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

They were now taught how to deal with glaciers, cut steps in ice slopes, use ice axes and crampons: to become proficient, professional mountaineers. Once again, this maquis was armedand funded by the Allies, both by the SOE and, later, its fresh-faced US equivalent, the OSS – the story of which appears in the next chapter.
    From March 1943 the BBC, at the behest of the SOE’s Baker Street propaganda section, began to talk of major groups of maquisards in the Haute-Savoie. Swiss radio also began to run stories of risings in the Savoie – which adjoined the republic’s Canton Valais. It was this activity – and publicity – that gave the movement in the Haute-Savoie a reputation that inspired resistance throughout France. Similarly, from the summer of 1943 onwards, such was the extent of the resistance around Grenoble that it became known by both General de Gaulle’s Free French Forces and – critically – the BBC as the ‘capital of the maquis’.
    The resistance in the French Alps had arrived.
3
    Meanwhile, only a few miles to the north-east of the Savoie, Switzerland survived. The March Alarm that had sounded on 19 March 1943 had again proved false.
    Four weeks earlier, Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein had launched a fresh attack on the Eastern Front. By the end of March, the Soviet Voronezh Front was back on the east bank of the Donets river, the Red Army had abandoned nearly 6,000 square miles of the territory it had won after Stalingrad, and the cities of Belgorod and Kharkov were once again in the hands of the Wehrmacht.
    In the Berchtesgaden Berghof, Hitler’s warlords celebrated; every day the sun in the deep valley rose earlier and set later; every day the snow receded and sometimes the warm föhn wind blew from the south. Now there was spring in the air and – with this news from the east – all thoughts of Fortress Europe and the invasion of Switzerland were shelved. General Guisan’s forces in Switzerland, hastily mobilised, were once again stood down.
    In the place of the invasion of Switzerland, quite another plan was conceived in Berchtesgaden. This was Operation Citadel,the Wehrmacht’s ambitious plan to destroy the Soviet Central and Voronezh Fronts 280 miles south of Moscow in the Kursk salient.
    *
    Yet if Hitler could once again look with satisfaction to the Eastern Front, he was less happy with his southern flank, with Italy. Here, Il Duce’s regime was clearly crumbling. The Italians had entered the war trailing on the coat-tails of the Nazis. They had done so without enthusiasm, hoping at best for some ill-gotten spoils. As it so turned out, the country had gained little and lost a great deal in the conflicts in the Alps, the Balkans, in the Soviet Union and in North Africa. Casualties would soon amount to over 204,000. Of these, 67,000 had been killed, 111,000 were missing and 26,000 had died of disease. Hungry workers in Milan and Turin were now demonstrating for ‘bread, peace and freedom’; Venetian women now spurned the propaganda suggestion that they looked their best in coats made of tabby cats’ fur. 8
    Il Duce needed support. Now firmly ensconced for three months in the Berghof, the Führer summoned Mussolini up from Rome to the Reich.
    On 7 April 1943 Hitler drove down from the Berghof to meet Mussolini in Salzburg. In the city’s baroque Schloss Klessheim the Führer unfolded his plans for two operations intended – among other things – to put heart into his ally. The first was Operation Citadel in Kursk; the second Fall Schwarz. This was the Axis’s fifth offensive against the resistance in Yugoslavia, Mussolini’s north-eastern neighbour. According to Goebbels, the enthusiasm and energy with which Hitler set out these operations won over the faltering Mussolini. ‘By putting every ounce of energy into the effort, he succeeded in pushing Mussolini back on the rails … The Duce underwent a complete change … When he got out of the train on his arrival, the Fuehrer