Except for those who had previously been part of the French armed forces, most Maquis were not and had never been professional soldiers, and the Germans rarely treated them as such. Captured maquisards were usually executed immediately rather than being taken prisoner as the Germans would normally do (if they were following the Geneva Conventions) with official members of enemy armed forces. Some of the Maquis’ fellow Frenchmen also took issue with their nonprofessional status: the remnants of the French Army—the Armée Secrète—and Charles de Gaulle’s organization generally, treated the Maquis with only reluctant respect, viewing them as undisciplined and unpredictable bands that needed to be brought under control and made part of the FFI. Charles de Gaulle and his followers especially wanted to control and disarm the Communist Maquis since the size and strength of the French Communist party at that time caused them to fear a postwar Communist takeover of the country.
Although there were some badly run networks and while there was sometimes a general sense of disorganization among Maquis groups, in the main they were effective guerilla fighters who could inflict impressively large casualties on the Germans in rural areas, but only when they were familiar with the terrain in which they were fighting. When the Maquis had leaders who understood how to maximize their potential, they could be trained into an impressive fighting force.
But as the war progressed and the Nazis’ grip on France began to weaken, the AS and the FFI began to assert more control over the Maquis. One consequence of this was that all four sections of the Marie-Wrestler Network—approximately 3,500 Maquis—were ordered to move into the Gâtines Forest.
The regional leaders of the AS and the FFI—most of whom had been secretly headquartered at Châteauroux—frustrated the Maquis by deliberately moving them out of familiar territory. But the Americans who arrived on the scene (and who knew almost nothing about the Maquis) infuriated these rural French fighters even more, albeit in a much more innocent but ignorant way, during what became known as the Surrender of the Elster Column.
The Gâtines Forest starts where the SOE memorial is located near Valençay. A large part of the forest belonged to the duke of Valençay. It was there that the F-Section of the SOE began: the first SOE contact in France was with Max Hymans [a French resister] when a radio operator, Frenchman Georges Bégué, was parachuted there on May 6, 1941. This was also where I completed my own SOE work.
Commander “Surcouf” [Colonel Paul Minguet] in Châteauroux was chief of the Secret Army in the Indre department. In fact he wasn’t our chief because we never saw him; but as he oversaw Indre, I presume we were under his jurisdiction. We didn’t have any other contact with them except for Francis Perdriset’s arrival.
Toward the end of August, Francis Perdriset received orders to move all the Maquis to meet up in the Gâtines Forest, near Valençay. The order came from Colonel Minguet in Châteauroux. Everybody had to go, including us. I was furious and I said, “It’s completely ridiculous. You can’t expect these men to go to an area they don’t know to engage the enemy in guerilla warfare; you have to know the land well to do that.”
Our greatest strength was knowing our territory. The Maquis could not fight like soldiers, who fire at each other, advance to occupy territory, retreat, and so on. Guerrilla warfare isn’t the same; you have to hassle the enemy and retreat immediately. You cannot plan to occupy territory or seek face-to-face combat.
But I wasn’t in command, so nothing I said had any weight. I think Colonel Chomel [chief military counselor of the Indre FFI] gave the orders to move there; he was thinking like a military commander, imagining we were soldiers. But I was there to help, so I followed. We took the four Maquis groups [of the Marie-Wrestler network] there, and we stayed in the Gâtines Forest from the end of August to mid-September, with the Gâtines Maquis. According to the statistics, which came out much later, there were 3,500 to 3,700 volunteers scattered inside the forest at that time, whereas I thought there were about 1,500.
When we arrived in Gâtines, we first slept in a farm called Colombier that was in the forest. There was a lot of movement because the courtyard was large [the farm was noisy and busy with Maquis wandering in and out]. Later, in September, when we were sure there weren’t too many Germans in the vicinity, we moved into the château in Valençay. We stayed there for a while.
Some of the Louvre’s treasures were stored away in the château, including the sculptures Victoire de Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, and engravings by Rembrandt and [Albrecht] Dürer. In one sense, our bedroom was nicely decorated. But it wasn’t a bedroom; it seemed to us more of a ballroom. The bed was at least six by six feet, like a battlefield!
The works of art were locked away in cases. Employees from the national museums were there and opened one of them for us. André Leroi-Gourhan [a famous French archaeologist and anthropologist] took that initiative. He said, “I’ll show you things the public never sees.” He showed us a very old tiara belonging to the pope and engravings by Rembrandt where you could see corrections to the drawing on the copper.
Luckily for us, we were in the Gâtines Forest after the battle of August 16. The Germans did a lot of damage in Valençay that day. I wasn’t there, but Francis was. He was told to stand against a wall, he really thought he had had it. The Germans set fire to things, shot, killed. It wasn’t as bad as Oradour-sur-Glane [a notorious SS atrocity that took place about 100 miles to the south], but it wasn’t a pretty sight. When we were there, only a few Germans passed through our territory. All the Maquis in France, wherever they were, had been told to stop the Germans from returning to Germany.
At the outset Churchill said, “Set Europe ablaze.” All they wanted to do was to get rid of the Germans, and for that London gave us the means to do it. But they weren’t aware of how we operated. Also, I’m not sure there were two Maquis groups organized—or disorganized—in the exact same way. Every one of us did what we could with whatever means we had at our disposal. Our first objective was to stop the Germans from reaching Normandy and, later, we had to stop them from returning to Germany.
We ended up having two wounded German soldiers with us: a youngster and an officer who was wounded in both legs. They were in an ambushed truck, hit by a bazooka. We took the youngster to the hospital run by nuns in Valençay. The officer, a captain in the German army, was 100 percent pro-Hitler and had decided he wanted to be shot. We let him write a letter to his family. It wasn’t easy killing him, in such a situation. But we couldn’t keep them prisoners; we had nowhere to put them. The Maquis leaders decided between them to kill him. Personally, I think, whether he was for Hitler or not, he was a human being. After all he was fighting in a war.
Paul Guerbois, former assistant commander of the FFI in Valençay, was more closely involved with the execution, and he related the details later. A war council was held at Belle Etoile farm in Valençay [Perdriset’s headquarters] and the council decided to avenge comrades who had just been killed in atrocious conditions. Pedriset gave the execution order to Paul Guerbois. He assembled a firing squad and read the sentence to the captain, who was sitting in front of an oak tree: he couldn’t move because he was hit in both legs.
In the end, however, the captain was shot by one man. There was a deserter from the German army, who was in a Maquis but not with us, still in German army uniform. He was part of the first battalion of Vannier’s company. He told Paul Guerbois that he was from Alsace. Just as he was telling Paul this, a dozen German prisoners on their way to fatigue duty passed by, accompanied by the Maquis. The captain called over to them and got them to stand to attention [see note on page 168]. They all saluted, and he suddenly started haranguing them—but not for long because the Alsatian shot him twice in the head with his P38.
Personally I think that someone who hasn’t lived through this type of war can’t understand what it was really like; it’s impossible. Even London had no idea. On September 10, 1944, a column of 18,000 Germans who had been trying to return to Germany [see note on page 169] surrendered to one man, an American from the US Army, in the town of Issoudun. At the time the American press thrived on the story, but they didn’t tell the full story. They forgot to mention the column had been harassed by all the Maquis in the sector. The 18,000 German soldiers didn’t surrender as easily as that, for no reason, to one American! In addition, the Americans authorized the Germans to cross the region all the way to Orleans with their weapons. The resisters were furious. Always the same old story: armies prefer to deal with armies, and the Resistance wasn’t an army.
Major Clutton, with someone from Châteauroux, negotiated the surrender. I wasn’t involved. I know that Philippe de Vomécourt was present. But if those 18,000 Germans surrendered in Issoudun, it was because they had been attacked everywhere but refused to surrender to the Maquis. We had to get hold of an American, to whom they surrendered in Orleans. The Allies didn’t cross the river Loire so the Germans went to Orleans with their arms.
None of the Maquis was pleased about this. Major Clutton did everything he could to try to stop this business, but it was impossible. Moreover, when the Germans got to the other side of the Loire, the Americans welcomed them with oranges, chocolate, the whole works. But that’s an old story, you know, soldiers were welcoming other soldiers. We weren’t soldiers.
But at the end of the day, the Americans who were offering oranges probably hadn’t fought much against the Germans, not at all. They couldn’t understand what had happened.
[After the liberation], in September 1944, when we were still eating at the Maquis staff mess at the Lion d’Or hotel in Valençay, a mission of the Gaullist regional military delegation [representing General Charles de Gaulle—see note on page 169] invited themselves to lunch with us. They came in and sat down at the table. During the meal one of them started talking to Henri in English, because he was wearing British battle dress.
Henri said, “Don’t tire yourself speaking English, I’m French.” So the chap then said, “Really! Well as a Frenchman in a foreign uniform, I consider you to be a deserter from the French Army.”
When everyone was preparing to leave, Henri, who was at the other end of the U-shaped table, was making desperate signs to me. I was in deep conversation with Francis Perdriset’s assistant. When he told me what had happened I was completely flabbergasted. I can’t tell you how I felt. As if the world had fallen around me; it was awful.
I took the officer who had threatened Henri into another room and asked him what he meant. All he could see fit to say was, “Do you know Colonel Buckmaster is a Francophobe?”
I was so shocked I could hardly utter a word. I managed to splutter, “So, you believe during the war we wandered around with a notice board saying, ‘This is a British network, come and join us’?” People came to us for help, they didn’t care whether we were English or French, and we fought the war with them.
It was all just politics.