Marked II: The Resistance

Marked II: The Resistance

Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier of Lyon, a staunch antisemite who had supported Vichy's efforts to solve the "Jewish question" in France, opposed the rafles of Jews, arguing in a sermon that the "final solution" was taking things too far; he felt it better to convert Jews to Roman Catholicism. They are part of mankind. They are our brothers. Ousby argued that, given the widespread belief that the Jews in France were mostly illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe who ought to be sent back to where they came from, it was remarkable that so many ordinary people were prepared to attempt to save them.

Now, as the threat of absence become brutally literal, their choices were more sharply defined, more urgent even than for other people in France. As in World War I and the war of , the Germans argued that those engaging in resistance were "bandits" and "terrorists", maintaining that all Francs-tireurs were engaging in illegal warfare and, as such, had no rights. Their symbol was the white gamma, the zodiacal sign of the Ram, symbolising renewal and power. At the Dora works near the Buchenwald concentration camp, about 10, slave workers, mostly French and Russian, were building V2 rockets in a vast subterranean factory; they were living in quarters meant to house only 2,, allowed to sleep only four and half hours every night, and regularly brutalised by the guards.

As the occupation went on, service with the STO was widened, with farmers and university students losing their exempt status until , when all fit men aged 18—60 and women aged 18—45 were being called up for service with the STO. Fritz Sauckel , the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment and the man in charge of bringing slaves to German factories, demanded the flight of young men to the countryside be stopped and called the maquis "terrorists", "bandits" and "criminals".

Despite warnings from Laval, Sauckel took the view that he was ordered by Albert Speer to produce a quota of slaves for German industry, that the men joining the maquis were sabotaging German industry by fleeing to the countryside, and the solution was simply to kill them all. When Laval was presented with Sauckel's latest demand for French labor for German industry, he remarked: As Laval predicated, the hardline policies that Sauckel advocated turned the basically apolitical maquis political, driving them straight into the resistance as the maquisards turned to the established resistance groups to ask for arms and training.

After the Battle of Stalingrad , which ended with the destruction of the entire German 6th Army in February , many had started to doubt the inevitability of an Axis victory, and most French gendarmes were not willing to hunt the down the maquis , knowing that they might be tried for their actions if the Allies won. Entering the popular vocabulary at more or less the same time, the words maquis and milice together defined the new realities: The Maquis and the Milice were enemies thrown up by the final chaos of the Occupation, in a sense twins symbiotically linked in a final hunt.

The established Resistance groups soon made contact with the maquis , providing them with paramilitary training. We established contact with them through our departmental and regional chiefs. Usually these little maquis voluntarily followed our instructions, in return for which they expected food, arms and ammunition It seemed to me that these groups, which were now in hiding all over the French mountain country, might well be transformed into an awesome combat weapon. The maquisards were all young, all volunteers, all itching for action It was up to use to organize them and give them a sense of their role in the struggle.

The terrain of central and southern France with its forests, mountains, and shrubland were ideal for hiding, and as the authorities were prepared to commit thousands of men to hunt the maquis down, it was possible to evade capture. The maquis were careful about concealing fires and could usually avoid aerial detection. Men who come to the Maquis to fight live badly, in precarious fashion, with food hard to find.

They will be absolutely cut off from their families for the duration; the enemy does not apply the rules of war to them; they cannot be assured any pay; every effort will be made to help their families, but it is impossible to give any guarantee in this manner; all correspondence is forbidden. Bring two shirts, two pairs of underpants, two pairs of woollen socks; a light sweater, a scarf, a heavy sweater, a woollen blanket, an extra a pair of shoes, shoelaces, needles, thread, buttons, safety pins, soap, a canteen, a knife and fork, a torch, a compass, a weapon if possible, and also a sleeping bag if possible.

Wear a warm suit, a beret, a raincoat, a good pair of hobnailed boots. A maquisard should stay only where he can see without being seen. He should never live, eat, sleep except surrounded by look-outs. It should never be possible to take him by surprise. A maquisard should be mobile. When a census or enlistment [for the STO] brings new elements he has no means of knowing into his group, he should get out. When one of the members deserts, he should get out immediately. The man could be a traitor. Darkness falls in the forest. On one path, some distance from the our camp, two boys stand guard over the safety of their comrades.

One has a pistol, the other a service rifle, with a few spare cartridges in a box. Their watch lasts for two hours. How amazing those hours on duty in the forest at night are! Noises come from everywhere and the pale light of the moon gives everything a queer aspect. The boy looks at a small tree and think he sees it move. A lorry passes on a distant road; could it be the Germans? Are they going to stop? Oubsy stated that the "breathless prose" in which this maqusiard remembered his first night out in the forest was typical of the maqusiards whose main traits were their innocence and naivety; many seemed not to understand just precisely who they were taking on or what they were getting themselves into by fleeing to the countryside.

These essential features stand out in accounts by maquisards even after innocence had quickly given way to experience, which made them regard danger and disciple as commonplace. As the maquis grew, the Milice was deployed to the countryside to hunt them down and the first milicien was killed in April Until , there were only 23 Halifax bombers committed to supplying Resistance groups for all of Europe, and many in the SOE preferred resistance groups in Yugoslavia, Italy and Greece be armed rather than French ones.

The Story of a British Agent. She refused to talk. In those places the only thing one could try to keep was a certain dignity. There was nothing else. And one could have a little dignity and try to prove that one had a little spirit and, I suppose, that kept one going.

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When everything else was too difficult, too bad, then one was inspired by so many things-people; perhaps a phrase one would remember that one had heard a long time before, or even a piece of poetry or a piece of music. In June , a sabotage campaign began against the French rail system. Between June May , the Resistance damaged 1, trains, destroyed passenger cars, damaged about 1, passenger cars, destroyed about 2, freight cars and damaged about 8, freight cars. Hardy was arrested on 7 June when he walked into a trap laid by Bastien.

Despite the blow inflicted by Barbie by arresting Moulin, by 1 October the AS had grown to , members, through most were still unarmed. If the instructors from the training schools in England could have seen those Frenchmen making up charges the cellar would looked to them like Dante's Inferno. Every conceivable school "don't" was being done. By the beginning of , the BCRA was providing the Allies with two intelligence assessments per day based on information provided by the Resistance.

As the Resistance had not been informed of the details of Operation Overlord, many Resistance leaders had developed their own plans to have the maquis seize large parts of central and southern France, which would provide a landing area for Allied force to be known as "Force C" and supplies to be brought in, allowing "Force C" and the maquis to attack the Wehrmacht from the rear.

Greece, Yugoslavia and the Haute-Savoie". By designating the resistance as part of the French armed forces was intended to provide the Resistance with legal protection and allow the French to threaten the Germans with the possibility of prosecution for war crimes. Getting no reply, they slapped in the face with such force that I fell from the chair. Then they whipped me with a rubber hose, full in the face. The interrogation began at 10 o'clock in the morning and ended at 11 o'clock that night. I must tell you I had been pregnant for three months".

As part of the preparations for Operation Overlord, Resistance attacks on the rail system increased with the Resistance in the first three months of damaging locomotives compared to damaged by air attack. Casey writing that many in the Resistance appeared more interested in post-war politics than in fighting the Germans. Agreed on this common imperative, the sides in the conflict blur and become almost indistinguishable from each other.

The Milice hit squads pretended to be the Maquis ; the Maquis hit squads pretended to be the Milice. Sometimes it was impossible to tell which was really which, and sometimes it hardly mattered". In the town of Voiron , close to Grenoble , in April , a Maquis assassination squad entered the home of the local Milice chief and killed him, his wife, his infant daughter, his year-old son, and his year-old mother.

Ayer arrived in Gascony as a SOE agent in the spring of , he described a power structure established by the maquis that placed power "in the hands of a series of feudal lords whose power and influence were strangely similar to that of their fifteenth-century Gason counterparts". Reflecting their weakening power, the authorities grew more harsh in their punishments.

Until the end of May , SHEAF had a "Block Planning" policy for the Resistance under which the Resistance would lie low until Operation Overlord was launched and then afterwards, the Resistance was to launch a full blown guerilla war in all of the French provinces one by one. He actually held indoctrination classes as well as his military operations and exercised a degree of almost forced recruitment among the young people of the area, threatening their families.

But once he got them on board, he did operate against the Germans. General de Gaulle himself was only informed by Churchill on 4 June that the Allies planned to land in France on 6 June. Until then the Free French leaders had no idea when and where Operation Overlord was due to take place.

Do not mass together Form small separate groups". Some had been shopkeepers, artisans, young sons of wealthy parents. Others were scrum of the gutter and many were soldiers. Now, however, all were much the same. All wore the clothes, and many still the wooden clogs, of peasants. Some lucky ones had scraps of uniforms and British battledress, but predominantly their clothes consisted of drab colored shirts, blue overall trousers and German field boots, whose owners no doubt had ceased to require them for obvious reasons. They wore neither brassards nor regular uniform of any kind.

The only distinguishable difference between the men of the Maquis and the men of the country from they had sprung was the pistol cocked aggressively from the trouser tops, the rifle on the shoulder, the Sten on the back or the string of grenades depending on the belt. Sometimes, the maquis wore armbands featuring the tricolor with either a Cross of Lorraine or the initials FFI stamped on them, so they could maintain that they had insignia and thus a sort of uniform, making them entitled to legal protection under the Geneva and Hague conventions.

Usually, the maquis and their Anglo-American allies would cut down a tree to block a road in the wooded section of the French countryside, sometimes an anti-tank mine would be planted under the tree trunk and the Germans would be ambushed with machine gun and sniper fire when they attempted to remove the tree blocking the road.

Through the maquis caused the Germans much difficulty, the guerrillas tended not to fare well in sustained combat.

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A man within feet of me slumped to the ground with blood spurting two feet into the air from the side of his neck We had anticipated an infantry assault-possibly backed up with light armour-but snipers, a threat we had not met before, were difficult to counter. Within minutes of the first casualty, another seven of our men lay dying within the farm complex: As the snipers continued to cut down his men while he could hear the sound of panzers coming up in the distance, Hue ordered his men to retreat into the woods under the cover of darkness while using his radio to call in a RAF airstrike that disorganised the Germans enough to make escape possible.

Just as terrifying to the young Frenchmen was the sight of those who were wounded and who yet had to die without help. I was not surprised that so many had enough. I was perhaps astonished that the number of defectors were so low". All over France, the maquis attempted to seize towns in June , expecting the Allies to be there soon, often with tragic results.

Being unable to take them prisoner, these soldiers then took the proprietors of that farm the husband and wife , and after subjecting them to numerous atrocities knifing, rape, et cetera they shot them down with submachine guns. Then they took the son of these victims who was only three years of age, and, after having frightfully tortured him, they crucified him on the gate of the farmhouse".

The reference to the "Mongolians" were to Asians serving in the Red Army who been captured by the Wehrmacht and joined either the German Army's Ostlegionen or the SS; the French called all these men "Mongols" regardless if they were Mongols or not. The Milice was especially hated by the Resistance and captured miliciens could expect little mercy. One maquisard fighting in the Haute-Savoie wrote in his diary about the fate of a milicien taken prisoner in July Made to saw wood in the hot sun wearing a pullover and jacket.

Made to drink warm salted water. Covered with blows from fists and bayonets.

French resistance anniversary marked in London | UK news | The Guardian

Made to dig his gave. Made to lie in it. Finished off with a blow in the stomach from a spade.

Two days to die". The rejection of the "Force C" plan had not reached many of the maquis leaders operating out in the countryside and after the news of D-Day, the maquis attempted to seize "redoubts", most notably at the Vercors plateau. By this point the Germans had taken such heavy losses on the Eastern Front that they needed the manpower of the Ostlegionen to compensate. De Gaulle disapproved of the truce as he used the uprising to order on 22 August General Philippe Leclerc 's 2nd Armored Division to liberate Paris, stating he did not want the Communists to liberate the city.

As various cities, towns and villages were liberated in France, the Resistance was usually the most organized force that took over. Each town and village still celebrates a different day, the gaps between them marking advances that often looked bogged down, pockets of German defense that often turned out to be unexpectedly tough. It proved the bitterest of ends to a bitter war. Besides for attempting to establish a government, the Resistance took its revenge on collaborators who were often beaten or killed in extrajudicial executions.

They are lads from the mining areas It is understandable that they should now want to beat them up". In the aftermath of the Liberation, the SOE agents were all ordered out of France as the Anglophobic de Gaulle wished to maintain a version of history where the SOE never existed and the Resistance was entirely a French affair. The French Resistance involved men and women representing a broad range of ages, social classes, occupations, religions and political affiliations. In , one resistance leader claimed that the movement received support from four groups: Resistance leader Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie observed, in retrospect, that the Resistance had been composed of social outcasts or those on the fringes of society, saying "one could be a resister only if one was maladjusted".

The question of how many were active in the Resistance has been raised.

The post-war government of France officially recognised , men and women. The doctrine of Gaullism was born during the Second World War as a French movement of patriotic resistance to the German invasion of He asked, in his Appeal of 18 June , that every patriot who could reach British territory should do so and join the Free French Army to fight in company with the Allies. His approval of this link between the Resistance and the colonials legitimised it.

De Gaulle's influence grew in France, and by one resistance leader called him "the only possible leader for the France that fights". The Allies helped build networks of propagandists, spies and saboteurs to harass and discomfit the occupiers. Eventually, leaders of all of these separate and fragmented Resistance organizations were gathered and coordinated by Jean Moulin under the auspices of the National Council of Resistance CNR , de Gaulle's formal link to the irregulars throughout occupied France.

During the Italian campaign of , , Free French soldiers fought on the Allied side and, by the time of the Normandy invasion , Free French forces numbered approximately half a million regulars and more than , French Forces of the Interior FFI. The division played a critical role in Operation Cobra , the Allies' "breakout" from its Normandy beachhead, where it served as a link between American and Canadian armies and made rapid progress against German forces. The 2nd Armored all but destroyed the 9th Panzer Division and mauled several other German units as well. During the battle for Normandy this German division lost killed, wounded and 85 missing.

The most celebrated moment in the unit's history involved the liberation of Paris. Allied strategy emphasized destroying German forces retreating towards the Rhine , but when the French Resistance under Colonel Rol staged an uprising in the city, Charles de Gaulle pleaded with General Eisenhower to send help. Eisenhower agreed, and Leclerc's forces headed toward Paris.

After hard fighting that cost the 2nd Division 35 tanks, 6 self-propelled guns and vehicles, Dietrich von Choltitz , the military governor of Paris, surrendered the city in a ceremony at the Hotel Meurice. Jubilant crowds greeted the French forces, and de Gaulle led a renowned victory parade through the city. De Gaulle not only kept the patriotic resistance alive; he also did everything possible to re-establish the French claim to independence and sovereignty.

As a leader, the American and British governments preferred the less popular, but less abrasively vindictive, General Giraud to de Gaulle, but for the French population de Gaulle was almost universally recognised as the true leader in their victory. These events forced Roosevelt to recognise, finally and fully, the provisional government installed in France by de Gaulle.

The military strength of the communists was still relatively feeble at the end of , but the rapid growth of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans FTP , a radical armed movement, ensured that French communists regained their reputation as an effective anti-fascist force.

Towards the end of the occupation the PCF reached the height of its influence, controlling large areas of France through the Resistance units under its command. Some in the PCF wanted to launch a revolution as the Germans withdrew from the country, [] but the leadership, acting on Stalin's instructions, opposed this and adopted a policy of cooperating with the Allied powers and advocating a new Popular Front government.

The publication opposed both fascism and western imperialism, and 12 issues were distributed from July through July Many well-known intellectual and artistic figures were attracted to the Communist party during the war, including the artist Pablo Picasso and the writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. A number of them formed the Union of Russian Patriots , which adopted pro-Soviet positions and collaborated closely with the French Communist Party. The same thing was created by Jean-Baptiste Lebas in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais administratively joined with Belgium in January , along the lines of a prior network created in September In Algeria , left-wing networks of resistance were already formed.

As the Riom trial began in , the fervour and the number of socialists in the Resistance grew. Despite some differences in their positions on certain issues, these organizations were united in their opposition to parliamentarism , [] a stance that had led them to participate in demonstrations, most notably the "political disturbance" riots of 6 February These efforts continued until La Cagoule could be infiltrated and dismantled in But the powerful appeal of French nationalism drove others to engage in resistance against occupying German forces.

Sometimes contact with others in the Resistance led some operatives to adopt new political philosophies. In contrast, many extreme right-wing members of the Resistance, such as Gabriel Jeantet and Jacques Le Roy Ladurie , never renounced their tolerant attitudes towards Vichy.

The Affiche Rouge red placard was a famous propaganda poster distributed by the Vichy French and German authorities in the spring of in occupied Paris. It was intended to discredit a group of 23 Franc-Tireurs known as the " Manouchian group ". The poster emphasised the composition of the group's membership, many of whom were Jews and communists, to discredit the Resistance as not "French" enough in its fundamental allegiance and motivations.

The Statute on Jews , which legally redefined French Jews as a non-French lower class , deprived them of citizenship. So there's a bunch of ways you can think about it, and I encourage you to let me know if there's other ways that help you. But the current through this entire series circuit is constant. Now if we say that, what else can we say? Well, if the current here-- let's say the current through here is I1.

If the current through here is I1, what is going to be the voltage if I measured it from here to here? What is this voltage here? I measured it with a voltmeter. Well, V1 is going to be equal to I1 times R1. I don't know why I put an R. That's a 1, not an I. I1 times R1, right?

And similarly, if I measured the voltage from here to here, that voltage is going to be equal to I2 times R2. Let's say this is where I3 is. So the voltage, if I were to measure it from here to here-- But anyway, if we look at the voltage from here to here, it's going to be I3 times R3. So what we see is that the voltage across the entire circuit, which I can write as V-total, is going to be equal to the potential drops, the total potential drop across each of these devices.

So the way to think about it is that-- well, let's think about the electrons. The electrons here, they really want to get here. But after they've bumped around a little bit and they get here, they've experienced some potential drop. So the electrons here actually are a little bit less eager to get here. And then once they've gone through here, maybe they're just tired of bumping around so much.

And once they're here, they're a little bit less eager to get here. So there's a voltage drop across each device, right? So the total voltage is equal to the voltage drop across each of the devices.

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And now let's go back to the convention, and we'll say that the current is going in that direction. And what's the total voltage drop? Well, that's equal to the total current through the whole system. Well, we know that all the I's are the same. Hopefully, you can take it as, just conceptually it makes sense to you that the current through the entire circuit will be the same. So all these I's are the same, so we can just cancel them out. Divide both sides by that I. So when you have resistors in series like this, the total resistance, their combined resistance, is just equal to their sum.

And that was just a very long-winded way of explaining something very simple, and I'll do an example. Let's say that this voltage is-- I don't know. Let's say it's 20 volts. Let's say resistor 1 is 2 ohms. Let's say resistor 2 is 3 ohms, and let's say resistor 3 is 5 ohms. So what is the total resistance through this circuit? Well, the total resistance is 2 ohms plus 3 ohms plus 5 ohms, so it's equal to 10 ohms.

So total resistance is equal to 10 ohms. So if I were to ask you what is the current going through this circuit? Well, the total resistance is 10 ohms. This gripping novel is full of dynamic characters and heart-pounding suspense. Everything isn't as it appears. Once you look below the surface, it all becomes terrifyingly clear. Once your eyes are opened to evil, you begin to see its presence everywhere.

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