Reliving the most famous last stand of the French Resistance

Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Vercors, perhaps the most famous stand of the French Resistance in the second world war, there is an awful inevitability to this book. Tragedy looms like the great plateau itself, overshadowing the individual stories of the people who lived, fought and died in these mountains. The strategic and tactical failings that led to their defeat run like strata through the history: a lack of clarity in Allied communications; failure to deliver sufficient heavy weapons or reinforcements; the mistaken use of a guerrilla army as a fixed, defensive force and, above all, the tendency to let diplomacy and politics trump military common sense. And yet Paddy Ashdown has produced not only the most thorough history to date of the Resistance in the Vercors, but also the startling new contention that, ‘the Germans did not win on the Vercors. They lost.’

Essentially this is military rather than social history but, in the Vercors, the military and the human coincided. The Vercors resisters included Catholics, Jews and communists, career soldiers, farmers, mechanics and civic leaders. Some of the men lived on the plateau for two years; others ‘went to war still in the clothes they had left home in two days previously’. Often all that united them was the depth of their convictions, and their love of free France. As Ashdown notes, ‘not all were brave, and not all died well’, but many, too many, died.

To explain why, after some scene setting, time slows down as chapters, initially dedicated to months, are reduced to ‘The First Five Days of June’, and then to single days of July. Written with pace, the detail is fine, but the pain of watching radio signals repeatedly ignored, lessons unlearned in the field, and opportunities consistently missed at the highest levels becomes almost unbearable.