De Gaulle’s second problem was that the French Resistance was held in very low regard by the British and American authorities. Churchill loved France and recognized its claims to great-power status. But he was not averse to making unflattering comparisons between the French Resistance and Tito’s Yugoslav partisans, who were tying down some twenty German divisions in bloody guerrilla warfare. Roosevelt, on the other hand, had something close to contempt for France, seeing it as a decadent imperial power which lacked the moral fibre Britain had shown in the early years of the war. On the question of the effectiveness of the 1943 French Resistance (or rather lack of it), the two leaders and their staffs were united: it could not in 1943, and would not in 1944, be able to deliver anything of weight to the coming battle on French soil. It was this opinion that de Gaulle had, by hook or by crook, to change.
Back in March 1943, the British War Cabinet had met to take the first of several decisions establishing the priorities for the supply of arms and equipment to partisan forces in Europe. It put France as third strategic priority behind the Italian-held islands, Corsica and Crete (taken as one) and Yugoslavia. These priorities were personally reconfirmed by Churchill himself in August and November of that year. A Cabinet paper at the end of March put total Resistance strength in France at 175,500. Yugoslavia, with a much smaller population, had partisans, they estimated, numbering 220,000. The paper included an annex showing Resistance strengths as a proportion of what it referred to as ‘net male population’. This showed that 30 per cent of ‘available’ men were in the Resistance in Norway, 6 per cent in Denmark and Poland, whereas in France, no doubt because of its internal divisions, it was just 3 per cent.
An SOE assessment in May and June 1943 pronounced the French Resistance ‘at its lowest ebb’ and added that its forces ‘could not be counted on to be a serious factor unless and until they were rebuilt on a smaller and sounder basis’. The paper ended by warning that this would require a ‘total reorganisation and reformation’. London’s reaction to the deficiencies in the Resistance organization was to send out tripartite ‘missions’ made up of representatives of France, Britain and the US with the task of assessing what needed to be done to mend the gaping holes left by Gestapo arrests and to create a new structure of organizational control. One of these missions in October 1943 estimated Resistance strength in the maquis of the Rhône-Alpes as 2,300 and described the Vercors camps they had visited as ‘modestly equipped and armed, adequately turned out given the very difficult conditions, good morale’.
Having elbowed Giraud out of the way, de Gaulle was now free to take further steps to reform the command and control of the Resistance by setting up Committees of Liberation in all the French departments and naming military delegates for each of the three administrative levels of the country – national, zonal and regional. The General was beginning to assemble a government for France, though it would take long tortuous months before first the British and then, finally and reluctantly, Roosevelt gave formal recognition to this. Over succeeding months this structure was progressively strengthened, in large part prompted by the fact that, by the end of November 1943, it was clear that an invasion of France was being planned and that, citing security as the reason, the British and Americans were going neither to involve, consult nor indeed even inform de Gaulle about what they had in mind.
De Gaulle was predictably furious at the snub. But it also presented him with a real practical problem. If he knew nothing of Allied plans, how could he ensure that the Resistance would be in a position to assist when the great moment came? His answer was to set up a special planning unit in December 1943 to prepare a ‘rational plan for the participation of Resistance activity in the eventuality of an Allied landing on French soil’, without having the first idea where the landings would be, what form they would take or how they would be exploited. De Gaulle made his position clear in a speech given on 8 October 1943, in liberated Corsica: ‘Victory is approaching. It will be the victory of liberty. How could such a victory not be the victory of France as well?’
One of the key staff in the planning unit de Gaulle had set up was an exceptionally able captain of Czech origin, Ferdinand Otto Miksche. On 20 January 1944, Miksche produced a study listing the options before the British and American planners, drawing conclusions about which in the end they would be most likely to choose. It was astonishingly accurate in predicting that one of the most likely landing points was Normandy – a conclusion which would have deeply worried France’s allies, who were trying desperately to keep the location of Overlord secret. This study also proposed possible military actions which could be undertaken by the Resistance to assist the invasion, wherever it occurred. These were discussed with the British, who ‘showed a great deal of interest and asked for a second … detailed study of the conditions under which French resistance would help in the landing’.
In Miksche’s second study he stressed (somewhat hopefully) that the Resistance ‘although not an ensemble of regular military units [should] be looked upon as a regular Army obeying orders from the Allied High Command’. He also identified several territorial zones of France and how the Resistance might be employed as the Allied breakout from the beachhead developed. Among these were areas where ‘redoubts of Resistance’ would be established ‘in districts geographically unsuitable for large scale military operations’, such as the Alps (including the Vercors). Miksche’s plan continued the drift towards something more ambitious and permanent than Dalloz’s original Plan Montagnards (of which at this stage he had no knowledge). ‘In these redoubts’, he wrote, ‘the Maquis would be organized and be in readiness for sabotage and guerrilla operation behind enemy lines … the creation of permanent redoubts [emphasis added] would inevitably expand, even before D-Day, through the arrival of patriots who refused to accept forced labour for the enemy.’
The idea of ‘Resistance redoubts’ (réduits in French) was not a new one. On 13 November 1943, a secret meeting in Switzerland between British SOE representatives and a gathering of Resistance and Secret Army leaders (who were also unaware of the existence of Plan Montagnards) concluded with a recommendation that the Vercors (among other possible ‘redoubt’ areas) should be held ‘as a fortress from which raids could be made’ on German lines of communication. Two weeks later, on 29 November 1943, an experienced French agent, in London at the time, wrote a paper picking up on the fortress idea and proposing the establishment of ‘geographic fortresses’ manned by ‘trained, disciplined, adequately armed and properly led forces’ in places like the Vercors. The aim was ‘to place at the disposition of the Allied High Command, forces under their direct control which could offer operational possibilities comparable with parachute troops dropped in advance. These should be kept hidden until after, or exceptionally a little before, D-Day.’ Note the key proposition here. The Maquis would not create an area for paratroopers, but would instead take on the role of paratroopers dropped in advance.
On 31 December 1943, an SOE paper followed up this thinking and proposed that ‘small controlled areas’ should be created for the delivery of weapons and paratroops after D-Day. These would be established where ‘the Maquis [could] occupy ground which can be comparatively easily defended and thus controlled’. This imprecise language left it open for some to believe that the Maquis could defend these controlled areas by themselves. In the fertile soil around this lacuna, muddled thinking, unclear orders and military folie de grandeur would take root, flourish and ultimately cost the lives of many hundreds of the young, the inexperienced and the innocent.
Pierre Dalloz arrived in Algiers on 25 November 1943 having completed a long and hazardous crossing of France under the false identity of René Brunet, an even more dangerous one over the snow-bound passes of the Pyrenees and a short stay in Gibraltar. He was horrified that no record of or interest in Plan Montagnards could be found in any quarter. He immediately sat down and reconstructed the plan from memory, dictating it to the personal secretary of one of de Gaulle’s most senior advisers (see Annex B). It was