Denise Domenach-Lallich, who was nineteen in 1943, noted the new atmosphere of repression and fear in Lyon, writing in her diary in October: ‘the curfew sounds at ten o’clock in the evening and no one gives us passes because of the reprisal troops, Mongol-types who shoot anything that moves … One grows quickly in the moment when one doesn’t die … several of my friends have been caught and shot three days later.’
Paradoxically, with the Germans so busy in Grenoble and Lyon, these were relatively quiet weeks on the Vercors. On 11 October, the Gestapo arrested a Maquis leader in Saint-Jean-en-Royans. There was also a German raid on a camp on the south-western edge of the plateau, looking for a radio set which their gonio detection vans had identified in the area. (Gonio was an abbreviation of voitures de radiogonio.) But the camp’s inhabitants were able to disperse into the forests quickly enough to avoid capture; ‘we went three days with nothing to eat but artichokes which we found in a shepherd’s garden’, one complained afterwards, ‘… before finally ending up at the Grande Cabane [a mountain refuge] below the Grand Veymont’.
Although the Germans had so far mostly left the plateau alone, events in Grenoble caused some nervousness in the camps. The diary of Lieutenant Louis Rose in the Forêt de Thivolet records a number of false alerts in October, including an excitable sentry who called the unit to arms at 04.00 because he feared they were about to be attacked by what turned out to be a troop of badgers foraging in the woods.
And then, on 13 November 1943, just one day after the full moon and the same night that Aimé Requet blew up the ammunition store at the Polygone de l’Artillerie in Grenoble, the plateau received its first major parachute drop at Darbonouse, the isolated Alpine pasture on the eastern side of the plateau which had been the site of the Resistance gathering of 10/11 August. The arming of the Vercors had begun.
In fact there is good evidence that the original plan had been to begin this process a month earlier, during the moon period in October 1943. The logbook for one of the Tempsford RAF squadrons shows that on the night of 16/17 October a Halifax bomber took off from the airfield on a mission to parachute containers to a site identified as ‘Trainer 96’, a codeword which in relation to other missions refers to Vassieux. This supposition is supported by the list of code phrases for parachute drops to be carried out in the October 1943 moon period which were given out in the BBC’s nightly broadcast to France on 30 September. This list contains one phrase whose main elements would later become indelibly linked with the Vercors: ‘Le chamois bondit’ (‘The chamois leaps’). Unfortunately, however, if such a drop was planned, it never took place for the pilot’s logbook notes that the mission had to be aborted because the ‘A/c [aircraft] caught fire’.
In some ways the choice of the Darbonouse for this drop was a strange one, for access to this high pasture is by difficult, barely motorable forest tracks and mountain paths. A drop on the parachute sites previously identified by Dalloz, on the open plain near the village of Vassieux or in the wide valleys around Saint-Martin and Villard, would have been much easier for all. It may be, however, that the October German activity in the south-west of the plateau and in Grenoble made it wiser to choose somewhere further away from habitation and main roads.
André Valot, at the time the second-in-command at the Ferme d’Ambel, recalled this momentous drop on 13 November: ‘It was a Sunday. Louis Bourdeaux and I were sitting … in the dining room after dinner smoking and listening somewhat distractedly to the “Messages personnels” section [of the BBC] broadcast … Suddenly I was transfixed. I felt myself go pale and the shock caused Bourdeaux to drop his cigarette. Had we not just heard our codeword “Nous avons visité Marrakech” [“We visited Marrakesh”]? Disbelieving, we listened again; the voice said it again – more insistently this time. The message we had been waiting for! The aircraft we had been longing for were at last coming! They were coming just as promised … Now the voice was gone and they were playing some recorded music. We looked at each other, our eyes filled with tears, our spirits full of disbelieving laughter. We hugged each other. At last our hopes had been fulfilled; our resolution rewarded; our confidence confirmed. “Shall we go?” I said. “You bet,” Louis replied. “I will telephone to make the arrangements.”’
Valot and Bourdeaux quickly gathered their men and set off in trucks for the Darbonouse pasture. They were not alone. The entire plateau had either heard the BBC broadcast or heard of it and knew what it meant. As Valot’s gazogène trucks wheezed up the steep tracks leading to the eastern plateau, threading their way through the forest, it seemed as if half the Vercors were there as well. Young men from other camps marching along, singing patriotic songs, groups of peasants driving pack mules, old carts drawn by oxen and, of course, more ubiquitous gazogène trucks, all making their way to the drop site – all intent on carrying away at least a share of the booty which the distant BBC voice had promised would fall from the sky that very night.
It was 22.00 by the time Valot and his team reached the shepherd’s hut at Darbonouse. Here they joined a small crowd who had already arrived from other camps, milling around an assortment of trucks, carts and motorcycles. Around them a recent fall of snow had gathered in drifts at the edges of the forest and in the pasture’s shallow undulations. And in the distance the great mass of the Grand Veymont looked down, its summit capped with snow, sparkling in the moonlight.
Eugène Samuel and Roland Costa de Beauregard had already taken charge of the drop site. Three-man sentry posts, each with a machine gun, had been placed on all the points of access and bonfires were already being prepared. There was plenty of time. H-hour – when the aircraft would arrive – was not until an hour after midnight. Valot described the scene:
By midnight, all was ready and there was nothing to do but wait …
… The moon slowly slipped towards the horizon threatening to leave us alone under a silent and empty sky.
And then suddenly, borne on the wind, there was a sound like a far-off whispering. Almost nothing. No more than the rustle leaves make in a breeze. But quickly it became more constant, heavier somehow and with a kind of strong underlying beat. Soon we could tell where it came from – the north-west. It was them – it was undoubtedly them!
We stood in the middle of the site and the Commander pulled out a large electric torch. Pointing it in the direction of the noise, he started to flash a series of dots and dashes in Morse code. Suddenly – there! – up there! A new star suddenly appeared and flashed back the same sequence at us! They had seen us …
‘Light the fires!’
Immediately a lance of flame, fanned almost flat by the wind, leapt out of the darkness near by. Then another and another and another until a vast letter T was picked out in flames around us – four bonfires long and three across. Above us we heard the still invisible aircraft turning as though enclosing us in a wide circle of noise, holding us in an embrace of friendship. We suddenly felt – wonderfully – that we were not alone.
And then the miracle happened. One of the aircraft burst out of the darkness above us following the line of the long stroke of the T. And suddenly, beneath it, a great white flower blossomed against the darkness of the sky. It did not appear to us as something falling, but rather as something sprouting out of nothing – as though it was the product of magic conjured into existence by the black shape above and by the noise it made. And then there was another and another and another. The wind made them all dance as though in some fantastical aerial ballet. The spectacle was one of utterly intoxicating, utterly astonishing beauty. Now we could see the round circles of the parachutes jostling each other for position. Below each one swung a long black, cylindrical shape. At first we thought they were men. Then a dull heavy thud, then two, then three, then four, five, six, ten, twenty, thirty, repeated and repeated and repeated. The white flowers now lay deflated, exhausted, dead and lifeless on the ground around us. The miraculous cargo had arrived.
Everyone, even the sentries rushed to the landing ground – if an enemy had attacked us then we would all have been