Jean Claude awoke in the faint early dawn to the sound of resuming German gunfire. He heard trucks approaching too, most likely bringing enemy reinforcements.
Skirmishing lasted for most of the morning. The Germans raked the ridge with automatic fire, and again they deployed mortars. Jean Claude’s men ran low on ammunition. German troops launched a hard assault against the maquis position by the roadblock. By noon it looked as if the guerrillas might not hold.
Jean Claude saw no sense in trying—surely the DZ would be cleared by now. He detonated the blocks of plastic explosive. As the blast resounded over the battleground, the maquisards began to fade away.
The German machine-gun and mortar fire abruptly ceased. The maquisards fell back in groups, running through the trees, then pausing to provide covering fire for those who followed. Jean Claude was amazed at how smoothly the extrication progressed. The Germans made no attempt to follow the retreating men.
Suddenly Jean Claude understood why. Another maquis group, having no inkling of the withdrawal plan, had at that moment arrived at the other side of the German position and attacked from behind. Surprised and grateful for the diversion, Jean Claude led his men away into the safety of the forest.
That night they had a tired celebration in the woods, with plenty to eat and drink. They talked over the German attack. None of them could understand its persistence. If the Germans had been so intent on reaching the DZ, why hadn’t they disengaged and found another route? The only explanation they could think of was that the troops had been assigned to that sector and, once engaged, would not let go. Someone in charge, they figured, was not going to admit being unable to deal with a bunch of irregulars.
Later, Jean Claude learned that his firefight was one front in what has come to be called the battle of Mont Gargan, a broad defense by about 3,800 maquisards against an assault by 4,800 German troops—some of them SS, including Romanian and Russian conscripts—and about 500 French Milice. It lasted the better part of a week. Casualties were lopsided: 342 German soldiers were killed or wounded, while of the maquisards, 38 were killed, 54 were wounded, and 5 disappeared. The battle is remembered as a major success for the Resistance—not a victory exactly, as the guerrillas slipped away when the fighting was done—but an important holding action that protected the arms drop and helped divert Das Reich from its northward march. In France, it is commemorated as a milestone military achievement—for Georges Guingouin and his Communist Party fighters.
Jean Claude stayed with his little band of DZ maquisards for another day. Word reached them that Philippe had given instructions to revert to guerrilla tactics—to harry any German patrols and destroy what they could, but not to hold terrain. Jean Claude took part in a couple of ambushes, and late in the day he handed his Bren gun to one of the other fighters, left the group, and walked back to the DZ. He retrieved his wireless set from its hiding place and took it back to the rock hut at Sussac. There he contacted Philippe by telephone and recounted what he had seen and done during the days they had been out of touch.
Philippe expressed satisfaction that Jean Claude had survived and “enjoyed himself.” Jean Claude learned that the Châteauneuf position had been overrun, but that Bob was unhurt. Philippe told Jean Claude to sit tight and expect him soon.
The next morning a two-car convoy pulled up in front of the rock hut. In the first car were Guingouin and two of his top aides. Philippe was at the wheel of the second car, and Bob sat beside him. Jean Claude loaded his wireless set into Philippe’s car. They drove off with Guingouin in the lead.
For two hours they motored along roads that were little more than wide pathways through the woods. Philippe drove with brio—he had done some amateur road racing before the war. At one point they came to an intersection where their path through the trees crossed a larger dirt road. Jean Claude saw dust in the air. The cars zipped through, and Jean Claude saw that they were driving in the dust cloud raised by the wheels of feldgrau trucks that had crossed on the bigger road seconds before. If the Germans saw the cars they didn’t give chase. Jean Claude doubted that their trucks could have fit on the narrow forest trail in any case.
They arrived at last at a clearing in the woods where an isolated farmhouse stood, one of Guingouin’s hideouts. They were to spend a few days there, collecting intelligence and making fresh plans. Guingouin, his aides, and the Salesman agents gathered around a table and spread out a large map of the region. Each man marked it with what he knew about the Nazi offensive. As the big picture emerged, they were shocked by the scale of the assault. The Germans seemed to be letting up on the Haute-Vienne, but they were sending more troops into the surrounding departments—Charente, Creuse, and Corrèze.
Philippe told them that he had appealed to Baker Street to send an OG—short for Operational Group. OGs were OSS commando teams, under joint command with SOE, specially trained in small-unit tactics for the post–D-Day phase of the war. Each OG consisted of two officers and fifteen enlisted men, selected for their language proficiency and toughness. They fought in uniform, and as a rule they were lethally effective—in an ambush in the Vercors that July, one team killed more than a hundred German soldiers in ten minutes. Philippe intended to use an OG as the spearhead of a counteroffensive against the German ratissage.
Until the OG arrived, Philippe thought it best to exploit the essential advantage that guerrilla armies have held since the dawn of warfare: the ability to vanish. He gave orders for the maquisards to melt into the countryside and let the Germans roam freely, believing they had accomplished their mission. Resupply drops were curtailed, and save for the occasional ambush at the territory’s perimeter, enemy patrols went unmolested.
Jean Claude had little to do at the farmhouse. He monitored the Broadcast and kept up scheduled wireless contacts with London. He and Bob went for walks together, never venturing far from the farm.
One day the two men were walking along a narrow dirt road when they heard the sound of trucks. They ran a short distance off the road and dove into a stand of tall, thick grass that was partly covered by overhanging bushes. They had just a few seconds to burrow into the undergrowth before two trucks came abreast of them. The trucks stopped. Jean Claude and Bob were certain they were about to be killed or taken prisoner. But the enemy troops—French Milice and “German-Allied” conscripts, led by German noncoms—climbed down from the trucks, stretched, lit cigarettes, and relieved themselves by the roadside. They were just stopping for a ten-minute break.
Jean Claude and Bob lay perfectly still. They were so close that they were both sprayed by enemy urine. From what they saw and heard, it was clear that the soldiers were perfectly at ease, unafraid that they might be attacked. The troops remounted the trucks and drove on.
The episode was happenstance, but it could hardly have been a more perfect illustration, in miniature, of the tactical state of affairs. All around the Salesman territory, maquisards went to ground but did not depart. The German commanders, with no one to fight, became convinced that they had wiped out the guerrillas. Within a week they began withdrawing troops and moving them to the north and east—just as the Allied invaders were finally clearing the hedgerows in Normandy and preparing to deliver a hammer blow to the Nazi occupiers. The anvil was on the way: More Allied troops were heading for France’s Mediterranean coast, preparing to come ashore at Cavalaire, Saint-Tropez, and Saint-Raphael, in a giant reinforcing movement that is sometimes called “the Forgotten Campaign.”