Target (7 page)

Millar, relatively isolated as he had been for months, realized quickly enough that Bazata’s arrival meant the Allies were serious about aiding the fighters he had been organizing under strained conditions. He was eager to get more supplies from London. In a stroke of luck for Bazata, local Maquis chieftains hampered by the German presence around them could not meet for three days. He thus got that time to recuperate. Self-administering Sulfanilamide,
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which luckily he had pocketed just before leaving,
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he had improved to the point of being able to function effectively despite his injury. He and Millar had decided, as they waited for more supplies to be dropped, to concentrate their efforts on harassing the flow of Germans on the Besancon-Belfort road and railway routes running north northeast from Besancon up to Belfort (another ancient town) around and through which most of the local German traffic was heading. The Nazis, retreating from Patton’s Third Army, were being particularly brutal as they passed through the corridor seizing all available transport—cars, carts, bicycles, horses—and dealing severe reprisals for interference. As Bazata later wrote, “They burnt three villages adjacent to us two days after our arrival.”
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Bazata and his men were soon forced to go on the run. Because of poor security, they were continuously chased by Germans.
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The Maquis they were organizing were scattered. They had to use a car to reach them. Millar acquired a shiny black Citroen he had stolen from the Germans in another area. He and Bazata, aided by false identification and brazen courage, posed as Gestapo agents
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while reconnoitering, meeting with fighters, and making plans for sabotage. When and where they could, they cut telephone lines that might aid the enemy.

In another stroke of luck, they acquired a unit of approximately 650 Ukrainian soldiers forced to fight for the Germans, who had been talked into massacring their Nazi guards by the Maquis and joining the resistance. But the two leaders were still terribly short of weapons and ammunition. A drop of sixty supply containers from London backfired. In a breakdown of communication, the drop was not coordinated through them and the Nazis learned of it. All sixty containers were found by searching German soldiers. The botched drop angered Bazata who radioed London that in addition to the loss of valuable weapons, he and Millar’s prestige with the Maquis had suffered. Why had their supposedly important Allied leaders, Bazata and Millar, not known of the drop, the local fighters wondered?

It was a kink that needed smoothing. But Bazata, charming and resourceful—not to mention courageous in the eyes of those around him for the way he handled his painful and debilitating injury—was “too sharp,” wrote Millar. “He soon adopted the local habits with various enjoyable flourishes and exaggerations, for he was a born clown.”
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In spite of their reluctance, the various
local fighter chieftains warmed to the likeable American who let it be known he was impatient with their hesitation.

By September 1, he and Millar had the various resistance bands daily attacking retreating Germans with whatever weapons were available on secondary roads and railways, including the Besancon-Belfort line. Belfort, some sixty or so miles northeast of Besancon, was the gateway to the “Belfort Gap,” an ancient and scenic passageway through the mountains into Germany near Switzerland. One day, Bazata and a driver went to Belfort, which was crawling with Nazis, including their secret police, the vengeful Gestapo. Leaving the driver, Bazata walked alone to the main railroad station in broad daylight and after reconnoitering which trains he wanted to hit, including asking locals for information, surreptitiously snuck into the engine yards and damaged several important escape trains bound for Germany and their tracks with dynamite as they were leaving. Details in documents are unclear as to the number of destroyed trains and loss of life. But in a write-up to award Bazata the Distinguished Service Cross, the army’s second highest medal for bravery,
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Colonel James R. Forgan—noting other praiseworthy train sabotages by the Bazata-Millar-led fighters—penned, “After this, the Germans no longer made any attempt to use rail transportation in this area.”
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On September 4, Bazata wrote in his after-action report,
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“the entire remnants of the German 19
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Army” had passed through his area in a slow-moving “convoy of [mostly] camouflaged civilian cars.” He could have blasted the vehicles already on the point of collapse he lamented, if only they had had the needed weapons. What he did not write until many years later when he attempted
to pen a book was the time he brazenly went down amongst the 19
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Army soldiers and spoke to them in English, declaring he was a recent French graduate student of the language, which, tired and needing supplies from the locals, they bought. He thereby got on-the-spot intelligence. In response to his requests, London finally radioed that they were sending a special mission of ten officers with ample supplies and to get a secret field ready to accept the mission. The next day, however, reconnoitering, they discovered that the area they had selected, which had several towns and villages near it, had been overrun with German soldiers. The enemy was everywhere. Hastily, he and Millar had Floyd radio London to scratch the officers but go ahead and drop the supply containers—they needed arms badly enough to risk it.

As Millar would later write,
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it would have been “madness” to light bonfires so they planned to use flashlights to signal and guide the drop. That night, they climbed in the Citroen and headed for the drop site which was in the vicinity of Vieilley, north northeast of Besancon. But in Loulans, a small town on the way, they ran into so many beaten Nazis trudging East that they had to pull off the road to let them through. Tanks were now beginning to rumble by as well. To find out more, they left the car in the care of the driver. When they returned, two Germans in Panzer uniforms were trying to requisition the vehicle. Luckily, the driver (who actually had the key) played dumb and managed to signal what was up to his returning leaders before they showed themselves. When the Germans left to get permission from their officers to take the car, the three jumped in and roared away. It was late and they had to drive fast to get to the drop site.

They took back roads, fearful that with the numbers of Germans they had seen, they might run into more, even a tank, and have more explaining to do than they could handle. As they approached
the village of Cirey, one of the towns on the way, they were flagged down by a local who knew Millar. She warned them to go back. The Germans, in a foul mood, were in the village and coming their way. Bazata and Millar stepped out of the car. They could hear horses and commotion. They decided to heed the woman’s warning. The driver tried hastily to turn the car around in the narrow road but it stalled. Just then, two Germans appeared on the road ahead of them, one with a sub-machinegun, the other with a rifle. According to Bazata, they were not more than fifty yards away. Bazata and Millar had little with which to fight.
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Their rifles were in the car. The Germans started firing. “During this time our frantic chauffeur pushed every button in the dashboard eighty times,” wrote Bazata.
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“The car finally started and we jumped back into it.” As they roared off, the last of perhaps seventy-five rounds was fired at them, but without inflicting any physical damage. “Bazata had been lying on the floor in the back,” wrote Millar. “When he came up, we laughed heartily together. And thanked God that the Germans could not shoot.”
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Their chauffeur drove like a demon until they could cut off into the woods where they hid the car in brush, erased its tracks, and continued escaping on foot. Meanwhile, others of their band had made it to the drop site and a fearless Maquis leader, Georges Molle, had, despite the presence of Germans in the immediate area, stepped out onto the darkened field and flashed the proper code with his “electric torch.” The drop had been made with spectacular success—almost all containers hit a single field. The containers, forty-six of them, were hastily gathered and their contents—rifles, ammunition, grenades, anti-tank guns—were distributed among the local resistance groups.

Millar, Bazata, and the driver, unaware of this, spent the night fearfully hiding in the woods. As they climbed hills to get above the Germans on the nearby roads around them, they heard whiffs and saw the light of distant artillery fire indicating the advancing Allies (probably Patton’s Third Army) were getting nearer. Finding what they thought was a relatively safe place high up, they tried to sleep. But throughout the night, they were kept awake by German voices which carried far in the woods. It was obvious they were surrounded, although the soldiers were not necessarily looking for them. Around midnight, it began to rain, making conditions, including the fact that they had missed the drop, more miserable. Only Bazata, writes Millar, was making jokes. But even he was depressed. Everything they had done so far had been predicated on getting to the drop site. And they had failed. By dawn, they decided they would have to make a move or be spotted. Taking different routes, and being as silent as they could, they crawled through the German-infested woods and, miraculously, made it out of the area safely.They were spectacularly buoyed when they heard the good news of the successful drop.

On 6 September, Millar and Bazata led a band of Maquis armed with the new weapons in an ambush of several convoys along the Besancon-Belfort route, killing seventy Germans and losing only one of their own—a rousing success.
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Around the same time, they sent three young, newly trained Maquis into Besancon with a Welrod
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and assassinated the Gestapo agent there who was second in command.
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They next assassinated the Gestapo chief at Vesoul, a large town north and west of Besancon with road and rail links to Belfort that seved as a chief route for the retreating Germans.
After attempts to destroy a bridge spanning the Doubs River failed, they tried to have it taken out by Allied bombers. Though they were told it would be done, the air strike never occurred, reinforcing Bazata’s opinion that what they needed, they would have to do themselves. All the while, despite his nagging injury, Bazata was a driven commando, setting up ambushes, reconnoitering, committing to memory military intelligence like artillery emplacements in his area, and demanding that despite odds against them, their small band of local and foreign resistors attempt any sabotage possible. Sometimes he and Millar disagreed. But “Bazata was a delightful companion,” the British agent wrote in
Maquis.
“While the adventure merely made me feel dead inside... it stimulated him.... I began to take a real interest in what he said, to seek out his personality.” He was a man of “tugging contrasts; an unhappy man and a gay one. A mixture of rapacity and generosity, of laziness and industry, at the same time sensitive and crude.” But always determined. “I was afraid his determination would lead us into German torture cells. Walking with the tempestuous Bazata towards German lines was like riding a horse with a mouth of iron towards a precipice that the horse knew nothing about.”
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Reconnoitering a village near Besancon, he and Bazata had been trapped in a German round up of all eligible men for what they guessed was some kind of forced work project. Six hundred soldiers and Gestapo surrounded the town and they knew their fake identifications would not hold up, especially since local French collaborated with the Germans and Bazata’s limited French, spoken with a strong New Jersey accent, would not withstand such scrutiny. They ducked into a friendly house and Bazata, pondering their predicament, looked out a window and saw some older village residents gathering mushrooms that had sprouted
from recent rains. He suddenly saw how to escape. He and Millar got blankets to use as shawls and peasant baskets and the two of them went out into the field to join the other oldsters, bending and picking. Soldiers all around gave them scant a look. But how to escape? They were in an open field with the woods beyond across a kind of no man’s land with the soldiers largely in between. Bazata decided to cause a commotion. Bent over, crawling and picking, Bazata moved slowly toward “the largest Corporal” until the disinterested German was blocking his way. Suddenly, he stated loud and clearly “Boy, you are standing on my cloak and mushrooms!” pushed him and passed between his wide-spread legs while Millar “took total flight and the silly Krauts opened fire hitting naught.” As all the soldiers concentrated on Millar, some running after him, Bazata “just stepped into the woods.”
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They both escaped.

But almost as soon as they were safe, Bazata was proposing they go back in harm’s way. They were getting increasing reports by this time that, as they had suspected, U.S. forces (likely Patton’s Third Army and Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army) coming from the south and the west were getting nearer. Bazata had precisely mapped locations of German defenses in their area that he wanted to get to the oncoming allies. Millar objected. The Germans, as they had just seen, were now streaming in larger numbers through their area. The dangers of detection and reprisals had mounted. They would have to go through as much as thirty miles of hostile, enemy-occupied territory, much of it on foot, to get to the Allies. “I doubted if his leg was strong enough,” Millar later wrote in his book,
The Maquis.
“However, he was an expert at getting his own way, and I was half afraid that he might realize that I was not certain in my mind whether reason or cowardice made me resist the project.”
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Bazata prevailed. But after two nights of ducking constant patrols, enduring freezing rain atop a mountain while watching Germans congregate unknowingly beneath them, and seeing burning villages in the distance, Bazata, furious at times at his comrade’s “carefulness” and making jokes at other times to keep them going, relented. He agreed it would be suicide to try to continue on. However, when London advised that it had over 1,000 paratroopers poised to drop in their area who could help the advancing U.S. troops if requested by ground forces, even Millar’s attitude changed. That was news that could prove crucial in closing the Belfort Gap, a vital strategic goal.