D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

immediately successful. This was the only occasion I can recall when Hitler did not hesitate too long before deciding to evacuate territory.’ But the sudden German retreat produced a savage cycle of violence in France.

The Resistance, scenting victory, increased its attacks, and the Germans, especially the SS, responded with cruel and indiscriminate reprisals. Security police and the Gestapo in many places massacred their prisoners before pulling out. Altogether some 600 were shot, including almost all Jews in German custody. In some areas, the Resistance had tried to switch from guerrilla warfare to open insurrection, usually with catastrophic results.

In the Vercors, a high plateau between Grenoble and Valence, a large force of 3,200 maquisards had cleared the area of Germans by the end of June and raised the tricolore. General Cochet in Algiers had failed to tell them to wait for the landings in the south of France. Even so, their attempt to hold ground against regular troops was contrary to every rule of guerrilla warfare. The Americans dropped 1,000 containers of arms by parachute on 14 July, but by then the Germans had surrounded the plateau with 10,000 troops backed by artillery. A week later SS troops were landed by glider and soon the whole area was overrun. The Maquis should have dispersed to fight another day, but despite lacking heavy weapons they attempted to fight a conventional battle against overwhelming numbers. Their desperate heroism ended in a massacre. The reprisals were barbaric, as the British official history of SOE in France recorded: ‘One woman was raped by seventeen men in succession while a German doctor held her pulse, ready to stop the soldiers when she fainted. Another was eviscerated and left to die with her guts round her neck.’

The Resistance targeted the Gestapo and SS wherever they could. On 6 August, Sturmbannfuhrer Ludwig Kepplinger of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier-Division was ambushed at Villiers-Charlemagne, south of Laval. The next day, the head of the Gestapo in Chateauroux was gunned down. On the evening of 10 August, German authorities announced that ‘128 terrorists were eliminated in fighting on French territory’ that day. Three days later at Tourouvre in the Orne, eighteen men were executed and the main street was set on fire, almost certainly by members of the Hitler Jugend. The artillery regiment of the Hitler Jugend Division issued an order stating that ‘reprisals cannot be harsh enough’.

The massacres continued until almost the end of August, even after any hope of holding on to France had gone. Only a savage bitterness remained. In Bucheres near Troyes (Aube), an SS uni tkilled sixty-eight civilians, including women, children and infants. On 25 August, following an FFI attack on a Wehrmacht truck in which three German soldiers were wounded, the SS murdered 124 people, including forty-two women and forty-four children, at Maille (Indre-et-Loire) and the village was destroyed. In the Aisne at Tavaux and Plomion, members of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and the Hitler Jugend killed a total of thirty-four civilians, of whom only one was a member of the Resistance. In the twenty-six worst massacres in France during 1944, 1,904 civilians were murdered.[66]

The breakthrough in Normandy combined with the 15 August landings in the south of France triggered a hasty withdrawal not only by the Germans, but also by Vichy’s hated paramilitary force, the Milice. Over the next few days, Luftwaffe and naval personnel from ports in southern and western France, Organisation Todt officials, supply and clerical personnel from military depots, security police — in fact the whole apparatus of the German occupation built up over the last four years — pulled out. A running battle was fought across France against the Milice. Well aware of their fate if they stayed behind, these criminal paramilitaries sought safety in eastern France and then Germany. Vehicles, bicycles and horses were seized as well as food to help them on their way.

German forces in the south-west ordered their men to escape in ‘march groups’. Few got through. Most succumbed to hunger and exhaustion and were forced to surrender to the FFI or the Americans. The Resistance killed relatively few of their German military prisoners. They handed them over proudly to the Allies or to regular French forces. But hardly any Gestapo, SS or Security Police survived capture.

As part of a scorched-earth policy during the retreat, German detachments were ordered to destroy bridges, telephone systems, railways and ports, as well as any establishments which might help repair them. SOE liaison groups at 21st Army Group and SHAEF advance headquarters passed ‘counter-scorching’ requests to the Resistance, which meant thwarting German attempts to wreck communications behind them.

The collapse of the German occupying power also signalled the collapse of the Vichy regime. In Normandy, a senior Vichy official reported during the American breakthrough that, ‘military events having taken a new direction’, he would withdraw to ‘rejoin French territory according to the orders of the government’. He retreated with the local Feldkommandant, who provided him with fuel for his car. But every time he tried to set up a new prefecture, first at Gavray, then Saint-Pois and then Mortain, the rapidity of the American advance sent him hurrying on. Pierre Laval, Marshal Petain’s prime minister, tried to persuade the old marshal to seek refuge at Eisenhower’s headquarters.[67]

The power vacuum in large areas of France, especially in the Dordogne, the Limousin, the Correze, the Massif Central and the south-west, meant that the different groups of the Maquis began to settle accounts. They took revenge on genuine collaborators, but also on those class enemies they considered collaborators. This was not hard to foresee once the invasion started. A Vichy report to Paris just after the invasion spoke of ‘regions where hideous civil war will reign’. In July, an agent reported back to London on the situation in the Limousin created by Resistance attacks and ferocious German reprisals: ‘In the face of these barbarous acts, the whole region trembles. The peasants hide in the woods and scouts signal the arrival of any German vehicles. The country experiences at one and the same time the violence of the enemy, of the Maquis, and of the Milice. There is no longer any legal authority.’

There was much to avenge, but the moral outrage of vengeance also concealed a degree of political and personal opportunism. Some private scores were settled and rivals for post-war power done away with. Resistance groups killed some 6,000 people before the German withdrawal. Then, in what became known as the epuration sauvage, or ‘unofficial purges’, at least 14,000 more were killed. A few British and American troops also killed French collaborators, but most preferred to look away, feeling that, having not experienced German occupation, they were in no position to judge. Perhaps the most shocking statistic is that in Brittany a third of those killed were women.

French people as well as Allied troops were sickened by the treatment meted out to women accused of ‘collaboration horizontale’ with German soldiers. Some of the victims were prostitutes who had plied their trade with Germans as well as Frenchmen. Some were silly young girls who had associated with German soldiers out of bravado or boredom. Many more were young mothers whose husbands were in German prisoner of war camps. They often had no means of support, and their only hope of obtaining food for themselves and their children in the hunger years had been to accept a liaison with a German soldier. As the German writer Ernst Junger observed from the luxury of the Tour d’Argent restaurant in Paris, ‘Food is power.’

After the humiliation of a public head-shaving, the tondues — ‘the shorn women’ — were usually paraded through the streets, occasionally to the sound of a drum, as if France was reliving the Revolution of 1789. Some were daubed with tar, some stripped half naked, some painted with swastikas. In Bayeux, Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, recorded his reactions to one such scene: ‘I watched an open lorry drive past, to the accompaniment of boos and cat-calls from the French populace, with a dozen miserable women in the back, every hair on their heads shaved off. They were in tears, hanging their heads in shame. While disgusted by this cruelty, I reflected that we British had known no invasion or occupation for some nine hundred years. So we were not the best judges.’ The American historian Forrest Pogue observed of the victims that ‘their look, in the hands of their tormentors, was that of a hunted animal’. Colonel McHugh near Argentan reported, ‘The French were rounding up collaborators, cutting their hair off and burning it in huge piles, which one could smell miles away. Also women collaborators were forced to run the gauntlet and were really beaten.’

It was indeed ‘an ugly carnival’, as one writer put it, but this had been the pattern since soon after D-Day. Once a city, town or even a village had been liberated by the Allies the shearers would get to work. In mid-June, on the market day following the 101st Airborne’s capture of Carentan, a dozen women were shorn publicly. In Cherbourg on 14 July, a truck-load of young women, most of them teenagers, were driven through the streets. In Villedieu, one of the victims was a woman who had simply been a cleaner in the Kommandantur. In the departement of the Manche alone, 621 women were arrested for ‘collaboration sentimentale’. Elsewhere some men who had volunteered to work in German factories had their heads shaved, but that was an exception. Women almost always were the first targets.