Free Storming the Eagle's Nest by Jim Ring

also had an ulterior motive. The Third Republic had failed. Chavant was a socialist who wanted to build a more just society on its ruins. The Soviet spy H. A. R. ‘Kim’ Philby, who had worked briefly for SOE before joining MI6, commented that the aim of the SOE, ‘in Churchill’s words, was to set Europe ablaze. This could not be done by appealing to people to co-operate in restoring an unpopular and discredited old order.’ 5
    Chavant screened candidates for the haven. Those selected were then taken up to the plateau. By the beginning of 1942 there were around a hundred distributed in makeshift camps situated in the woods within reach of the scattered villages. They came to be known as the Montagnards, a subspecies of the rural resistance throughout France beginning to be called the maquis. Funding was obtained through the SOE in London’s Baker Street, a system of food distribution set up, and a sentinel system arranged using the plateau’s electricity station. If the lights went on and off three times, trouble was on its way. Many of the Montagnards were French and foreign Jews who would otherwise be bedded down in Auschwitz.
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    Three events added impetus to the affairs on the plateau.
    First came Operation Anton, the invasion by Axis forces of the Zone Libre. As we have seen, in the south and west of France this had meant takeover by the Wehrmacht; on the eastern Alpine border by General Vercellino’s Italian Fourth Army. The Pusteria Alpine Division detrained in Grenoble in November 1942. The result might have been anticipated: the eruption of a plethora of resistance organisations of various political shades:Combat, Franc-Tireur, Armée secrète, Organisation de résistance de l’armée. Second came the perception that – with victory at El Alamein and the Allied landings in North Africa that had precipitated Operation Anton – the tide of the war was now turning against the Reich. Third, in the New Year of 1943, there came Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO). Set up by the Vichy government on 16 February 1943 to provide workers for German industry, STO entailed dispatching skilled workers to the Reich in exchange for French prisoners of war in Germany. It proved an excellent agent of recruitment for the maquis among those presented with the choice of working for the Nazis or joining the resistance, of turning themselves in or escaping to the mountains. This, it should be said, was no casual choice. As the senior SOE liaison officer Max Salvadori later put it, ‘Guerrilla warfare is even more cruel than conventional war, the chances of surviving slimmer. Whoever joined up as a patriot or partisan signed their own death warrant.’ 6 In the first few months of 1943, the numbers in the Vercors camps nevertheless doubled or tripled.
    The Pusteria Division soon realised that they had a problem on their doorstep. From the maquis established in the Vercors, the Belledonne and the Chartreuse came a steady drip of sabotage and subversion throughout the Dauphiné.
Les Allobroges
– the ancient term for the Alpine inhabitants of both the Savoie and the Dauphiné – was the resistance news-sheet started in the spring of 1941. Eighteen months later, explosives were being stolen, power lines and transformers being destroyed, and the personal details of prospective STO victims were being seized and burned. Something needed to be done. During winter, with snow on the narrow roads that accessed the plateau, the Vercors was virtually inaccessible, an island more than a plateau. With the spring thaw of 1943 came calling the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo (the Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism or OVRA). Founded in 1927, this was Mussolini’s equivalent of the Gestapo, indeed the organisation that provided a model for Heinrich Himmler’s Secret State Police.
    In mid-March 1943 the OVRA seized fourteen of the Montagnards on the Vercors. They talked, one of them