Descendants recall role of French Resistant in Allied Invasion 6/6/2014

Published 12:00 am Friday, June 6, 2014

Descendants recall role of French Resistant in Allied I


(The print version of this column  and the initial online posting listed an incorrect date for the attack on Cherisy bridge.)

By John Howell
I would be remiss on this 70th anniversary of the Allied landings at Normandy if I did not acknowledge a recent gift from Liliane Bounds through her son and my brother-in-law, David Bounds of Hattiesburg.

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It is a manuscript written by her father, Francis Dablin entitled Les Années Les Plus Longues — The Longest Years — translated from the original French by Liliane and her granddaughter, Nathalie, in which he recalls his role as a member of the French Resistance during World War II.

After the war it was said that every Frenchman claimed to have been a member of the Resistance, but Dablin’s participation is well-documented. His activities around his native Dreux, a city about 25 miles west of Paris and 100 miles from the Normandy coast, brought him recognition from Great Britain and the U. S. as well as his native France which presented him with, among several medals, its highest civilian and military decoration, the Legion D’Honneur.

He started early, at first cutting telephone wires and defacing German propaganda posters. For Christmas, 1940, the Germans, to celebrate their joy in victory, placed a lighted Christmas tree in the center of Dreux

The French of Dreux were less celebratory. Dablin went to a cobbler and bought a rabbit skin. 

Then under the cover of darkness he flung it into the tree where it caught the branches. The next morning it quickly became a source of amusement for townspeople as word spread about the subtle act of defiance. When the Germans discovered that their tree had been compromised, they mounted a guard. After that, they never again put Christmas trees in the Dreux square.

For the Dablins, resistance was a family affair. His son, Maurice often fought alongside him. The men were occasionally forced from their home as the Gestapo stepped up efforts to capture them. The home was searched for documents and weapons.

Dablin writes with noticeable pride about daughter Liliane when she faced questioning from Gestapo who thought that at age nine she might be tricked into revealing information that would compromise her father and brother.

As the Gestapo agent searched a closet where she kept her dolls, she asked:

“Do you really believe my father is stupid enough to hide his things among my toys?”

The German then turned on the little girl and demanded sharply, “OK then, you flippant little girl where do you buy the receipt-stamps your father sends for?” 

Her mother cringed inside, worried that Liliane might lose her composure in the confrontation with the alien adult.

“You must think my father is not old enough to do his own errands,” came Liliane’s nonchalant reply.

But it was serious business. As soldiers without uniforms, members of the Resistance were subject to summary execution on capture; their families subject to deportation to concentration camps.

As the war progressed, Dablin and the clandestine network were forced to take more and more risks as they rescued Allied airmen who parachuted from disabled planes, conducted acts of sabotage against German military infrastructure and waged psychological warfare against their occupier.

Their work was assisted by supplies parachuted from Allied planes during nighttime drops, especially as the 1944 invasion date approached.

Recovery was always risky. Coordination between the members of the Resistance and the Allied Command in England was via small, portable wireless radios that arrived, as did weapons, ammunition and explosives, attached to one of those parachutes.

Dablin’s main role in the Allied invasion came over a month after D-Day while the landing forces were stalled at Caen and in the hedgerows of the Cotentin Peninsula. 

Repeated bombing by Allied aircraft had failed to disable a key rail line near Dreux at the Cherisy Railroad Bridge. German engineers constantly repaired what little damage the bombs rendered to the rail link carrying supplies and reinforcements to the Germans fighting to hold the American, British, Canadian and other Allied troops back.

On July 17, 1944, Francis and Maurice Dablin, along with four other men split into two groups and approached the base of the Cherisy railroad bridge lugging over 600 pounds of high explosive. Using a sledgehammer, they created openings in the concrete base and placed the explosives inside.

They lit a slow fuse at midnight, retreated back into the forest. And waited.

About 3 a.m. the Resistants heard the giant explosion. Later they would learn that the blast had successfully destroyed the bridge. Over the wireless came the text of a telegram from Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower congratulating “the team of men who succeeded in the destruction of the Cherisy bridge.”

Within a month, American soldiers, some of whom may have been spared because of the bridge’s destruction, drove the German Army from Dreux. 

Dablin would return to his civilian life as a gymnastics instructor and school administrator after the war. He would serve on the Dreux town council and as president of a veterans organization.

They named a street in Dreux to honor father and son Dablin, the Rue Francis et Maurice Dablin. It’s a pretty street. I’ve visited there on Google.

Perhaps today, as D-Day’s anniversary is celebrated further west along the Normandy beaches, the people of Dreux will again recall the role that their sons played in that epic struggle to free their homeland from its occupiers.

Their memory has now been served especially well in Hattiesburg with the loving labor of a daughter and great-granddaughter whose translation has made the story available to their non-French-speaking kith and kin.

My copy is special. It bears the handwritten inscription, “To John From Granny Frog.”