Free Das Reich by Max Hastings Page A

to drop and handle on the ground. The other serious obstacle to any complex or coordinated manoeuvre by large groups of maquisards was the complete absence of short-range radios.
    Yet even with hindsight, it is difficult to fault the attitudes or the conduct of those in London who were responsible for organizing Resistance for D-Day. SOE and the Free French, concerned with supporting Resistance, had done everything possible with the resources they were granted. The Allied commanders chargedwith responsibility for Overlord were also eminently reasonable. Despite the claims of enthusiasts, a guerilla struggle in a major international war must always be a campaign on the margin. If the likely contribution of guerillas to victory is doubtful, then so also must be the resources expended upon them. General De Gaulle’s preoccupation with restoring the soul of France could only be courteously acknowledged at SHAEF. In the spring of 1944 it would have been unthinkable, indeed hopelessly irresponsible, to cancel or curtail the transport bombing offensive which cost 12,000 French and Belgian civilian lives, in favour of reliance on the Resistance.
    If there was a failure, it was in frankness towards the networks in the field. Inevitably, résistants were given an exaggerated notion of the importance of their role in the attack on communications. But it was less necessary that most were allowed to believe that Liberation would inexorably follow invasion within weeks, if not days; and that the creation of Resistance armies would be rewarded from London by massive supplies of arms and ammunition, probably also by reinforcements of regular parachutists.
    SHAEF confidently expected that the Germans would throw every man, tank and gun they could bring to bear into the struggle to defeat the Allied armies on the beaches of Normandy. To any commander with a clear grasp of strategy, this was the overwhelming priority. Fundamentally it could not matter to the Germans what Resistance achieved in the Vercors, the Dordogne, or other areas remote from the north coast. Any insurrection could be crushed at leisure once the Allies were thrown back into the sea. If they secured a lodgement, then the loss of southern France scarcely mattered. The simple truth was that French Resistance was strongest in areas that strategically mattered least to the Germans – the Massif Central, the south-west, the Dordogne, the Corrèze and the Haute-Vienne. An important SHAEF paper of 28 February 1944 assumed that in their response to the Allied landings, ‘. . . the Germans will ignore local Resistance’. This was a fundamental – albeit perfectly rational – misjudgmentof German thinking. Hitler’s obsession with retaining every foot of his empire once again betrayed him. The Germans would deploy resources to repress Resistance on a scale the Allies had never conceived possible. In the first, vital days after the Allied landings, the German struggle to hold France against Frenchmen employed forces – above all, the 2nd SS Panzer Division – that could have made a vital contribution on the battlefield in Normandy. There are many tales of tragedy, reckless error and even absurdity among résistants in the chapters that follow. It must never be forgotten that the Germans’ response was absurd only in its cost to their battle for France.

 
3 » SOE: SOUTHERN FRANCE
     
    Few of the British and French agents parachuted into France fired a shot in anger during the battles of June 1944. Their names will seldom recur during the story of the Das Reich’s march through their sectors. But to understand what Resistance was on D-Day, and how it came to be what it was, it is essential to know something of the men and women who made it possible. For thousands of résistants taking up their Sten guns and their gammon bombs and embarking upon open warfare, D-Day was a beginning. But for the agents of SOE and De Gaulle’s BCRA, it was the flowering of four years’ labour,