ABSTRACT
As we saw at the beginning,2 soon after OVERLORD was launched on 6 June 1944, the Etat-major des Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (EMFFI) was set up to undertake the direction of all active forces of resistance in France that had previously been working either with F or with RF section; and the staffs of both sections and the staff of BRAL were thrown together in the one headquarters of external resistance under General Koenig. Many of this staff turned out incompetent for their work. Though Koenig’s executive chief of staff, Colonel Ziegler (Vernon), worked tremendously hard, he had more to do than it was humanly possible to get done, even with the help of Gubbins’s chief of staff, the highly skilled Barry, who had charge of the operations section. The main troubles were four: the staff had to start work at full speed, with no time to shake down together; a fair proportion of them were quite inexperienced in this specialised field; many of the others had, till the day before they joined, regarded some of their colleagues in EMFFI with suspicious rivalry; and many of the French were so deeply concerned with the political future of France that they found it hard to concentrate on their unfamiliar daily tasks. Hutchison felt at the time, from the field, that London’s pulse was beating feebly; and Thackthwaite was greeted, wherever he went in France in the autumn, with the inquiry ‘What went wrong at the end of June?’3 The leading people in the intelligence, operations, and special missions sections (known, to suit the French, as the 2e, 3e, and 6e bureaux respectively) were experienced GSOIIs and III’s from F, RF, and AL sections and from BRAL; even so, agents were now and then sent to the wrong places, and many requests for fighting stores from the field went unanswered.
