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By ric —

Vive La Resistance

I’m planning a trip to the South of France to visit the Operation Dragoon landings (Aug 1944) and up the Rhone valley, misc. Roman and Medieval sights to see, and continuing to the Côtes-du-Beaune to check out the Burgundy wine region.

As usual, I’m searching for any and all sights, memorials, and more to place on a map so whilst driving around we can make random stops to celebrate history, war memorials, whatever.  A Roman viaduct! A Van Gogh landscape! The meeting place of Napoleon’s return from Elba!

I was able to find a great organization and web site devoted to American War Memorials Overseas.  So I dig in and make note of memorials along our travel path dedicated to various WW2 US soldiers. (For example, there’s a memorial plaque at the Nice Airport to six Army engineers who died while removing mines from the airport)

Meanwhile, checking out other WW2 happenings in the area, I come across various accounts of the Resistance in the Vercours, a mountain range and high, wide plateaus in the French Alps, now a French national park. During WW2, especially after 1942, this area was famous for the myriad acts of resistance and in fact was hugely important during Operation Dragoon for cutting Wehrmacht communication lines —  of critical help disrupting the ability to organize a coherent defense of the landing sites.

The Vercours fighters had been operating for years in the area, becoming more of an organized enemy than a mere nuisance. At one point in July 1944, the area was in fact declared “Free France”. That declaration was too much for the Germans who organized a large-scale assault on the area, with a division or so, glider landings, etc, followed by, as usual, razing of villages, executions, etc.

Searching around, I also found some memorials to resistance fighters of the Oisans area. Ok, so now to search the internet for that. The Oisans is just east of the Vercours, in a somewhat more mountainous area, and now famous for many ski resorts, hiking, and climbing vacations.

One link got me to a plaque at some sort of mountain refuge near the (lake) Lac de La Fare, dedicated to a resistance group and US B-24 bomber crew who defended themselves and hospital evacuees from a German attack. The plaque is said to be inscribed:

💡
In this modest refuge and its surroundings, the Departmental Hospital of the French Forces of the Interior stayed during the summer of 1944. Under the direction of its chief doctor, Doctor Robert TISSOT, who was covered by a Maquis protection group, assisted by 11 men of a U.S. Air Force crew, the hospital had to withdraw under pressure from the Alpenjager of the 157th Bavarian Alpine Division. After a brutal halt of the German advance by the mobile group No. 4 of the maquis de l'Oisans at the battle of Grandes Rousses on 14 August 1944, all the staff and wounded of the Hospital were able to return to liberated Grenoble.

The location is a near glacial runoff lake high up in the Grandes Rousses massif. The refuge/hut is now a rest cafe for hikers/skiers, Refuge de la Fare

A little more than interesting! I did a quick check on the American War Memorials site but nothing was listed around the Lake. Huh; maybe this is just an urban myth?

A bit more digging and I realize that the bomber crew is in fact the same crew that crashed near Prunières, France.  Not quite sure how much info is out there on this, but I want to at least find out if possible about the crew.

Searching around for B-24 crews and Prunières I find a few French articles and brochures about the resistance, but oddly no mention of the crew by name. Not even any names next to a purported picture of the bomber crew in the brochure.

  • See this site on the Huez and Oisans Museum  – in the Description section
  • Official summary of the mission from the 15th Air Force ,  report dated July 20th, 1944. But this report has no specific information about the crash, or the crews of the airplanes. It wasn't until the crew returned in October that the military was able to correct their MIA report.
  • An interesting brochure on the Oisans resistance and the fight at the Refuge de La Fare. Includes this picture of the crew:
Crew of the B-24

A few days later, I take that crew picture and do a reverse Google image search, which leads me not just to more info on the crew, but links to video remembrances by a crew member, by a daughter of the co-pilot, and to a book about the Crew’s escape route and help fighting off the German attack - “Onze Américains tombés du ciel” - "11 Americans who Fell from the Sky" writen by Pierre Montaz, at the time one of the Oisans resistance leaders (and also a key inventor of ski lift cable cars).

I’ll leave the rest of the story to the links below, a couple of which summarize the bombing mission, crash, escape, hospital evacuation, and more. (Make sure to use your browsers 'translate' feature for the French text, if needed.)

But importantly, for me, I’ve been able to contact the American War Memorials Overseas site and am working with them to update their info on the crash site and to add to their database the Lac du la Fare attack memorial.

I had only planned to get out as far as Napoleon's Meeting Place, but I guess I’ve got to carve out a day in our trip to go east a bit more and get to the Grandes Rousses mountains by cable car and the memorial site!

P.S. Just to note the wonders of the modern world:  The crew photo was scanned from a book published in 1994, a low-resolution copy was put on the web many years ago, and I copied that to Google image search, which in less than 1/2 second found many copies of it in its search database, giving me links around the world to other web sites with more info. Quite the best time to be a history researcher.

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