![\"Paddy](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2018\/01\/OliverEdwards_BBCH_PADDY_ASHDOWN_004_kindle-c435312.jpg?quality=90&resize=520%2C347\" "\\"Paddy")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>What\u2019s heartbreaking is that, whereas I was a professional soldier who took my chances where I could, the people that I explore in my book \u2013 the maquis du Vercors, a rural group of French resistance fighters who converged on the Vercors plateau in south-east France \u2013 were young and naive. In the heady days post-D-Day<\/a>, they still believed that war was glorious and were trying to do something to liberate their country. I became obsessed by the utter tragedy of these young men who genuinely believed, as most soldiers don\u2019t, in the glory of war and the importance of patriotism.<\/p>\n The extraordinary thing is that the idea of the Vercors plateau as a centre of resistance, a place of refuge in which the shattered elements of broken France could retreat, was already quite old at this point. But suddenly at the same time, in 1941, three groups of absolutely different people \u2013 intellectuals, the defeated French army, and the socialists \u2013 all had pretty well the same idea: to create a place that could, when liberation came, hold as a fortress for the Allies to fly into.<\/p>\n But I think that it\u2019s really important to understand that without the young men of France, this would just have been a middle-aged man\u2019s dream. The Nazis had suddenly ordered young men into compulsory work in Germany, and many went to the Vercors to avoid it. Others were drawn in by the romance: that this was a place of clean living and pure air. There was a whole mixture of motives, but it\u2019s fascinating to see that these disparate elements all came together, albeit sometimes uncomfortably. The young men became hardened maquisards, committed to the cause, and the groups largely set aside their differences to take on the Germans.<\/p>\n There was, however, always a divide between the rightwing military men and the primary civil organisations, which were socialist. This divide extended into what they were fighting for, which was not just how to get rid of the Germans, but also what the nature of the new France was going to be after the shame of occupation. The army wanted to keep France as it was: hierarchical, Catholic and rightwing; the socialists, who ran the civil organisation, wanted to have a new France more in tune with the tenets of the French Revolution. In the end, it worked, and their motives coagulated into a single aim as a result of the act of German oppression. There were huge internal tensions, though.<\/p>\n Muddle, in unclear lines of communication and unclear thinking. The original plan was to get the resistance in the north of France to rise, but keep the resistance in the south \u2013 in places like Vercors \u2013 undercover to be used in the course of a southern landing. One of the agents dropped in to the Vercors reported back that, if that\u2019s what happened, the Germans would know that the Allies were only going to land in the north. And so the US army general Dwight Eisenhower took the decision \u2013 which was correct, but cost thousands of French lives \u2013 to make the entire resistance simultaneously rise when it was vastly premature for those in the south.<\/p>\n The leader of France\u2019s government in exile, Charles de Gaulle, on the other hand, was desperate to make sure that France would play a part in her own liberation. So he had this plan, which was mad by anyone\u2019s calculation, to instead do a French landing into the Massif Central. In the end that\u2019s what the Vercors was sacrificed for: the resources that could have gone into saving it at the last minute were held in abeyance for de Gaulle\u2019s plan. The Allies\u2019 failure to tell him that this wasn\u2019t acceptable was also a factor.<\/p>\n But I can\u2019t blame de Gaulle. He was trying to do something enormous: to restore the greatness of France when it had nothing to bring to the table. She had been shamefully defeated, had no resources, no troops, was not even going to play a big part in her own liberation. De Gaulle\u2019s magic, with nothing in his hand, was to restore France to a great power after the war. It was extraordinary.<\/p>\n The French in London had developed the idea of using fortresses throughout 1943 and 1944. They sought to have a static defence in three places after D-Day, and in each case the Germans attacked with more men than it was thought that they could muster and obliterated them.<\/p>\nWhy do you think that people joined the maquis du Vercors?<\/h3>\n
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What problems were \u00a0faced in efforts to manage the resistance up until D-Day?<\/h3>\n
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How did German forces respond to the resistance in June and July 1944?<\/h3>\n