D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [238]
As part of a scorched-earth policy during the retreat, German detachments were ordered to destroy bridges, telephone systems, railways and ports, as well as any establishments which might help repair them. SOE liaison groups at 21st Army Group and SHAEF advance headquarters passed ‘counter-scorching’ requests to the Resistance, which meant thwarting German attempts to wreck communications behind them.
The collapse of the German occupying power also signalled the collapse of the Vichy regime. In Normandy, a senior Vichy official reported during the American breakthrough that, ‘military events having taken a new direction’, he would withdraw to ‘rejoin French territory according to the orders of the government’. He retreated with the local Feldkommandant, who provided him with fuel for his car. But every time he tried to set up a new préfecture, first at Gavray, then Saint-Pois and then Mortain, the rapidity of the American advance sent him hurrying on. Pierre Laval, Marshal Pétain’s prime minister, tried to persuade the old marshal to seek refuge at Eisenhower’s headquarters.67
The power vacuum in large areas of France, especially in the Dordogne, the Limousin, the Corrèze, the Massif Central and the south-west, meant that the different groups of the Maquis began to settle accounts. They took revenge on genuine collaborators, but also on those class enemies they considered collaborators. This was not hard to foresee once the invasion started. A Vichy report to Paris just after the invasion spoke of ‘regions where hideous civil war will reign’. In July, an agent reported back to London on the situation in the Limousin created by Resistance attacks and ferocious German reprisals: ‘In the face of these barbarous acts, the whole region trembles. The peasants hide in the woods and scouts signal the arrival of any German vehicles. The country experiences at one and the same time the violence of the enemy, of the Maquis, and of the Milice. There is no longer any legal authority.’
There was much to avenge, but the moral outrage of vengeance also concealed a degree of political and personal opportunism. Some private scores were settled and rivals for post-war power done away with. Resistance groups killed some 6,000 people before the German withdrawal. Then, in what became known as the épuration sauvage, or ‘unofficial purges’, at least 14,000 more were killed. A few British and American troops also killed French collaborators, but most preferred to look away, feeling that, having not experienced German occupation, they were in no position to judge. Perhaps the most shocking statistic is that in Brittany a third of those killed were women.
French people as well as Allied troops were sickened by the treatment meted out to women accused of ‘collaboration horizontale’ with German soldiers. Some of the victims were prostitutes who had plied their trade with Germans as well as Frenchmen. Some were silly young girls who had associated with German soldiers out of bravado or boredom. Many more were young mothers whose husbands were in German prisoner of war camps. They often had no means of support, and their only hope of obtaining food for themselves and their children in the hunger years had been to accept a liaison with a German soldier. As the German writer Ernst Jünger observed from the luxury of the Tour d’Argent restaurant in Paris, ‘Food is power.’
After the humiliation of a public head-shaving, the tondues - ‘the shorn women’ - were usually paraded through the streets, occasionally to the sound of a drum, as if France was reliving the Revolution of 1789. Some were daubed with tar, some stripped half naked, some painted with swastikas. In Bayeux, Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, recorded his reactions to one such scene: ‘I watched an open lorry drive past, to the accompaniment of boos and cat-calls from the French populace, with a dozen miserable women in the back, every hair on their heads shaved off. They were in tears, hanging their heads in shame. While disgusted by