Alain Le Ray
Alain Le Ray (born October 3, 1910 in Paris ; † June 4, 2007 ibid) was a French officer, resistance fighter and most recently General de corps d'armée , as well as holder of the Grand Cross (Grand-Croix) , the highest military decoration of the Legion of Honor (Légion d'honneur) .
In 1940, Le Ray was taken prisoner of war by Germany as a lieutenant. In April 1941 he managed to escape from Colditz Castle in Saxony, which was considered safe from breakout . His path took him via Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Tuttlingen, Singen and Gottmadingen to Schaffhausen in Switzerland, using almost exclusively the train and crossing the border to Switzerland on a steam locomotive as a kind of figurehead on the night train to Erzingen. He then took on a key role in the French resistance . As an experienced mountaineer , he founded the Maquis du Vercors resistance group in the French Alps near Grenoble . In 1945 he led the French troops ( FFI ) in the Isère department and fought German and Italian mountain troops in their last retreat in the Alps on Mont Cenis .
After the end of the Second World War he remained true to his profession and fought in Vietnam ( Vietnam War ) and Algeria ( Algeria War ). At the end of the 1950s he was employed by the French government as a military attaché in Bonn .
biography
Young climber, member of the Bleau Group
In the 1930s, Alain Le Ray was a member of the Bleau group, which also included Parisian mountaineers, including his friends Jacques Boell (mountaineer and mountain writer) and André Boell, Marcel Ichac, the sisters Elisabeth and Raymonde Lartigue, etc.
The first leader of the Maquis du Vercors
Alain Le Ray, having become “Officier d'active”, passed through the famous 159th Alpine Infantry Regiment. Before the Second World War , he headed a Scout Division (SES). In 1940 he was captured on the Ourcq after being wounded . On April 12, 1941, he was the first prisoner to escape from the legendary Colditz Castle , which is considered safe from escape . He reached Switzerland while sitting on a platform between the lanterns of a steam locomotive in the shape of a figurehead. After returning to France, he returned to his original regiment in the Armistice Army.
Alain Le Ray joined the Resistance in 1943 and became the first military leader of the Maquis of Vercors (under the name "Rouvier" or "Commander Ferval"). He was one of the founders of the Vercors Maquis, along with the architect Pierre Dalloz, the commander Marcel Pourchier (former EMHM commander), the writer Jean Prévost and the journalist Yves Farge. "He founded the secret combat committee of Vercors and was the first military leader of the massif who deliberately did not want to build a citadel, but a platform for parachutes from which commands were to be carried out." (Jean Mabire, The Battle of the Alps 1944-1945, Presses de la Cité, T1, 1986, page 15).
In 1944 he became commander of the Forces françaises de l'intérieur of Isère and organized the liberation of the region in conjunction with the Allies . In April 1945 he freed Mont-Cenis, at the head of the 7th Half-Fighter Brigade of the Alpine Fighters . He had to fight hard to recapture the last remaining territories still in the possession of the Germans.
The writer Jean Mabire wrote of him: "Sentimentally, he would be more what one would call" progressive "with generous ideas, but instinctively he remains a great ruler of sovereign authority." (Jean Mabire, “La bataille des Alpes” 1944–1945, volume 1, page 16).
Military career after 1945
Alain Le Ray led operational command posts in French Indochina and Algeria , including:
- Indochina campaign 1953–1954, then negotiator at the Trung gia conference.
- Chief of Staff of the Parachute Division (1955–1956).
- Algeria Campaign (1955-1958)
- Military attaché at the French embassy in Bonn
- Brigadier General, Commander of the 27th Alpine Division in Großkabylien (1962).
- Major General, Commander of the 7th Mechanized Division.
- General of the Corps ( Lieutenant General ) (1968)
Associative responsibility
Alain Le Ray was director of the Écrins National Park from 1973 to 1981 .
From 1970 to 1982 General Le Ray was President of L'Epaulette, an association of officers recruited (some directly from the gendarmerie, army, general services and police) other than Saint-Cyr , armed by title or selection process is recruited through internal recruiting or through reserve officers.
Since 1969 he was Honorary President of the National Association of Scouts and Skiers.
He died on June 4, 2007. His funeral, a funeral with military honors, took place on June 11 in the Invalides in Paris before he was buried the next day in the tomb of the Mauriacs in the Vémars cemetery, where he was in the Close to his father-in-law, the Nobel laureate in literature François Mauriac , and of Jeanne Mauriac (née Lafon), the wife of François, her daughter Claire Wiazemsky, as well as their daughter, the actress Anne Wiazemsky and Alain's wife, Luce Le Ray (b . Mauriac), rests.
literature
- Alain Le Ray . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 2007, pp. 174 ( Online - June 11, 2007 ).
- Alain Le Ray, Première à Colditz , Presses Universitaires de Grenoble 2004, ISBN 2706112042
- Reiner-Ruft: Spectacular escape of French officers from German captivity via Singen to Switzerland in 1941 in "hegau - magazine for history, folklore and natural history of the area between the Rhine, Danube and Lake Constance, yearbook 76/2019". Hegau History Association V., Singen (Hohentwiel), ISBN 978-3-933356-97-0 , pages 249-258.
Web links
- Contemporary history in the Netzeitung ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Le Ray, Alain |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French general and resistance fighter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 3, 1910 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 4, 2007 |
| Place of death | Paris |