All Hell Let Loose (67 page)

In mainland France, the Resistance enjoyed support from only a small minority of people until the Germans’ 1943 introduction of forced labour persuaded many young men to flee to join
maquis
groups, for which they afterwards fought with varying degrees of enthusiasm. To challenge the occupiers was difficult and highly dangerous. Given the strong French tradition of anti-Semitism, there was little appetite for assisting Jews to escape the death camps. Much of France’s aristocracy collaborated with the Germans, as well as with the Vichy regime which governed central and southern France until the Germans took them over in November 1942.

There were honourable exceptions, however, notable among them Countess Lily de Pastré. She was born in 1891, her mother a Russian and her father a rich French member of the Noilly Prat vermouth dynasty. In 1916 she married Count Pastré, who had his own fortune derived from a nineteenth-century family shipping business. One of their three children, Nadia, assisted wartime Allied escape lines. In 1940 the Countess was divorced, but continued to live in style at her family’s Château de Montredon, south of Marseilles. She began to lavish her fortune on making Montredon a haven for artists, many of them Jewish, who had escaped from the German-occupied zone. She created an organisation,
Pour que l’Esprit Vive
– ‘So that the spirit may survive’ – to finance and shelter people at risk. Up to forty fugitives at any one time – writers, musicians, painters – became long-stay guests at the château, including such artists as André Masson and the Czech Rudolf Kundera, together with Jewish pianist Clara Haskil and harpist Lily Laskine. Pastré arranged for Haskil’s treatment for a brain tumour, and her subsequent escape to Switzerland.

There were regular recitals and afternoon concerts by residents. To stimulate her guests’ creativity, the Countess offered a 5,000-franc prize for the best interpretation of a Brahms piano work. The highlight of her wartime career was a moonlight performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
staged on 25 July 1942, with a cast of fifty-two and incidental music played by an orchestra with a Jewish conductor. Costumes were created by the young Christian Dior, mostly from Montredon’s curtains. Lily de Pastré’s activities were brutally curtailed in the latter part of the war, after German troops took over her château. Some of her former guests, such as German Jewish composer Alfred Tokayer, were arrested and shipped to death camps. But the Countess’s efforts to succour some of the most vulnerable victims of Nazi persecution stand in distinguished contrast to the passivity of most of France’s rich, who declined to risk loss of their property as well as their lives. She died broke in 1974, having exhausted her huge fortune in the service of philanthropy, much of this during the war years.

Elsewhere, some small countries showed bolder defiance than did the French. The Danes, alone among European societies, refused to participate in the deportation of their Jews, almost all of whom survived. Few of the 293,000 people of the tiny Grand Duchy of Luxembourg welcomed its incorporation in Hitler’s empire. During the 1940 German invasion, seven of Luxembourg’s eighty-seven defenders were wounded; the ruling family and ministers escaped to London to form a government in exile. When a plebiscite on the German occupation was held in October 1941, 97 per cent of the population declared their opposition. Berlin shrugged off this vote, declared all Luxembourgers German citizens, and began conscripting them into the Wehrmacht. They responded by calling a general strike, which was broken by the execution of twenty-one trades unionists and the deportation of hundreds more to concentration camps. It would be mistaken to idealise Luxembourg’s resistance to the Nazis: its post-war government convicted 10,000 citizens of collaboration, and 2,848 Luxembourgers died in German uniform. But most of the Duchy’s people made plain their rejection of Nazi hegemony.

Further east, large numbers of Ukrainians and citizens of the Baltic states enlisted in the Wehrmacht, disliking Stalin’s Soviet Union more than the Nazis. Ukrainians provided many of the guards for Hitler’s death camps, and in February 1944 Nikolai Vatutin, one of Stalin’s best generals, was killed by anti-Soviet Ukrainian partisans who attacked his vehicle. In occupied Yugoslavia, the Germans exploited ethnic animosities, deploying Croat Ustaše militia against the Serbs. The Ustaše, together with Cossacks in German uniforms, committed ghastly atrocities against their fellow countrymen. In the later war years, the Germans recruited soldiers of any subject power willing to serve in their uniform – Cossacks, Latvians, even a few Scandinavians, French, Belgian and Dutch troops.

Perhaps the most exotic formations in Hitler’s armies were the 13th and 23rd SS Divisions, largely composed of Bosnian Muslims under Croatian rule, and led by German officers; for parade appearances, these men wore the tasselled fez. Himmler described the Muslim Waffen-SS as ‘among the most honourable and true followers of the Führer Adolf Hitler due to their hatred of the common Jewish-English-Bolshevik enemy’. This was an exaggeration, since 15 per cent of the formations’ men were Catholic Croats, but Himmler promoted Muslim support by establishing a special mullah military school in Dresden, and the Mufti of Jerusalem created an ‘Imam School’ in Berlin, to educate SS officers about shared Nazi and Muslim ideals. One of the Muslim formations’ commanders, a bizarre figure named Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig who liked to address his soldiers as ‘children, children’, asserted that ‘The Muslims in our SS divisions … are beginning to see in our Führer the appearance of a Second Prophet.’ But Sauberzweig was removed from command of 13th SS Division after it performed poorly in Yugoslavia in 1944, and Muslim recruits contributed scant combat power to Hitler’s forces.

Guerrilla war against the Axis occupiers, promoted by Allied secret organisations, has been romanticised in post-war literature, but its strategic impact was small. Resistance groups were seldom homogeneous in motives, make-up or effectiveness, as Italian Emanuele Artom – later executed by the Germans – noted in his diary in September 1943: ‘I must record reality in case decades hence psuedo-liberal rhetoric applauds the partisans as purist heroes. We are what we are: a mixture of individuals – some acting in good faith, some political
arrivistes
, some deserters who fear deportation to Germany, some driven by a yearning for adventure, some by a taste for banditry. In the ranks are those who perpetrate violence, get drunk, make girls pregnant.’

So it was among Resistance movements all over occupied Europe. Both sides acted with considerable brutality: there was embarrassment in SOE’s French Section when a courier, Anne-Marie Walters, denounced her British chief in south-west France, Lt. Col. George Starr, for implication in the systematic torture of collaborators and prisoners. During subsequent investigations in Britain, senior SOE officer Col. Stanley Woolrych wrote that, despite his admiration for Starr’s achievements in the field, ‘I feel that his record has been somewhat marred by a streak of sadism which it is going to be extremely hard to ignore … There is no doubt … that they tortured prisoners in a fairly big way.’ Walters’s allegations were hushed up, but they highlighted the passions and cruelties that characterise irregular warfare.

It is unsurprising that only small minorities supported resistance, because the price was so high. Peter Kemp, an SOE officer in Albania, described a 1943 episode when he and his British party sought refuge in a village after ambushing a German staff car. Stiljan, their interpreter, conducted a long argument with an indignant figure at a half-open door, which was finally slammed in his face. ‘He will not have us,’ explained Stiljan. ‘They have heard the shooting on the road and they are very much afraid, and very enraged with us for causing the trouble.’ Who could blame such people? They knew they would face appalling reprisals, while the young foreign adventurers moved on to make mischief for the Axis elsewhere. Kemp acknowledged: ‘As time went on it became more and more obvious that we could offer the Albanians little inducement to take up arms compared with the advantages they could enjoy by remaining passive. I must confess that we British liaison officers were slow to understand their point of view; as a nation, we have always tended to assume that those who do not wholeheartedly support us in our wars have some sinister motive for not wishing to see the world a better place.’

The European overseas empires were riven by divisions which became more acute where colonies were subject to occupation. In Indochina, through a variety of complex anomalies the French flag continued to fly until March 1945; a Vichy regime led by Admiral Jean Decoux administered the country in accordance with the orders of a Japanese military mission. In September 1940, Japanese troops emphasised their absolute dominance by attacking two Tonkinese towns and killing eight hundred French troops before withdrawing into southern China. The confusion of local loyalties intensified when Vichy warships fought a series of actions against the neighbouring Siamese, who attempted to secure disputed border territory in Laos and Cambodia. The Japanese intervened to enforce a French retreat, to secure the interests of their Siamese clients. From July 1941 onwards, 35,000 Japanese troops acted as they chose in Indochina, which was incorporated in Japan’s so-called Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Vichy
colons
preserved shreds of personal freedom as long as they, like European acolytes of the Nazis, implemented the policies of their Axis masters. In March 1945, on orders from liberated Paris, French troops launched a disastrous uprising, quickly and brutally suppressed by the Japanese, who then assumed full control of the country.

The Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians suffered appallingly from 1942 onwards, as the Japanese pillaged their countries: elderly Vietnamese later said that their experiences were worse than those of their later wars of independence. Rice, corn, coal and rubber were shipped to Japan; many rice fields were compulsorily planted with jute and cotton to meet the occupiers’ textile requirements. Denied their own produce, local people began to starve on a staggering scale: in Tonkin, by 1945 at least 1.5 million Vietnamese, and perhaps many more, had died of hunger in a country which before the war was the world’s third-largest grower of rice. The French colonial authorities suppressed local protests and insurrections with a brutality the Japanese could not have surpassed.

The communist Vietminh movement was the chief political beneficiary of Vietnamese misery, gaining substantial support in northern areas where Tokyo’s policies caused most distress. There was no significant armed resistance to the Japanese until the summer of 1945, because the passionately anti-imperialist Americans refused to fly Free French officers into Vietnam from China. Only in the summer of that year did the OSS ship arms to the Vietminh, in a belated attempt to foment anti-Japanese activity. The weapons were warmly welcomed by their leader Nguyên Ai Quôc, better known as Ho Chi Minh. OSS officers on the ground displayed unreserved enthusiasm for his guerrillas, epic naïveté about their politics, and bitter animosity towards local French colonialists.

The Vietminh – by that time numbering about 5,000 active supporters – were happy to fight the French, but showed no interest in engaging the Japanese. They either stored their weapons in readiness for the post-war independence struggle, or brandished them to impose their will on the rural population. Under pressure from Washington, the OSS persuaded the guerrillas to make some show of engaging the occupiers; one group staged a noisy demonstration against a small Japanese supply column, which turned and fled without suffering much harm. On another occasion, on 17 July 1945, a Vietminh battalion led by Vó Nguyên Giáp attacked a Japanese outpost at Tâm Doa, killing eight of its forty defenders and capturing the remainder. But this appears to have been the sum of the Vietminh contribution to the Allied cause, in return for US deliveries of several tons of weapons and equipment, which were later used against the returning French colonialists.

By far the most important overseas element in the Allied war effort was, of course, the British Empire. London’s relations with the white self-governing dominions were conducted with considerable clumsiness and indeed ruthlessness under the exigencies of global conflict, and policy towards the black and brown nations of Empire was uncompromising. The prime minister asserted his determination to sustain hegemony over India, and outraged American opinion by declaring in November 1942 that he had not become the king’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. Most of his people were warmly sentimental about the contribution of Indian and colonial troops to the war effort, heedless of the fact that their services were purchased for cash and only rarely inspired by loyalty, or even understanding of the Allied cause. James Mpagi from Kampala, Uganda, said: ‘We thought perhaps war was something very simple … perhaps the same thing as if people were quarrelling for a cow or [between] neighbouring villages.’

Britain took for granted the loyalty of its black and brown subject peoples, and in 1939 this was promptly expressed, in the form of messages of support from colonial governors and prominent citizens. There was no significant dissent: black Africa and the Caribbean eventually contributed some 500,000 recruits to the war effort; three African divisions carried arms in Burma, while most other black soldiers performed labour service. Britain never introduced military conscription in its African possessions, but strong local pressure and sometimes compulsion were exercised to mobilise tribesmen who served in British uniform under the command of white officers. Batison Geresomo of Nyasaland recalled later: ‘When we heard about the conflict, we were not sure … whether they will be taking everybody by force … the white man came in all the districts to recruit soldiers. Some were taken by the chiefs’ force and some went on their own wish.’ In addition, conscription for agricultural labour service was widely introduced in East Africa, much to the profit of white settler farmers. Local chiefs in the Gold Coast colony bowed to the wishes of the authorities by urging their young men to enlist. Recruiting bands sang songs to attract men, one punning the Akan word
barima
– ‘brave man’ – with Burma.