With the arrival of grandfather’s OSS contingent about a week later, the military situation intensified. Intent on securing an escape route through the woods that led to Combeaufontaine, where a garrison of German troops was gathering, the Germans occupied Confracourt on the morning of September 10.
Five hundred German troops secured Confracourt just hours after grandfather and Lt. Burke had left their safe house to inspect BUK 102. They immediately took 60 hostages and locked them in the basement of the Confracourt town hall. A messenger carried Nazi demands to the maquis in the woods: surrender or, in the event of firing from the woods, the hostages would be executed.
After consultation, grandfather, as the ranking officer in charge of the Allied force, replied with a bluff: “If you shoot the sixty hostages, we will immediately shoot the four hundred and fifty prisoners that we have.” At the time, the maquis held thirty-five Germans POWs. But the Germans, by not executing the hostages during upcoming battles, appeared to take note.
Having failed at negotiating with the maquis, over the course of several days in mid-September, German forces, backed by tanks and heavy artillery, launched multiple attacks on the Confracourt Woods. The odds were against the allies, with German forces outnumbering them 5 to 1 and surrounding the woods on all sides. It felt like a noose tightening.
It didn’t help matters that on September 11 the Germans captured a member of the local maquis, André Bazeau, who carried an American Colt. 45 that had been issued to him from the trove of guns brought to the maquis by the OSS the night before. The American firearm was, literally, a smoking gun, confirming for the Germans that they had captured the enemy.
Bazeau, who with his wife had been part of the maquis welcoming team for the OSS mission, was seized as he was ascending from the village on his way to the Confracourt Woods. A 29-year old veteran maquisard, Bazeau was the only person outside the woods who knew the true strength and disposition of the Allied forces. If the Germans could break him in interrogation, they would find out that they vastly outnumbered the joint French-Ukrainian-American forces and likely reposition themselves accordingly to eliminate the enemy. The question on everybody’s mind was: Would Bazeau talk? Could he withstand torture?
Bazeau’s fate hung in the air as the maquis, supplied from the OSS container drops with British Sten guns, Thompson submachine guns, .45 Colt automatics, ammunition, and grenades, arranged themselves to withstand German assaults. BUK 102 manned the front lines, with soldiers positioned every few meters along the periphery of the forest. The French maquis directed them, and the Americans remained at their base camp deep in the woods.
Doillon and Vougnon coordinated the movements of the Ukrainians, who looked to their fearless French leaders with admiration and deep respect. In his own memoir about his wartime experiences, Burke describes the two Frenchmen as “without question, the most valiant men I have ever known.”
Doillon and Vougnon were leaders in the local maquis, serving under the command of Darc. Natives of the region who both spoke fluent German, they had joined the Resistance at its inception, following the fall of France in 1940. As former members of the French military, they were united by their abject hate of the Germans who had invaded their country. They were willing to undertake any mission no matter its danger. Burke describes Doillon, 30, with a full head of hair and aristocratic bloodlines, as having “all the requisites of a great matador.” He remembers Vougnon as a man of the soil, or “terroir” in French, who dressed simply: no undershirt, no drawers, no socks. In cold weather, Burke recalls, Vougnon would put on a ragged sweater under his tunic, and when he went out on hit-and-run raids he usually wore a WWI French infantryman’s helmet, the type with a crest above the lid and a ridge running from front to back across the top. Vougnon had created such havoc that the Germans had posted a 100,000 franc reward for his capture. Both Doillon and Vougnon never cursed or ranted; theirs was an underlying toughness, writes Burke.
Grandfather on the right stands next to Lt. Claude Vougnon of the French resistance in November 1944 in Rambervillers, France. Captain Cornut, a member of the OSS mission, is in the center. Photo courtesy of Grace Housholder.
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The first German attack came on the afternoon of September 11, starting with a hail of machine guns bullets covering German forces advancing from Confracourt toward the woods. With the help of BUK 102’s heavy guns, the joint force repelled the German tanks leading the assault, thus preventing German soldiers following behind the tanks from gaining a foothold in the woods.
The Germans suffered hundreds of casualties. But the assault unnerved the Ukrainians, who took the brunt of the German assault, suffering four deaths. Stating his men were low on ammunition, Major Hloba insisted on retreating farther into the woods during the night. But the maquis, expecting further German assaults, dissuaded the Ukrainian major and resupplied BUK 102 with arms and ammunition.
More clashes took place in the following days. During the next assault the Germans attacked from the south in greater numbers, with German artillery literally cutting trees to pieces and pinning a Ukrainian company to the ground for almost an hour.
The third attack came on the third dawn. After heavy bombardment with heavy artillery and mortars, the Germans attacked on the flanks. But Darc, the local maquis commander whom grandfather described as the “personification of confidence,” responded deftly. He reinforced his flanks with 200 Ukrainian soldiers who had been kept in reserve, thus allowing him to keep his middle strong. BUK 102 opened up on advancing German tanks with seven 57-millimeter antitank guns, crippling four tanks. Though the Germans gained the tree line, they did not come into the woods. German mortar shells lobbed sporadically into the trees exploded on the soft forest floor or burst in tree branches, spewing shrapnel out and down. But the maquis were so well dispersed throughout forest that casualties were nil.
Licking their wounds, the Germans withdrew to Confracourt. They sent a courier to the woods, offering to surrender but only to the Americans, who they believed would treat them better than the embittered maquis.
Grandfather organized a mission to deliver a response to the German command in Confracourt. Reasoning that the Germans were weary and bogged down in a troublesome retreat, he leveraged their fear of the maquis. The gist of grandfather’s message, which contained more bluff, was: the Germans should surrender because Allied forces in the Confracourt Woods outnumbered the Germans (which wasn’t true), and German soldiers, if they surrendered, would be treated as POWs according to the Geneva Convention.
If they didn’t surrender, it was understood that the Germans would have to take their chances on being captured by the vengeful maquis.
Grandfather’s missive was backed by his assessment that the Germans were still unsure how many enemy soldiers were in the woods. That’s because André Bazeau hadn’t betrayed his comrades. Sources in the village had relayed to the maquis that upon his return from his first interrogation by the Gestapo, Bazeau, semi-conscious and barely able to walk, had shaken his head to indicate that he hadn’t talked. Subsequent German maneuvers on the battlefield – retreating after each attack instead of advancing with the knowledge that they outnumbered the maquis – proved that Bazeau, wherever he was, was keeping silent.
To demonstrate that grandfather’s ultimatum carried the full faith of the U.S. military, the two American officers from the OSS contingent, Lt. Burke and Lt. Kuzmuk, agreed to deliver the message to the Germans. Carrying a white flag to signal their peaceful intentions, Burke and Kuzmuk on horseback set off through the fields to Confracourt.
It was a windless day, and the makeshift flag hung limp, Burke recounted in his memoir. The two men walked side-by-side, not knowing if they would be cut down by a hail of German gunfire or arrested and handed over to the Gestapo, the dreaded German secret police (the same police grandfather had evaded a few years earlier in Portugal). “There was little room for abstraction during our walk in the sun,” Burke recalled. “The tactic of the moment concentrated our attention. If my mind strayed at all, it was to an Everyman hope that, if they opened fire, I would not be hit in the crotch. Or, if I was, to be hit everywhere else too and die quickly.”
After passing the crest of the incline leading from the village to the woods, the men spotted Confracourt below. It was quiet and motionless: no German soldiers in sight, no guns poking over walls or out of windows. On the far side of the village, they caught site of German troops climbing into vehicles and moving off in the direction of the nearby village of Combeaufontaine.
To their immense relief, Burke and Kuzmuk realized that the Germans were abandoning Confracourt. The two OSS officers settled on the steps of the Confracourt church and watched an unforgettable scene unfold before them.
Slowly, one or two at a time, villagers began to emerge from their stone houses and from around corners. Someone shouted, “The Americans are in the village.” A trumpet played, and church bells sounded. A villager set off on his bike to inform the maquis in the woods of the fortuitous turn of events. A young woman hurried towards Burke and Kuzmuk sitting on the church steps. She filled three glasses with wine, and they all toasted one another. The maquisards arrived from the woods, and excited townspeople filtered into the village square, including the freed hostages, who, Burke recalled, “bore the look of men delivered by some godly stroke.” People sang, shouted, milled, laughed, wept, hugged, shook hands and drank. In the thick of things were the soldiers of BUK 102, hailed by the locals as liberators.
Amidst the rejoicing, Burke caught sight of Madame Bazeau, standing erect in front of a café in Confracourt. She wept softly. The next day her husband’s mangled body was discovered by the side of a nearby road. His fingernails were gone, and his back was lined with bloody ribbons where hooks had been inserted and yanked out. He had been savagely beaten, with the final blow being a shotgun blast to the back of his head. True to his maquis comrades’ belief, Bazeau hadn’t broken under German torture – and thus the inferior position of the maquis contingent in the woods remained unknown to the Germans.*
During a visit to Confracourt in October 2022, the author stands next to a commemorative plaque which marks the spot where Andre Bazeau’s corpse was found in mid-September 1944.
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A coda to the Confracourt saga came the day after liberation when maquisards stopped a black Citroen carrying a Gestapo lieutenant and two privates. When inspected, the trunk of the car revealed vicious trade tools – instruments for pulling out fingernails, hooks for tearing flesh and a shotgun. Documents taken from the car recorded so many crimes committed against civilians and resistance fighters that the three Germans were sentenced to death. Consumed by revenge, the maquis told the Americans to stay away. “Bazeau is none of your affair,” they said.
Grandfather acquiesced, despite misgivings that the maquis were violating military convention by executing prisoners. When interrogated, the 30-year-old German lieutenant, who clearly understood his fate, was stoic, refusing to be intimidated. In civilian life he had been an architect, and a search of his rucksack turned up two well-thumbed volumes on the cathedrals of France, filled with notes in the margins indicating a high degree of sensitivity and appreciation. “It appeared incredible that the aesthete who had written those phrases had at the same time been engaged in the sordid, inhumane operations that characterized the Gestapo,” grandfather wrote in his memoir.
The German lieutenant was led away to be shot, the expression on his face one of utter indifference, grandfather recollected. When his turn came, the lieutenant gave the member of the maquis in charge of the execution a beautiful signet ring: “It would be a pity if it were lost,” the German said in good French. “Please give it to someone who has suffered a lot from the war”.
The maquis decided to give it to Madame Bazeau.
*The US Government posthumously awarded André Bazeau the Medal of Freedom with Gold Palm in recognition of his heroism. Grandfather made the recommendation. Madame Bazeau wrote grandfather to thank him: “Never shall I forget my joy at seeing men as well as containers dangling from your parachutes as they opened over Confracourt,” she wrote. “Though the following days brought tragedy to me personally, had I to live over I would not have my husband act otherwise than he did.”
Jeffrey Lilley Writing 