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Flames in the Field , London, Michael Joseph, 1995, pp. 115–27; also documentation at Natzwiller.
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    THE MAKING OF THE MAQUIS
    Whatever their differences, and whenever they were founded, all the Resistance movements were formed for action, whether this was dissemination of news from the BBC or neutral sources, fly-posting anti-German tracts during the hours of darkness when curfew-breakers were liable to be shot on sight, or the collection of intelligence to be passed to de Gaulle’s BCRA or Section F in London. In contrast, the Maquis arose not from any patriotism or political motivation, but was inadvertently created by the collaborationist French government based in the spa town of Vichy, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, the head of state, and his prime minister Pierre Laval, the manipulative Auvergnat lawyer who had single-handedly engineered the end of the Third Republic and the installation of the marshal as dictator, answerable to no one.
    Laval had been hailed on the front cover of Time magazine, dated 4 January 1932, as ‘The Man of the Year’. Yet, Pétain’s dislike for the manipulative lawyer who had made him dictator was such that he fired Laval, but could not govern without his political acumen and was forced to reinstate him at German insistence. In one, possibly apocryphal, exchange between them at the time of Laval’s return to power, he won back the premiership by saying: ‘ Monsieur le Maréchal, nous sommes dans la merde. Laissez-moi être votre éboueur ’ – ‘We’re in the shit, marshal. So let me do the digging to get us out.’ 1
    After Hitler’s Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer, complained that the manpower shortage in the Reich was critical as losses on the Eastern Front sucked almost every fit adult German male into uniform, on 21 March 1942 Fritz Sauckel was appointed plenipotentiary labour boss empowered to drain the occupied territories of able-bodied workers and transport them into the Reich as a replacement labour force. Hanged at Nuremburg in October 1946 for the brutality of the German slave labour programme, 2 Sauckel was a physically insignificant man who grew a Hitler moustache to give him what he thought was an air of authority. Meeting Prime Minister Laval on 16 June 1942, he demanded 2,060,000 workers from France in addition to the 1.6 million Frenchmen locked away as POWs under the terms of the armistice of June 1940 and used since then as cheap labour in the Reich.
    A week later Laval announced to the French people that he had done a deal under which, for every three volunteer workers heading east, one POW would be released to return home. Called La Relève, or ‘the relief shift’, the scheme was a dismal failure, enabling him to twist the facts at his post-war trial – he was a lawyer by profession – and claim that it was thanks to him only 341,500 French workers actually left, earning the release of 110,000 POWs. Of these, 10,000 were wounded and disabled men who should have been released without any quid pro quo .
    On 8 November 1942 the Allies opened the ‘second front’ by invading French-occupied North Africa, where they met such brief resistance from the Vichy troops confronting them that on 10 November Admiral Darlan, as senior French officer in North Africa, ordered all French forces to cease fire. Effectively occupying all strategically relevant parts of Morocco and Algeria, the Allied forces prepared to move eastwards into Tunisia, threatening the rear of the Axis forces south of the Mediterranean, which were being pushed back westwards by the British forces based in Egypt.
    Even on a map in Berlin, it was obvious that the sick Desert Fox, General Erwin Rommel, commanding the German and Italian forces in North Africa, could not win the war on two fronts which had now overtaken him. Given the problems of re-supply and shipping reinforcements across an increasingly Allied-dominated Mediterranean, it was only a question of time before the