WELL ORGANISED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 October 1943, Page 4

WELL ORGANISED

THE UNDERGROUND ARMY IN FRANCE WIDESPREAD SABOTAGE. DAY OF ALLIED INVASION AWAITED. The struggle within France is directed by a Council of French Resistance, which is in close liaison with the Committee of National Liberation in Algiers. It issues regular daily communiques. Every day, it is calculated, yields a score of an average of three locomotives destroyed or disabled and 25 trucks wrecked, three armed assaults on patrols, barracks, hotels or houses ■ accommodating Germans, to say nothing of places of entertainment reserved for Germans, recruiting bureaux and premises of Fascist organisations. ■Every day has its minor incidents of cables damaged, fuel tanks set on fire, sabotage at factories and railway stations and sentinels slain. Foreign Press estimates are that 250,000 French workmen are in hiding, evading compulsory labour in Germany. Many of these are in the mountains they know so well, where it is difficult to follow them. Gendarmes and Gardes Mobiles are reluctant to hunt them from their lairs, first, because they know the refugees from German compulsory labour are desperate men, and, second, because they know the war will end some, day and Gendarmes and Gardes Mobiles who have been too active in enemy interests will have short shrift. In the north of France, as in Normandy and Brittany, there are guerilla bands. They have taken names of patriots who have already been shot by the Germans. One detachment is named after Pierre Senart, railway worker hero and another after the seventeen-year-old boy Guy Moquet, both shot by the Germans. All these bands are ready and fully informed of the roles they are to play when the signal is given them that invasion has begun.