There is no reliable record of how many attended this gathering, which some have compared, rather grandly, with the great feast at the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790, a key event in Revolutionary France. We do know, however, that all the main Vercors leaders were there, including Le Ray, Chavant, Samuel and Prévost, as well as many of the heads of the newly formed Maquisard companies and others among the second echelon of Vercors leaders, including a doctor from Romans, Dr Fernand Ganimède, who will feature later in our story.
Le Ray opened proceedings with a statement of intent: ‘We have to eliminate all passive attitudes among our people. Our Maquis companies must be divided into highly mobile groups of thirty with the majority coming from those who have been in the camps already established. The danger lies in us becoming too settled in one place – too fixed. Mobility, speed and prudence – these are our best defences.’
He then outlined three possible future strategies. The first was a fortress strategy in which the Vercors would be held against all comers. The second, which he called the ‘hedgehog’ strategy, was to use the plateau as a base from which raids could be mounted on the Germans in the valley, with the raiders disappearing into the forests if they themselves were attacked. The third strategy was effectively Plan Montagnards – a proposal to turn the Vercors into an airbase to be held as an advanced bastion for a few days only, so as to enable airborne troops to fly in, consolidate and then begin attacking German lines of communications in the valley, while at the same time widening the secure base to other areas. It was this latter view which won the day, though some were worried it gave the starring role to the incoming paras, leaving the Maquisards as bystanders to the main action.
Despite the incessant rain, which caused the convocation to break up on 11 August, everyone realized that a watershed had passed. They had a united organization and a clear strategy to follow: ‘Never had the Vercors been more confident. Never had it been more sure of itself. Never had it been so united.’
Some time in August 1943 a tall Englishman with unusually large feet came to the Vercors for a meeting with Eugène Chavant. The twenty-seven-year-old Francis Cammaerts, alias ‘Roger’, was arguably one of the most successful of all SOE agents in wartime France. He had been landed by Lysander on 21 March 1943, two days after Moulin and Delestraint had landed at Melay. Equipped with a false identity in the name of Charles Robert Laurent, he had orders to assess the work of an SOE ‘circuit’ run by Peter Churchill and his courier Odette Sansom near Annecy in the Savoie. But he soon realized that Churchill’s security was so bad that it was only a matter of time before his organization was penetrated by the Gestapo. In fact Cammaerts only just managed to avoid the catastrophe when Churchill and many of his colleagues were arrested. Cammaerts duly set about constructing his own network under his SOE codename Jockey, which extended across the whole of the south and east of France. By the time ‘Grands Pieds’ (as he was quickly christened by Chavant) came to the Vercors he was, despite his youth, already respected even by hardened Maquis leaders twice his age and had become a marked man, much sought after by the Germans. One of the reasons for Cammaerts’ success was the scrupulous attention he paid to security and to the welfare of his agents and the fact that he ran his network through a series of isolated and unconnected cells so as to limit the danger of total collapse if one was penetrated.
‘I met … Eugène Chavant … and we walked up [the mountain] together and met a couple of the military chaps,’* Cammaerts said later of this visit. ‘It was obvious that Plan Montagnards had an enormous amount to commend it and I backed it as much as I could … The supposition was that after Normandy there would be either a sea landing in the south of France very shortly or an airborne landing where the troops, backed by the Resistance … [would land in mountainous areas such as the Vercors] which we could have held … against anything the Germans could put up … for the forty-eight hours it would take them [the parachutists] to gather their material together and be in combat trim.’
What is striking about these events of July and August is that the Italians, who had caused so many problems for the Vercors Maquisards earlier in the year, seem effectively to have vanished from the scene, more concerned perhaps with events at home in Italy than with what happened in the country they were occupying. On 17 August, a week after the Darbonouse gathering broke up, the Allies declared Sicily (which had been invaded once North Africa had been secured) free of Axis troops. Allied forces were now poised only a stone’s throw from the Italian mainland with an invasion expected any day.
Despite the easing of Italian pressure, the task facing leaders of the Organisation Vercors as they attempted to coordinate action on the plateau remained challenging. The temporary vacuum of local leadership caused by the May and June arrests had resulted in a climate of free-for-all when it came to forming new Resistance organizations. Now anyone could start their own Maquis – and they did. These newly formed Resistance groups varied greatly in quality – some good, many bad and a few deeply corrupt.
Among the latter category was a Maquis group led by an ex-policeman from Lyon called Marcel Roudet. A close collaborator of the equally dubious Chief of Police in Lyon, Roudet bought a café in La Chapelle some time in 1943 and started his own Maquis, which he used to ‘legitimize’ what was essentially a criminal gang specializing in theft, the black market and extortion. In due course Roudet, himself a heroin addict, became so powerful that he was even capable of terrorizing Eugène Samuel and was said by many to have ‘the whole of the south in his pocket’. As Albert Darier recalled, ‘He was big, strong and had the look of a real gangster chief about him. Roudet was impressive, even menacing, to look at. Always explosive, always on the edge, always prone to pulling out his revolver at the slightest provocation, he was at his most terrifying when he needed a “fix”. Then he would go into the nearest chemist and demand an ampoule of morphine with menaces. As soon as he had left the shop, one of his men, whose job it was, would take out the syringe which he always carried, and inject Roudet’s arm then and there on the street.’
Another ‘freelance’ Maquis, but one of a very different nature, was the Groupe Vallier, founded by the twenty-four-year-old Paul Gariboldy, a one-time draughtsman at the Merlin-Gerin engineering works in Grenoble. This group of audacious young desperadoes quickly became famous for their flamboyant dress, insouciance in the face of danger and expertise at assassinating collaborators even in broad daylight on the streets of Grenoble. Gariboldy himself was described by a Resistance comrade as ‘An extraordinary man. Full of passion. He was afraid of nothing. He was maybe brave to the point of foolhardiness. He just didn’t know where or how to stop.’
But when it came to assassination, no one was more feared on the plateau than ‘Petit René’ (his real name was René Lefèvre), who had been forced to watch when his mother and father had been summarily executed by the Germans. He had sworn implacable vengeance against the occupiers and all who collaborated with them. Small of stature, with finely drawn lips, a nervous rictus smile and a facial tattoo illustrating the four aces, he killed without pity – always, according to Vercors legend, downing a glass of undiluted anisette in one gulp to steady his nerves before each execution. René was rumoured, by mid-1944, to have executed more than fifty targets, chiefly collaborators of one sort or another, though this figure is certainly a gross exaggeration.
During the winter of 1943/4, Le Ray and Chavant did their best, with varying degrees of success, to bring these independent groups under central control. Chavant in particular was strongly opposed to summary executions and insisted, especially latterly, that the death penalty for traitors should be carried out only after due process – even though this was, initially at least, of a fairly rudimentary sort.
By this time, the social base of the local Resistance movement had widened. The Vercors women, involved right from the start in the first Resistance structures,