Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass by Douglas Boyd Read Free Book Online

Allies would occupy the entire North African littoral from Morocco to Egypt. The German High Command was thus obliged to secure the Mediterranean coast of France against an amphibious invasion from North Africa by driving into the Free Zone on 11 November, after which the whole of France was occupied. The former Occupied Zone was now designated ‘the northern zone’ and the former Free Zone became ‘the southern zone’.
    The next step was Operation Lilac, which came on 17 November: the disarmament and demobilisation of the units in mainland France of Vichy’s puny Armée de l’Armistice. Ordered by their own government to comply with German demands, many individual officers and men decided to act according to their own consciences and formed the disciplined Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), separate from the political factions of the Resistance. Typical of these officers was Colonel Schlesser at Auch. Demobilising his 2nd Dragoons there, he told each man to keep in touch with comrades and hold himself ready for the call. Some demobilised men slipped away from their homes in darkness; others made gestures of open defiance, like Lieutenant Narcisse Geyer la Thivollet who rode out of 2nd Cuirassiers barracks in Lyon on horseback in full uniform and kept riding until contacting a Maquis unit in the bleak limestone uplands of the Vercors.
    At the time of the armistice, Minister of War General Colson had penned a personal letter to the commander of each military region, ordering materiel and stores to be spirited away against the day when they could be used again, rather than tamely handed over to the Germans. The results were sometimes surprising. Within a few months, 65,000 rifles, 9,500 machine guns and automatic rifles, 200 mortars, fifty-five 75mm cannons and anti-tank guns had been administratively ‘lost’. Several thousand trucks were ‘leased’ to civilian transport contractors who agreed to maintain them ready for return to the army at six hours’ notice. The owner of one small trucking company in the south of France thus saw his fleet rise from five vehicles to 687! Sadly, when the Wehrmacht invaded the Free Zone in November 1942, all the secret arms dumps were useless to stop it. Based in Pau, Captain André Pommiès now created a network of arms dumps throughout the south-west. Yet, within a week of Operation Lilac many dumps had been betrayed by local informers.
    The OAS reasoned that the Germans could not possibly afford sufficient manpower to police the whole of France, but would secure the Mediterranean littoral with a military presence and then rely on collaborators and informers to help them keep control of the rest of the southern zone. All it took to neutralise one of these traitors was a bullet, and there were plenty of those hidden away. Vichy’s reply to this ‘terrorism’ and that of the PCF hit squads was the formation on 31 January 1943 of a paramilitary anti-terrorist force called La Milice under its infamous hard-line secretary general, Joseph Darnand. The miliciens – as its members were called – were charged with rooting out, arresting, imprisoning, deporting and killing Jews and members of Resistance movements, especially the various PCF groups . The brutal methods and lack of scruple they used, especially torture and blackmail, soon earned them the hatred of most of the population, even those who still supported Pétain politically.
    In February 1943 Sauckel’s unsated hunger for French labour forced Laval to introduce compulsory conscription of men of military age for labour service in the Reich. This was initially called Le Service Obligatoire du Travail until someone in Vichy with the vestige of a sense of humour pointed out that the initials SOT spelled the word sot , meaning ‘stupid’. The hastily re-baptised Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO) applied both to men and to women aged 18 to 45 with no children. In practice, although 200,000 Frenchwomen did volunteer to go