lines. Between November 1944 and February 1945, the Germans gradually evacuated the surroundings of the eastern front of (Fession and Saint-Gabriel in Saint-Omer, other localities in Bouvron and Fay-de-Bretagne); where inhabitants were invited to fall back inside the pocket or to leave on trains organised by the Red Cross. The details of these evacuations are detailed by Father François du Plessis de Grenédan (1921-2013), Sulpician priest, son of the commander of the airship Dixmude, a chaplain of the FTP and FFI maquisards of the Saint-Nazaire Pocket (south, then north), worker-priest, in an interview book in 2007. Military operations Faced with fierce German resistance during the assault on Brest, the Allied High Command decided not to attempt a similar assault on Saint-Nazaire. After several raids launched in September and October against the FFI troops on the other side of the Vilaine river, the Germans carried out a new attack in the eastern sector at the beginning of November. Apart from a small landing made in December at the in Morbihan, the most important operations were carried out in the Pays de Retz in the South Loire, where stretches of fertile land were useful for supplies. The Germans seized Frossay in October and at the end of December, following heavy fighting, the village of La Sicaudais. They were opposed by the 2nd Battalion FFI who ceded a stretch of nearly 100 km. The front stabilized thanks to the intervention of the The Americans, for their part, dislodged the Germans from the , forcing them to return to the other side of the Nantes to Brest canal and seized the town of Blain. In February 1945, thanks to secret agents inside the pocket fortress, the Resistance warned the Allies of an imminent German attack near the Nantes-Brest canal. During the month of March, American artillery managed to sink several cargo ships which had shuttled between the pocket fortresses of Lorient and Saint-Nazaire, thus increasing supply problems for the Germans. In April, the Germans redoubled their aggression and constantly harassed the Allied positions with their artillery. On 19 April skirmishes occurred between three Franco-American patrols and the Germans causing three deaths and more than twenty wounded (and the loss of three tanks) on the Allied side and the loss of 33 men (dead or wounded) on the German side (by this time, on the Western front, Anglo-American troops had already largely invaded Germany and