANSPORTS DERAILED NEAR PONS STOP CONSIDERABLE GERMAN LOSSES STOP GOODS TRAIN ALSO DERAILED NEAR PONS STOP DESTRUCTION OF THE RAILWAY BRIDGE NEAR FLÉAC STOP DERAILED GERMAN TROOP TRANSPORT IN COLLISION WITH A TRAIN CARRYING FUEL NEAR BORDEAUX STOP HUGE EXPLOSION AND FIRE ON THE LINE STOP SERIOUS GERMAN LOSSES INCLUDING A CAPTAIN AND A SERGEANT STOP 33-TON CRANE DYNAMITED FALLING ON A STEAM ENGINE STOP LINE BLOCKED STOP BOTH NOW OUT OF ACTION STOP THE RAILWAY LINE TO SOULAC CUT ENDS.
Even allowing for the fact that some of these reports from the front line were the overstated accounts of those who had never seen war before, the picture of widespread activity against key German installations is probably accurate enough.
It is easy in retrospect to overlook the extraordinary courage and determination of the young men and women of the Resistance during the days which followed 6 June 1944. They too were part of the invasion. Many had never seen a shot fired in anger. Yet, in the Bordeaux area, as across the rest of France, they took on the might of the German army with only Sten guns and plastic explosive. Eisenhower later said that the outcome on the Normandy beaches may well have been different without ‘the action taken by the French Resistance whose results exceeded my hopes’.
On the 7th, Hitler, who had been slow to react, fearing that the Normandy landings were a feint, finally gave the order to General Johannes Blaskowitz, the commander of Army Group G in southwest France, to move his main battle units north and join in the defence of Normandy. As Blaskowitz’s divisions, the infamous SS Panzer division Das Reich amongst them, began their long, blood-soaked journey north, Bordeaux and the region began to empty of frontline troops and equipment, leaving behind mostly second-rate troops and administrative units. This was followed two weeks later by the withdrawal of all non-essential German female staff from the city.
The effect on the morale of German troops in the area was sharply compounded by widespread shortages. Lack of petrol and scarcity of vehicles meant that, instead of riding in comfort, the German troops had to march almost everywhere – or – perhaps more humiliatingly – use horse-drawn transport. ‘Morale … is very low … [they are] extremely nervous and never go anywhere alone. Their uniform and equipment is poor … they have a lot of rifles and submachine guns [which] they take everywhere – even to the cinema. The Milice always carry two grenades and a machine gun [and are] very nervous; there are many desertions,’ reported the Canadian Pierre Meunier on his return to London. The wave of sabotage had an effect on the lives of ordinary citizens in Bordeaux, too. ‘Numerous sabotage attacks on the railways. Following an explosion in the Labour Exchange … we had curfew from 10.00pm for several days … there are constant stoppages in electricity supply and very few trams. Those that there are, break down all the time,’ one young resistant wrote in his diary.
Despite their diminished numbers, however, the occupiers could still hit back. On 11 June, a 500-strong force of Wehrmacht soldiers mounted an attack on Léonce Dussarrat’s headquarters near Dax, which, at the time, housed more than ten tons of arms and explosive. Forced to retreat, Léon des Landes blew the whole place up, causing an explosion which could be heard forty kilometres away and which, according to Dussarrat (who was famous for exaggerated reports), killed forty-two German soldiers.
Not all of the actions of Landes’s men were ‘glorious’. The rudimentary nature of his hastily assembled units began to show in breakdowns of discipline. On 11 June, André Bouillar’s men raided and quickly overran a Milice base in Bordeaux. According to one (uncorroborated) source, what followed was an exercise in unbridled and ferocious vengeance. Some of the Milice were beaten to death. Others were first chained up and then eviscerated. One teenage Milicien was strung up by his heels and, his throat cut, left hanging, bleeding to death, like an animal in an abattoir. Another was knifed to death in front of his comrades. Bouillar did his best to intervene and stop the carnage, telling the assailants: ‘These are our prisoners! … behave like proper soldiers! Stop this massacre!’ There was a brief lull, but then, when someone reported that German reinforcements were approaching, the remaining prisoners were machine-gunned to death.
Landes was furious with Bouillar’s men. ‘What you have done has poisoned the sacred cause for which you fight,’ he told them. ‘I know how much you hate these people, but we must not act as they themselves have done to their prisoners … [now] the Germans will have cause when they treat our captured men, not as soldiers, but as terrorists.’
But not all Landes’s problems were with his ordinary Maquisards. By 13 June, a week after D-Day, Commandant de Luze, the head of the Arcachon Maquis, had failed to carry out a single one of his sabotage attacks. Landes sent him a note drawing attention to the failure and threatening a report to Supreme Allied Headquarters in London. De Luze’s reply was as swift as it was furious: he did not take orders from a ‘mere sabotage chief’ and would henceforth take instructions only from Morraglia’s local FFI representative, Georges Julien. At least Julien ‘has the advantage of being a Frenchman’, de Luze ended pointedly. De Luze’s volte-face was the first step along a road that would, in due course, lead to the death of the man whose command he now accepted – Georges Julien.
The defection of de Luze was a clear illustration of one of Landes’s biggest difficulties: some of his guerrilla bands had attached themselves to him not because they accepted his leadership, but because it was the only way to get access to the arms from parachute drops.
The loss of Édouard de Luze’s 350 men was not as serious as it might seem at first sight, for by now new recruits were joining Landes’s Maquis bands in large numbers. The rate of parachute drops was also increasing apace. By the end of June, Landes estimated that, despite casualties and some defections to other Resistance groups, he could still call on some 4,000 men under arms.
The flow of messages to and from London was growing, too. By the middle of June, Landes had finished training a locally recruited second radio operator and had a third in operation by early August. Coding and decoding of messages was carried out by François and Mitou Faget, whose home by now resonated with the comings and goings of a full-scale guerrilla headquarters. Copies of communications traffic with London were kept for two days and then burnt. Fortunately Landes had an uncanny ability to recall previous messages almost verbatim, and even from weeks previously. Sometime around the end of July or early August, Landes managed to obtain – or had parachuted to him – a Morse-compatible teleprinter, which greatly speeded up the transmission and reception of messages.
Landes’s biggest problem now was not his men or their arms, but the vexed and seemingly insoluble problem of command and control in the Bordeaux area. On 18 June, London sent out messages to all its SOE networks, instructing them that henceforth they were to come under the command of the FFI, whose overall head, the London-based French general Marie-Joseph Koenig, had now been incorporated into Eisenhower’s SHAEF headquarters. Landes, remembering that his mission orders stipulated that he was in sole charge – and not having been given any instructions to the contrary – presumed ‘in good faith’ that this order meant he was Koenig’s senior representative in Bordeaux. Morraglia, on the other hand, took London’s signal to be confirmation that he was the person in charge – and so the deadly confusion deepened.
The problem should have been resolved when, three weeks later, a new regional military delegate, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Gaillard, arrived in Bordeaux. But for some reason, the thirty-one-year-old wine merchant, whose love of good company was, by some measure, greater than his natural ability to command, did not manage to meet Landes until almost a month after his arrival. By this time the fratricidal conflict paralysing the Bordeaux Resistance had reached unstoppable proportions.
While most of Landes’s concerns in the weeks after D-Day were the problems of success, most of Dohse’s difficulties were those of impending defeat. Even though the Allies would not finally break out from the Normandy beachhead for another two months, it was plain to most Frenchmen, and all but the most diehard Germans, that the Nazis could not now win the war. As Landes’s numbers swelled, Dohse’s sources of intelligence and support began to dry up. Although German forces retained a tight grip over the main arteries of communication and the chief centres of population, the withdrawal of troops from country areas meant that control in many rural districts now slipped into the hands of the Resistance. Meanwhile, the Gestapo, also now on the back foot, had to substitute desperate short-term measures for long-term strategy. Before D-Day, a captured Resistance fighter would be patiently interrogated and then released on a promise to collaborate. After D-Day, they were given one chance to talk, followed by immediate torture and a swift execution if they did not.
On 20 June, Dohse moved André and Lucette Grandclément out of the seaside villa at Moulleau and back to Bordeaux. Under the surname ‘Gonthier’, they took a rented apartment in a city-centre backstreet two kilometres from the KdS headquarters.
Ten days later, on the night of 30 June, German forces launched one of their last major anti-Resistance operations, arresting more than forty Maquisards in and around Arcachon (Grandclément’s move to Bordeaux may have been arranged in order to avoid the consequences of this sweep). The raid was planned and commanded by Kunesch, while Dohse, reduced to the status of a mere observer, stood idly watching from the steps of the Arcachon war memorial, dressed – most unusually – in the full uniform of a Gestapo lieutenant.
With German forces now being pounded into submission in Normandy and diminishing resources available to him in Bordeaux, Dohse knew that he didn’t have the means to influence the course of events in his region. The best he could do was to diminish their effect. He understood that soon – in the next few weeks – German forces would have to withdraw. His job now was to reduce, as far as he could, the dangers they would face when doing so.
Fortunately, he could always rely on a divided Resistance to help him where he could not help himself.
A week after the defection of de Luze’s Arcachon units to General Morraglia’s man Georges Julien, the forty-nine-year-old Julien detected, or thought he did, that he was under surveillance. He shaved his beard, moved address and changed his name. His suspicion may have been well founded for it was believed by some at the time (wrongly) that de Gaulle’s government in London had appointed Julien as the future préfet of the Gironde. The perceived appointment was not popular with some (such as Landes, who suspected Julien’s closeness to Morraglia) and excited jealousy and enmity in many others.
The precise course of events which ensued is confused and contested. But what happened as a result of them is not.
On 25 June, Georges Julien was sitting on the terrace of a café in the centre of Bordeaux with colleagues (including André Noël, the man who had threatened Landes on the Pont de Pierre in April) when André Bouillar – Dédé le Basque – walked by. A brief conversation followed, in which Julien and Bouillar agreed to meet the following day to try to resolve the antagonism between Landes and Morraglia. The rendezvous was fixed for 1100 hours on the corner of the Rue Élie Gintrac, a narrow cobbled backstreet close by.
The next morning at 10.30, Bouillar, accompanied by four men, arrived on the Rue Élie Gintrac and started making his way to the meeting point. There was as yet no sign of Julien. Instead ‘the whole place was infected with the “flics” [police],’ one of his group recalled. Bouillar ‘pointed at two of them and said: “I’ll [pretend I am still an inspector and] ask them for their papers.” He came back a moment later and whispered: “Yes. One is French and the other is German. We’d better beat it.”’
Bouillar turned and vanished down a sidestreet. The others, too, made to leave. But, ‘then, just as we turned to go, I felt the muzzle of a pistol in my side accompanied by an order barked in a German accent, to raise my hands. I looked round. They had rounded up all the rest of us.’ The four men were herded through the front door of a nearby cheese shop, put up against a wall and searched. Pistols and grenades were found. The officer in charge ordered one of his men to ask the French policeman watching outside on the pavement to order up some transport and take the prisoners away. The ‘French policeman’ at the window was in fact Dédé le Basque, who had returned to find his men. Bouillar entered the cheese shop, and, while exclaiming ‘Ah! You have them,’ pulled out his pistol and, firing several shots in succession, killed two of the policemen and wounded others, including the Gestapo’s official interpreter, Pierre Esch. In the ensuing confusion, Bouillar and his four companions made good a hasty escape.
Georges Julien finally turned up at the rendezvous at around 11.15, claiming that his tram had broken down. Post-war evidence would reveal that he was telling the truth. But the damage was done: the suspicion was planted that his absence was deliberate and that he had betrayed Bouillar and his men to the Gestapo.
Two days later, a council of war was convened at a Resistance safe house not far from the Bordeaux waterfront. There was a long discussion and some disagreement. Julien’s fate was finally swung by the evidence of Josette Lassalle who, though only nineteen, had become one of the most influential women in the Bordeaux Resistance movement. Julien and André Noël were condemned to death. The council also reaffirmed a sentence of execution on André Grandclément for good measure.
The following day after lunch, Josette Lassalle met Julien outside the Palais de Justice, where he had been conducting some private business. The two took a stroll along the boulevards in the June sunshine. ‘He didn’t ask any questions about where we were heading,’ Josette said afterwards. ‘We chatted about nothing in particular … I was nervous, but he didn’t seem to notice and appeared very relaxed and at ease. I was very conscious that I was walking alongside a man who was about to die and knew nothing of it. As we walked down the steps of the Palais I pulled my handkerchief out of my blouse pocket. It was the signal.’ Julien noticed neither the gesture nor the two men who slipped quietly out of the shadows and started following them. Lassalle led her prey out of the open space of the Place de la République and down a narrow sidestreet.
Suddenly and seemingly from nowhere, one of the assassins was in front of Julien, his pistol pointing at the condemned man. ‘Don’t shoot,’ Julien pleaded, as his assailant fired his weapon. ‘Next thing there were two other men running up behind us,’ Lassalle continued.
The new arrivals on the scene were two police auxiliaries who happened to be in the area. The wounded Julien cried to them for help as he lay bleeding on the pavement.
A ‘lively exchange of fire’ ensued as Lassalle fled the scene on a bicycle which had been left there by her cousin. ‘It was only afterwards,’ she wrote, ‘that I heard that Julien had been killed. That night the BBC announced that Georges Julien, the traitor, had been killed by the Bordeaux Resistance.’ Later she heard that one of the assassins had also been seriously wounded and was now in the hands of the Gestapo.
The next day, 30 June, André and Lucette Grandclément once more packed up their things and moved back to Moulleau and their Gestapo villa by the sea. The city was becoming too dangerous for anyone under suspicion as a traitor.
On 11 July, less than a week after the incident on the Rue Élie Gintrac, Landes, putting aside his suspicions, agreed to meet Morraglia again in a last bid to heal the rift between them.
As before, the two men held their meeting on a bench in the Parc Bordelais. And as before, it ended not by resolving their divisions, but by widening them. Both men were obdurate, each asserting that they alone were in charge: ‘I am the only Resistance leader in this region,’ Landes stated flatly. ‘I do not recognise any authority except that of the inter-Allied headquarters in London … I know nothing of the FFI headquarters in London. I have been in this region for two years now and I do not accept the authority of others who come here on Resistance business, unless if I have received orders from London to do so.’
With the Resistance squabbling over who was in charge and the German grip loosening, Bordeaux began to descend into a vortex of disorder and gangsterism driven by suspicion, rivalry and the settlement of old scores. Soon another motivation would be thrown into this witches’ brew – the desire to extract as much money as possible in rewards from the Germans, before they left and the well dried up.