could rebuild the French Army. Estimated to have a strength of 100,000 in June 1944, the strength of the FFI grew rapidly, doubling by July 1944, and reaching 400,000 by October 1944. Although the amalgamation of the FFI was in some cases fraught with political difficulty, it was ultimately successful and allowed France to re-establish a reasonably large army of 1.3 million men by VE Day. Escape lines Approximately 2,000 British and 3,000 American airmen downed in western Europe evaded German capture during the war. Airmen were assisted by many different escape lines, some of them large and organized, others informal and ephemeral. The Royal Air Forces Escaping Society estimated that 14,000 volunteers worked with the many escape and evasion lines during the war. Many others helped on an occasional basis, and the total number of people who, on one or more occasions helped downed airmen during the war, may have reached 100,000. One-half of the volunteer helpers were women, often young women, even teenagers. Escape and evasion lines created by the Allies specifically to assist their men, such as the Shelbourne or the Burgundy lines or those created by servicemen at large in occupied territory, such as the Pat O'Leary Line, usually focused on helping Allied servicemen. Other escape lines, grass-roots efforts by civilians to help those fleeing the Nazis, such as the Comet, Dutch-Paris, Service EVA or the Smit-van der Heijden lines, also helped servicemen but also compromised spies, resisters, men evading the forced labor impressments, civilians who wanted to join the governments-in-exile in London, and fleeing Jews. Premature activation In the uplands and forests, considerable numbers of resistance fighters gathered, known as maquisards because of the maquis shrubland that sheltered them. These "redoubts" of FFI fighters initially kept a low profile, since overt acts of sabotage resulted in savage reprisals by German forces, or direct military action on a large scale. On 26 March 1944, the Maquis des Glières in Haute-Savoie were defeated by more than 3,000 troops followed by shootings and burnings of farms amongst the local population. Excluded from the planning for the Normandy Landings, and his staff devised an operation called Plan Caïman in which French paratroopers would join the maquisards of the Massif Central to liberate the surrounding area and from there establish contact with the invading British and US forces. The Allied planners rejected the plan on the grounds that they would