had become home and refuge to a polyglot collection of the elements of defeated France: its new generations, its old administrators, its competing political parties, its heterodox communities and the scattered fragments of its once proud army. | source=Paddy Ashdown, The Cruel Victory'.' }} Beginning in 1942, the (STO, Compulsory Work Service) resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of young French men to Nazi Germany to work as forced labour for the German war effort. To avoid the STO, tens of thousands of men fled into the mountains and forests of France and joined the maquis, the rural resistance fighters against the German occupation. In 1943, three men, mountaineer Pierre Dalloz, soldier Alain Le Ray, and writer Jean Prévost planned to use the Vercors as a redoubt and a staging area for resistance to the German occupation. Following Operation Anton the German occupation of the (Free Zone) and the disbandment of the Vichy Armistice Army, about fifty soldiers of the 11th Cuirassier Regiment arrived in the Vercors but kept themselves distinct from the maquis, whom they regarded as amateurs. In August 1943, Francis Cammaerts, code-name Roger, an agent of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization, journeyed to the Vercors and met with French soldier Eugène Chavant. Cammaerts liked the Vercors plan. He foresaw the Vercors and other nearby mountainous areas as drop zones for allied paratroopers who would work with the local maquis to tie down German military forces and assist the Allied forces in the invasion of southern France (Operation Dragoon) which was being planned. Cammaerts arranged for the first airdrop of arms and supplies by the SOE to the Vercors maquis on 13 November 1943. On 6 January 1944 a three-man "Union" mission, including US Marine Peter Ortiz from the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Colonel Pierre Fourcaud, of the French secret service and Harry Thackthwaite of SOE, to evaluate the capabilities of the Resistance in the Alpine region of France. Along with Cammaerts they organized, trained and armed the maquis to prepare them for an important role in support of the allied invasion of southern France. The Union group departed France in May 1944. The Germans had no soldiers stationed on the Vercors Massif but in response to sabotage activities of the maquis conducted periodic raids usually launched from Grenoble. The first raid was on 25 November 1943 and a wireless operator was