Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [143]
As the British began supplying the Resistance, they also sought to control and direct its activities. They were not overly successful in this; for one thing, they often wanted slightly different things than the Resistance people wanted. For another, it was difficult to direct and control from afar. They also had to contend with the desires and directives of the various governments in exile, so there was at least a three-cornered tug of war for control in most cases. In spite of all this, the Resistance reached the third stage, that of giving battle to the enemy.
For the Resistance, “battle” was different from what it was for the regular forces. It might include overt action, an ambush or a derailment of a train; it might be the fomenting of a strike, or some kind of industrial sabotage. Overt action varied from place to place, and time to time.
In Russia where large numbers of Russian troops were cut off in the early days of the invasion, guerrilla or partisan operations began early. Large numbers of German units were forced to operate behind what were officially the front lines, and attacks on supply and communication lines were frequent. The same sort of thing happened in Yugoslavia, and though the Germans officially occupied the country, they never subdued it. At one point there were twenty divisions of Germans and Italians—as many as were fighting on the Italian front—busy in Yugoslavia attacking the partisans.
In France things were slower getting off the ground. The Vichy regime and the Armistice Army took some of the sting out of occupation initially and led to a degree of confusion as to who was actually the enemy, and where effort ought to be directed. Resistance grew up in both the occupied and the Vichy zones, but the simple existence of an ostensibly legitimate government served to make overt resistance a matter of argument. When the Germans occupied all of France after the Allied invasion of French North Africa the issue became clearer. The Armistice Army dissolved, Vichy was removed as an intermediary, and the French stood face to face with the conqueror. By that time there was already a cadre of resisters living in hiding, not only the normal underground resisters, but also the genesis of a partisan army, spawned by the labor draft and the roundup of Jews. Young men had taken to the hill country, where they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, eventually being organized, and armed and supplied in large measure by the British. They emerged to fight and by early 1944 they actually controlled substantial segments of France, on the borders of which they fought pitched battles with the Germans and the German-controlled Milice. At the time of the Normandy invasion the French Resistance made substantial contributions to the Allied effort, tying up German communications and interfering with their reinforcements.
An outstanding example of what the Resistance could achieve, and some of the difficulties under which it labored, was the affair of the Norsk Hydro Plant in Norway. At the start of the war the plant was the world’s only commercial producer of heavy water, a vital component for the creation of an atomic reaction. When the Germans took over Norway, they immediately made plans to increase the heavy-water output and took such an ill-concealed interest in Norsk Hydro that the matter soon came to the attention of the British. The question then was raised as to what should be done to cut off the supply to the Germans.
Eventually, the Allies mounted four separate attacks against the heavy-water plant, by three distinct methods. The result was a major vindication of unconventional methods.