June 5, 1944.
A group of French farmers huddle around a radio tuned to the London broadcast.
If they're caught, they will be thrown in prison.
Perhaps tortured, perhaps even executed.
But they listen anyway. And then they hear it:
A single line from a French poem
tossed in amongst a hundred nonsense phrases disguised as personal messages.
A cheer goes up and the farmers grab their guns. That was their signal.
The liberation starts tonight.
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Four years before the Normandy beach landings
the French government signed an armistice
that turned all of Northern France into a Nazi occupied zone.
They insisted that surrender was the only way to save their people
from being crushed by the unstoppable German war machine.
But from the first moment German army boots marched down the streets of Paris
resistance groups began to spring up all over France.
The early resistance groups were small, disorganized and independent.
They had enthusiasm but no direction
other than a burning desire to kick the Germans out of their country.
And there were not many of them.
Most chose to put their faith in what remained of the French government,
which had fled south to the city of Vichy.
They claimed to control unoccupied, Southern France.
But really they just did whatever the Germans told them.
The early resistance lashed out by attempting to hurt or kill German soldiers.
But all they managed to do was provoke vengeance.
Hitler ordered the mass execution and deportation
of several thousand French Jews and communists
in retaliation for strikes made by the early resistance groups.
The message was clear:
If you hurt our people we will hurt yours more.
The resistance needed to find ways to fight back
without inviting retribution and making things worse.
And things had gotten pretty bad.
By now, the German war machine,
which had ground up the French armies in less than six weeks,
had a desperate need for natural resources and industrial power.
Two things that France had in abundance.
They imposed tight rations on their French subjects
and began redirecting all the wealth of France to fuel their conquering army.
So that became the new resistance target:
Take out the factories and the rail roads so that Germans couldn't use them.
As long as they didn't harm any Germans, the harshest reprisals never came.
The British had that same idea.
They parachuted agents into France to begin forming resistance networks,
recruiting citizens they could trust and linking up with existing groups if they could find them.
One of those agents would have a radio that could transmit messages back to London,
requesting supply drops with weapons and explosives
so the resistance could get to work.
But radios powerful enough to transmit across the Channel were in short supply.
So they turned to Radio London, a public French language station
that had been created specifically to counter German propaganda
and organize protests from safely across the English Channel.
Radio London began to open and conclude every program
with a nonsensical jumble of phrases that it called "personal messages"
which were actually coded messages for the resistance.
The radio operators hiding in France
would contact British headquarters with the requested supply drop
and give them a random phrase, like "Pierre says hello".
Then, instead of resistance members coming back to the safe house for updates,
they could listen at home on their radios.
If Pierre said "hello", they would head to their prearranged drop point.
This radio system, the same one that would be used on D-Day
to call the Normandy resistance cells to action,
was operated by yet another group devoted to the liberation of France:
The Free French.
Back when the Germans had taken over Northern France,
a little-known general, Charles de Gaulle, escaped across the Channel to England.
He had been appointed to government office only twelve days before
but now found himself faced with the prospect of watching his country
and the government he was supposed to serve surrender to Germany.
De Gaulle would not have it.
He got on the British radio and called for all of France to rise up and fight.
He invited all the soldiers who had fled from the invading Germans
to join him now in London to regroup and take their country back.
And he vowed to keep speaking on the radio so that those who couldn't leave France
would know that the flame of French resistance still burned bright.
Inspiring words. But very few people heard them.
Most French people weren't in the habit of listening to British radio broadcasts.
But those who did began to spread the word.
Of 100,000 French soldiers who had escaped to Britain
7,000 decided to stay with de Gaulle. It was small, but it was a start.
And with that start de Gaulle vowed to take France back from the Germans
and the Vichy government that had surrendered.
He knew that a small force couldn't accomplish that on its own.
He needed to win support from Great Britain and the United States
and coordinate the scattered groups of the French resistance.
Both would prove very difficult.
Winston Churchill recognized de Gaulle as leader of the Free French resistance
but balked at acknowledging him as leader of France itself.
After all, de Gaulle had never been elected the leader of France.
And now he was trying to claim the right to lead a country
he couldn't set foot in because its government had sentenced him to death.
To make matters worse, de Gaulle rubbed President Roosevelt of the US
exactly the wrong way.
But the same arrogance that drove Roosevelt away
also proved to be the fire that de Gaulle had promised to keep burning for France.
Piece by piece, he built a government in exile,
appealing to generals and bureaucrats to abandon the Vichy government
and join his cause instead.
Because of his determination to push himself forward as true leader of France
he forced the Allies to treat France as an ongoing partner in the war effort
and not as a defunct and conquered nation like many others under the German thumb.
By 1942, two years before the landings at Normandy,
his efforts had begun to bear fruit.
He had appointed a leader to coordinate the resistance on his behalf
and succeeded in forming a central committee that was loyal to him.
British agents began to coordinate their own resistance with the Free French,
although they didn't trust him entirely.
They did keep a few of their networks secret.
Nevertheless, they worked together to create detailed plans
to support the upcoming allied invasion.
They would target rail roads, telephone systems and electrical installations
to sabotage Germany's ability to mobilize their defences once the Allies landed.
And that one small resistance movement had grown enormously
over the four years of occupation.
Now, over a hundred thousand combatants
stood ready with weapons and explosives
that had been parachuted in by drops coordinated through Radio London.
The Allies and the Free French had pushed back German control in the French empire,
winning massive victories in the French colonies of North Africa,
and proving that a properly organized French army could stand up to Germany.
The Germans responded to that success by reaching for more control of France.
They ended any pretence of the Vichy government's independence
and overran the southern countryside, which only alienated more French people
and bolstered recruitment for the resistance.
But Germany's greatest gifts to the resistance
were the invasion of Russia and the subsequent labor draft in France.
When the Germans broke their uneasy truce with Russia
they galvanized the many communist groups in France to take up arms against them.
These brand new resistance groups never entirely accepted
the leadership of the Free French or the British agents.
But they were well-organized in their independence
and made good use of the supplies those agents gave them.
Meanwhile, to compensate for the men they had sent away to fight Russia,
Germany began to draft young Frenchmen to serve as forced labour in their machine.
Many fled the draft by running to the only group that would fight for them:
The resistance.
So when resistance members gathered around their radios on June 5
and finally heard the words that meant the liberation was on its way,
they celebrated and then got to work.
In the span of a single day, they took down 577 rail roads,
30 driving roads and 32 telecommunication sites.
They cut off several panzer divisions from moving north to join the German defence,
giving the Allies precious time to establish a beach head
before German reinforcements could arrive.
Together with ordinary French citizens, many of whom joined the resistance
in such numbers that the Allies didn't have enough weapons for them,
they helped guide and support the paratroopers to strike key targets
and begin dismantling German control of France.
For all of the struggle, setbacks and even the surrender that France faced
it was as de Gaulle predicted in that fateful radio address
that first brought together the forces of the Free French.
But has the last word been said? Must hope disappear?
Is defeat final?
No!
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