Résistance Joué-du-Plain and the Assassination of Emile Buffon
[1][2][3] The events concerns two tenants of Chateau de la Motte during World War II in Lower Normandy, France.
The first was the mayor of the commune of Joue du Plain, Emile Buffon, who owned an animal brokering business, and rented the Chateau's attached farm.
German troops assigned to the Normandy often cooperated with locals in order not to attract unwanted attention from Nazi administrators.
[7][8] The Germans, in a chronic need for manpower, had discontinued the voluntary worker immigration for the Fatherland's war factories, and made it mandatory (STO Service du Travail Obligatoire), avoidance brought death.
April 27, 1944, a little over one month before D-day, the regional French Résistance chief, Jacques Foccart, with his lieutenant sitting behind him, drove an 8-cylinder Nervasport from the Chateau de la Motte.
Just as the driver reached the point of no return he accelerated, and crashed through the barricade, a blast of machine-gun fire ripped across the back of the vehicle.
Just as the Germans were catching up with the Nervasport, the Frenchmen turned across the tracks narrowly missing the oncoming train, which blocked the pursuit.
They drove to a crossroad and fired several shots, knowing that witnesses would be called on to verify the sound later in an investigation, which was sure to follow.
Following hasty instructions they parked the car in a barn, Foccart borrowed a bike to pedal into Ecouche to find the doctor Pasquier, a member of the Résistance.
[12] Later the doctor told the Germans, that an unknown woman on a bike had informed him of finding a still living body on the roadside at the crossroads, where they fired the pistol.
Attracting Nazi attention with untrained amateur warriors would only jeopardize the more desirable intelligence gathering by the French underground, learning critical information on size, strength, and location of enemy troops.
[15] The arms depot consisted of mostly anti-tank weapons, which were intended to kink up the Nazi reaction time by delaying the Panzer divisions of tanks the Germans would send to the landing sites.
Weapons consisted of mines, railway explosives, hand grenades, bazookas, and various small arms to protect the saboteurs.
[17] May 10, a few weeks before D-day, June 6, the second jab came from Nazi breaking into an office in Angers, an hour to the south of Ecouche by car.
[19] The soldiers didn't find the weapons, but took Yvonne, Bachelier's wife in for questioning, Bernard Jardin offered her dinner with champagne, but under the circumstances she declined.
Finding the sister just as she arrived back from delivering rescued American pilot Charles Moore to a safer hideout after hiding him at the Chateau.
[25] In Joué du Plain, within an easy two-hour drive from those landing beaches, Nazi power remained strong and tenacious.
Much of that was providing farm animals and produce to the occupiers; personal trucks, cars and horses had all been confiscated several years before just after the French defeat in 1940.
His brother, Georges, along with his two sons were active members of the Résistance, and it was to them that Jacques Bachelier took his anger of his suspected betrayal.
Entry was difficult except for a small man who could crawl in and dig under the animal feed and pass the arms out through the window.
Ramier had a truck because he worked for a stonemason contracted with the German TODT Corporation, hired to build the Atlantic Wall, the thousand mile coastal fortress, designed to stop any Allied Invasion.
