Free Storming the Eagle's Nest by Jim Ring Page A

induced to do so by being forced to sit on a red-hot frying pan. A second series of raids followed in which the OVRA headed straight for the secret camps. The electricity station warning system worked, and in each case the Italians found the camps deserted. In May, disaster followed. An attempt by the Montagnards to seize a petrol tanker at Pont de Claix, at the bottom of the plateau’s eastern escarpment, was botched. A dozen men were seized, tortured, and talked. In the purge that followed the plateau’s unofficial system of administration collapsed, six tons of explosive were seized, a number of the camps were broken up, and the survivors had to retreat to the most remote parts of the Vercors. 7 The Montagnards needed professional help.
    This came in the form of Capitaine Alain Le Ray.
    Born in 1910 in Paris, Le Ray was an ambitious young officer and an expert skier and mountaineer. Once commissioned, he was attached to the elite Chasseurs Alpins mountain light infantry, headquartered in Grenoble. Captured in northern France in June 1940, he had escaped from his first POW camp and was sent to Colditz. The legendary ‘escape-proof’ castle in Saxony held him for three weeks. Following his flight on 11 April 1941 he became the first Colditz prisoner to make it to freedom, to achieve a ‘home run’. Le Ray’s track record and his familiarity with Grenoble made him a good choice as the first military leader of the Vercors. He was also good-looking, bold and courageous, and he had the impeccable social credentials of being the son-in-law of François Mauriac. He took charge in May 1943, just as the plateau lurched into crisis. In summer 1943, as the maquis emerged once again from their refuges, Le Ray began turning them into a fighting force.
    He also did something more. For Operation Montagnards, as it would soon be called, was little less than a secret plan to turn the whole course of the war in Alpine France.
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    At the same time, the maquis further north in the Rhône-Alpes were acting under the same stimuli in similar ways.
    In the Savoie, the maquis leader was Colonel Jean Vallette d’Osia. Born in 1898, Vallette d’Osia was a professional soldier who had been decorated in the First World War, wounded three times, and ended up graduating from the elite military academy at Saint Cyr. Captured during the Battle of France in 1940, he escaped twice. He then turned to General Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin as the French military leader too late in the day to prevent the Fall of France. Weygand persuaded d’Osia to follow the call of de Gaulle and take a hand in the renaissance of the French nation. In August 1940 d’Osia became commanding officer of the 27th Mountain Infantry Battalion in Annecy. This was part of L’armée d’armistice, a force of 100,000 that Vichy retained under the armistice terms. The post was a cover that enabled the Colonel to establish links with the nascent maquis in Savoie.
    After Operation Anton in 1942 and the dissolution of L’armée d’armistice that Anton entailed, d’Osia became the formal leader of the resistance in Savoie. A small, fiery man and a fierce disciplinarian , he conceived the idea of creating a secret Alpine army as a response to the occupation of the Zone Libre. This meant not simply assembling the maquis – as had been done in the Vercors – but properly training them in the way that his colleague Alain Le Ray would soon be doing on the Grenoble plateau. For this purpose d’Osia set up an instruction camp on the Col des Saisies, a 5,436-foot pass close to what is now the skiing resort of La Saisies. This dated from March 1943, the very beginnings of STO. It was the germ of a series of training camps in the Savoie and Haute-Savoie where maquis leaders were inculcated into the theory and practice of mountain warfare. To many of the recruits brought up in the highlands of Savoie on the flanks of Mont Blanc, the basics of climbing and skiing were second nature.