Maquis des Glières The Maquis des Glières was a Free French Resistance group , which fought against the 1940 - 1944 German occupation of France in World War II . The name is also given to the military conflict that opposed Resistance fighters to German , Vichy and Milice forces . Resistance . At the end of 1943 , the French Resistance in the French Alps of Haute - Savoie needed arms . To find good drop zones to supply the Maquis with arms and sabotage equipment , a mission composed of Major Heslop from the Special Operations Executive and Captain Rosenthal from the Free French Forces was sent from London . The Glières Plateau , a high remote mountain table close to Lake Annecy , was chosen . On January 31 , 1944 , Lieutenant Tom Morel , a Chasseur alpin from the 27th chasseurs alpins battalion ( mountain light infantry ) in Annecy , was commissioned to collect parachute drops from the Royal Air Force with a hundred men . But Capt . Rosenthal , the Free French representative , convinced the other staff members to regroup the majority of maquisards on the plateau of Glières in order to establish a base to attack the Germans and carry out sabotage . Because the Allies were in doubt about the value of the French Resistance , it was necessary to show its capabilities to undermine the German military power in France . Repression . In January 1944 , a state of siege was declared in Haute - Savoie . Anyone found carrying arms or assisting the Maquis was subject to immediate court martial and execution . Hunted by the Vichy police and badly supplied , most of the maquisards gathered on the plateau of Glières to set up the base of operations . Soon after , a hundred French communist resistants and about fifty Spanish lumberjacks joined forces with them in taking refuge and getting weapons . From February 13 on , the four hundred and fifty maquisards , under the command of officers from the 27th chasseurs alpins battalion , were besieged by two thousand French militiamen and police . Although they suffered from starvation and freezing conditions , they collected three parachute drops consisting of about three hundred containers packed with explosives and small arms ( Sten submachine guns , Lee - Enfield rifles , Bren light machine guns , Mills bomb grenades ) . On the night of the 9th and 10 March , the commander - in - chief , Lt . Tom Morel , was killed in a skirmish with the Vichy forces . On March 12 , after the largest Allied parachute drop , the Germans started to bomb the area with ground attack aircraft . The French Militia staged several attacks , but they ended in failure . On March 23 , three battalions from the 157th Reserve Division of Wehrmacht and two German police battalions , composed of more than four thousand , with heavy machine guns , 80 mm mortars , 75 mm mountain guns , 150 mm howitzers and armoured cars , concentrated in Haute - Savoie . Retreat . Word had seeped out of France to Britain and America that a great and glorious uprising had taken place in southeast France . Clearly , Glières had become an important element in the psychological warfare . To honour the French Resistance , the new leader , Capt . Anjot , an experienced officer , would fight in the face of defeat , but his aim was to save his men ' s lives . Finally , on March 26 , 1944 , after another air raid and shelling , the Germans took the offensive . They split their attacking parties into three groups ( Kampfgruppen ) and designated to each a specific target . Reconnaissance was carried out by ski patrols dressed in white camouflage . One of the patrols with a " Gebirgsjäger " ( mountain troops ) platoon made an attack on the main exit to the plateau and captured an advanced post in the rear . Sustaining the attack from about fifty German soldiers , eighteen maquisards fought and resisted into the night , but were outnumbered and overwhelmed , though most of them succeeded in escaping under cover of darkness . At ten o ' clock , Capt . Anjot decided honour had been satisfied and ordered the Glières battalion to retreat . In the days that followed , he and almost all his officers as well as one hundred and twenty maquisards were found dead . They had been killed in battle or , if taken prisoner , had been tortured , shot or deported . The Germans considered the maquisards terrorists . The region of Savoie had been absolutely shattered . But this defeat would be transformed into a moral victory and give a boost to the French Resistance in the spring of 1944 . After the American and French landing in Provence on the 15th of August 1944 , it is a mark of the Maquis ' success in the French Alps that the speed of the American advance and the rapid retreat of the Germans was far beyond the expectations of Allied planning staff .