World War II Day by Day

Mont Mouchet, South-Central France • June 20, 1944

During the Allied invasion of France (Operation Overlord), the Maquis and other French resis­tance groups played a vital role in delaying the arri­val of German rein­force­ments to the Normandy beach­head as well as in the even­tual Allied vic­tory in France. The FFI, or Fifis (Forces Fran­çaises de l’Inte­rieur for “French Forces of the Inte­rior”), and Francs-Tireurs (roughly “French Gun­men”) sabo­taged rail­road tracks and repeatedly attacked German Army equip­ment and garri­son trains on their way to Normandy, helping to iso­late the inva­sion site from the rest of occu­pied France. Thanks to coded “personal mes­sages” broad­cast on the eve of D‑Day by the BBC during its segment “French speaking to French” (les français parlent aux français), the maqui­sards (as Maquis mem­bers were known) were alerted to the im­pending inva­sion and their assigned roles in it by listening for these pre-arranged mes­sages, meaning­less to most eaves­dropping Germans, read in a contin­u­ous flow over the air­waves. At last, at 9:15 p.m. on June 5, 1944, a BBC French-speaking announcer began reading, over and over again, the vital mes­sages, among them: “The dice are on the table . . . The tomatoes are ripe and ready for plucking at Perpignan. . . .” and the second and triggering part of a French poem by Paul Verlaine.

As Allied troops advanced from their beach­heads in June 1944, the FFI, whose ranks approached 200,000 (at its peak there would be 300,000), rose against the Nazi occu­pa­tion forces and their garri­sons en masse. On this date, June 20, 1944, in South Central (formerly Vichy) France, a group of 7,000 ma­qui­sards led by British Special Opera­tions Execu­tive (SOE) agent Nancy Wake, who was married to a French­man, began a series of pitched battles against upwards of 22,000 Ger­man SS soldiers. Between April 1944, when Wake para­chuted into France, and August, her group accounted for 1,400 German casualties, while losing only 100 themselves.

On the Vercors plateau west of the French Alps, a Maquis group led resis­tants in estab­lishing a short-lived Free Repub­lic of Ver­cors in June and July 1944, which ended in defeat and civil­ian atro­cities. When engaging the enemy, some Maquis groups took no pri­soners, so enemy soldiers often prefer­red to sur­render to Allied sol­diers in­stead of facing the ma­qui­sards. Ma­qui­sards, whether cap­tured by the Germans or by Vichy France’s Milice (French mili­tia), faced tor­ture, death, or concentration camps, where few survived (see photo essay below).

When Gen. Charles de Gaulle set up a Free French admin­is­tra­tion after the liber­a­tion of Paris in August 1944, many ma­qui­sards returned to their homes but many also joined the new French army to con­tinue fighting the Germans. France was rewarded for its tena­city against Adolf Hitler’s tyran­ny by joining the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union in sta­tioning troops and admin­is­trating zones of occu­pa­tion in a defeated Germany. The French zone lay to the east of the Rhine River, the decades-long contested boundary between France and Germany.

French Resistance Forces Target Both Germans and Collaborators

Left: The French Resistance was never a homo­geneous organi­za­tion. Its factions often acted like warring tribes, riven by polit­i­cal alle­giances and person­al­ity clashes and some­times putting bounties on each other’s heads. Until 1944 non­vio­lent mem­bers and rural and urban guer­rillas of the French under­ground were lumped under the collec­tive term une armée secrète. By the spring of 1944 membership in the various under­ground groups may have approached 350,000 (out of a total French popu­la­tion of 35 million), of which 100,000 may have had service­able wea­pons. At most a half-million people, or less than 2 per­cent of the popu­la­tion, were involved one way or another in the Resis­tance. Four-fifths of the resis­tants were less than 30 years old. They were an impu­dent annoy­ance that grew in inten­sity, but they posed no serious threat to Germany’s occu­pa­tion of France or to Vichy French author­i­ties, which acted as a second occu­pa­tion force. Their main contri­bu­tions lay in gathering intel­li­gence and con­ducting sabo­tage opera­tions; e.g., against rail, elec­tri­city, and phone lines, loco­motives, bridges, and tunnels, the latter more diffi­cult to repair. This photo depicts Allied para­troopers and beret-wearing French resis­tance fighters with Francs-Tireurs sharing infor­ma­tion during the Battle of Normandy, June 6 to mid-July 1944. According to Allied Supreme Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisen­hower the resis­tants shortened the French campaign by two months.

Right: Members of the Maquis in the hamlet La Trésorerie near Bou­logne-sur-Mer along the Pas-de-Calais coast in the Hauts-de-France region, Septem­ber 14, 1944. Although it is not her in this photo, the female figure bears an uncanny resem­blance to the British SOE agent Nancy Wake (1912–2011). The Gestapo nick­named Wake the “White Mouse” due to her abil­ity to evade arrest and escape when she was in cus­tody. The Gestapo offered a 5-million-franc reward for her capture. In one raid on a Gestapo head­quarters no less, Wake delivered a single karate chop that killed a German sentry to prevent him from raising an alarm.

Left: Associated with this photo, the German text written by a German Armed Forces corres­pon­dent named Koll in July 1944 reads: “A good catch by Ger­man sol­diers in France. The Com­mu­nist leader is on the list of the wanted. His escape was thwarted by ‘Streif’ com­man­dos. His papers prove his affili­ation to ter­rorist groups.” A mem­ber of the Propa­gan­da­kom­pa­nie der Wehr­macht, Koll titled his piece, “The ‘Red’ Resistance in France.” Communists were a signi­fic­ant seg­ment in the French Resis­tance. Having supported the Nazi inva­sion of their coun­try owing to the German-Soviet Non­aggression Pact of August 1939, French com­munists switched their alle­giance after Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa).

Right: Koll’s text associated with this photo from July 1944 reads: “Arrested ter­rorists before depor­ta­tion. The leaders of the gangs are Jews, who fled com­mu­nist Spain [i.e., Republican Spain], and English [SOE] agents, who are usually well dressed and equipped with large sums of money. Their hench­men are recruited almost exclu­sively from work-shy rabble.” As good as they were in ferreting out mem­bers of the Resis­tance, the German and Vichy French intel­li­gence ser­vices relied heavily on ordi­nary French men and women to betray their fellow citizens to the authorities.

Left: Germany’s brutal occupation of Europe precip­i­tated the rise of all sorts of home-grown resis­tance move­ments that tar­geted mem­bers of the Wehr­macht (German armed forces) as well as sup­porters of collab­o­ra­tionist regimes like Marshal Pétain’s Vichy France—creating forms of civil war inside each occupied coun­try. The Milice fran­çaise, or simply Milice, was a pred­a­tory Vichy para­military force formed in early 1943 with help from the Germans to fight the growing presence and armed capa­bil­ities of the French Resis­tance. A good per­cent­age of the Milice were the dregs of French society—petty crimi­nals, fana­tical anti-terrorists, and ex-prisoners bran­dishing their newly acquired wea­pons. Incred­i­bly, one in six miliciens was female. Resis­tance fighters tar­geted the thuggish miliciens for assas­si­na­tion, believing them more dan­gerous to their cause than the hated German Gestapo and SS. “Kill the miliciens,” a widely circulated clan­des­tine flyer read, “exter­mi­nate them like rabid dogs.” German corres­pon­dent Koll’s text for this photo reads: “Mem­bers of the French Milice parade with shouldered armor-clad machine guns.”

Right: Koll’s text reads: “Numerous prisoners taken in an opera­tion against the ter­rorists in France. Among them are many crimi­nal ele­ments who are guilty of mur­der, rob­beries, rail­road bombings, etc. They are guarded by the Milice fran­çaise, who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with German soldiers against Bol­she­vism.” Roughly 100,000 men and women whom the Germans and Vichyists labeled “terrorists” may have been killed in battle or, after capture, in prison following death sen­tences handed down by miliciens acting as judges, against which there was no appeal.

1944 Newsreel Account of the Liberation of France