[In the end, however], the arms, the explosives, the equipment – though all were magnificent, our nocturnal visitors brought us an even more special gift. They brought us back our confidence, our enthusiasm and, with these, the sure knowledge that we were not, after all isolated, abandoned and alone.
What may be guessed at from Valot’s lyrical account, but is not explicitly stated, is that the results of the Darbonouse parachute drop were less than optimal. The high wind distributed the parachutes and containers over a very large area and some were not found until years later hanging in the branches of fir trees or lying in the bottom of small depressions where they had plunged into deep snowdrifts. The contents of those that were found were enthusiastically pillaged, resulting in some groups having arms without ammunition, some ammunition without arms, some boxes of grenades, others the detonators, some surgical instruments which they didn’t know how to use and more woollen socks than they could ever possibly wear. There would, in due course, be a price to pay for all this undisciplined brigandage.
Much of what could be recovered in an organized fashion was stored in a nearby cave, the Grotte de l’Ours, and distributed later. The Maquis unit which had established itself at Malleval on the east of the plateau went to collect its share ten days after the drop and came back with an entire lorry full of arms and ammunition, storing it in the village presbytery.
Two days after the Darbonouse parachute drop, on 15 November, Francis Cammaerts was recalled to London, where he explained in detail his plans to hold the Valensole, the Beaurepaire and the Vercors plateaux as bridgeheads for paratroops in the event of a landing in the south of France. It was a message which would have been welcome in the British capital for, at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt had decided that ‘Operations against southern France (to include the use of trained and equipped French forces) should be undertaken to establish a lodgement in the Toulon and Marseille area to exploit northward in order to create a diversion in connection with Overlord. Air-nourished guerrilla operations in the southern Alps will, if possible, be initiated.’ Planning for the invasion of the Mediterranean coast of France began immediately under the codename Anvil. In a September minute to the Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, it was proposed that Anvil should be a diversionary operation to be carried out simultaneously with Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings. Its primary aim was not to capture territory but to draw German troops south, away from the Normandy beaches.
The Vercors may have lost its direct line to the highest level of the Free French command in London, but events elsewhere were conspiring to give it a potentially important role to play in the much bigger game which the Supreme Allied Command was now planning – the invasion of the European mainland.
On the Vercors, however, the autumn of 1943 brought the Resistance more to worry about than the distant plans of the mighty. On 24 November, three German gonio radio-detector vehicles were seen in La Chapelle. It seemed that they found nothing, for they were reported at the end of the day returning home over the Col de Rousset ‘empty handed’. The plateau breathed a sigh of relief. But it was premature.
The following day, the Gestapo descended on Saint-Martin in force and, seeming to know exactly what they were looking for, headed straight for a large farmhouse complex, Les Berthonnets, a kilometre or so east of the village. This housed two clandestine radios and their operators, Gaston Vincent and Pierre Bouquet, working to the Algiers office of the American equivalent of the SOE, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Warned just in time, the two men fled, Vincent carrying his heavy radio set. After a short chase, a German soldier who got within range of the weighed-down Vincent shot and wounded him. Helped by the owner of Les Berthonnets, Vincent hid in a pile of hay in a barn. Here he was subsequently found by a German search party, covered in blood. Presuming him to be dead, they left him alone.
Bouquet, however, was caught and held, but then – surprisingly – released by the Gestapo. He re-established contact with the Resistance but was placed under discreet observation. His former colleagues concluded that he had been ‘turned’ while in captivity. His body was found on 23 December, riddled with bullets as a result of an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a Resistance execution.
Though this raid was small in comparison with later incursions, it indicated the Germans’ determination to ensure that the Vercors did not harbour activities against their interests. And it demonstrated their ability to invade the plateau and leave it again, whenever they chose to do so. The Vercors Resistants may have viewed the plateau as a safe area, but the Germans certainly did not.
The damage done by the Gestapo’s 25 November raid was minor, however, compared with that done not much more than a week later by the French regional military commanders.
In the early autumn Marcel Descour – accompanied by his ever-present counsellor/monk Dom Guétet – took up a new post as the Military Chief of Staff for Region 1 of the Secret Army, within which the Vercors fell. He was therefore, in effect, Alain Le Ray’s direct military commander. Descour’s job was to unify the disparate elements of the Resistance in his region under an effective military command. Criticisms of the Vercors Maquisards for their lax ways had already reached him and he may have taken their independence of spirit as a challenge to his authority. He may also have been irked by the fact that, while he was trying to unify fighting structures under military control, in the Vercors it was a civilian in the form of Patron Chavant who was formally in charge, and Le Ray seemed content with this.
Whether there is substance in this or not, the question of the Vercors and Le Ray as its military chief came to a head at a meeting called by Descour and attended by all the military commanders in the Lyon area in early December. Not long into the meeting, Descour himself started openly criticizing Le Ray for ‘feudalism’ and especially for the mishandling of the parachute drop at Darbonouse. Le Ray described what followed as an ‘Inquisition based on the unproven suspicions of the unidentified’. Finally unable to control himself, he exploded: ‘Well, if it’s my resignation you want, you have it.’
Descour returned fire with fire: ‘Resignation accepted!’
Both men were later to say that they regretted their hotheadedness – though Le Ray regarded an eventual rupture as inevitable. ‘The Vercors was seen as a trump card in the whole French Resistance organization. The authorities wanted to put someone there who they could be sure would be their man.’
However, even if both men had wanted to pull the moment back, they couldn’t. The die had been cast, the damage done. The Vercors had lost its most able commander and the only one who understood that guerrilla warfare was about constant mobility and the closest possible military/civilian integration, not fixed defences and conventional military control. Some believe that many of the tragedies which would ensue would not have happened if these few testosterone-fuelled seconds could have been avoided. Chavant was furious when he heard and wanted to disband the whole Vercors structure immediately. But Le Ray, who had been instructed to leave his post at the end of the following January, persuaded him not to, saying that no purpose could be served by adding revenge to rancour.
Everyone presumed that, after the ‘resignation’ of Le Ray, his deputy, the much liked and admired Roland Costa de Beauregard, would take his place. But Descour, true to Le Ray’s prediction that the Army wanted a man who would take the Army line, chose Narcisse Geyer, who was at the time still in the nearby Thivolet forest. Geyer, acknowledged by all to be a man of great courage, initiative and élan, had many qualities. Among them, however, were not tact, diplomacy, sensitivity or any kind of understanding of the role of the civilians in the struggle. Diminutive, right wing and haughty in his demeanour, Geyer was mostly to be seen in full uniform, complete with kepi and soft white cavalry gauntlets, riding around the plateau on his magnificent stallion Boucaro: Descour could hardly have chosen a person less likely to appeal to