With a low budget, we managed to sabotage the Axis’s French railways repeatedly for an entire year ( resistancepasdecalais.fr )

Pictured: Charles Debarge, one of the saboteurs that we lost.

Quoting Steve Cushion in On Strike Against the Nazis, pages 33–5:

Charles Debarge, “Charlie”, was a thirty‐one year old miner who lived in Harnes in the Pas‐de‐Calais, thirty kilometres south of Lille. He went on the run after his activity in the miners’ strike of 1941 put him on the wanted list. He was arrested on 6 August 1941 having already organised an attempted train derailment and blown up two electric pylons. He managed to escape that same evening from the Feldgendarmerie, 36, rue de la Liberté in Lille.

It was the beginning of a manhunt, life or death. They had been ordered to shoot us on sight. But if these gentlemen had decided to attack us, we had also decided to sell our hides dearly.^64^

In 1942, the underground leadership of the PCF in the Pas‐de‐Calais charged him with the task of organising widespread sabotage in the region, which he did with foolhardy courage. On 12 January 1942 he unsuccessfully launched an attack on the prison at Looslès‐Lille, where his wife Raymonde and numerous other resistance fighters were imprisoned. He organised a group of twenty young activists who blew up pylons, derailed trains and raided mines for explosives, as well as attacking [Axis] soldiers and [their] collaborators.

Eusébio Ferrari was a very different character. Son of an Italian immigrant family living in Fenain, he was ten years younger than Charles Debarge. An electrician in the Aniche glass works, he was very serious and well read, a self‐taught Communist intellectual who carefully prepared each attack, leaving little to chance, the complete opposite of Debarge, the improviser.

At the beginning, the OS groups in the Forbidden Zone used explosives which had been abandoned by the French army following its collapse in June 1940. However, they soon moved to stealing dynamite from the mines, like the attack on the Compagnie des Mines de Drocourt, which Debarge organised with twenty‐seven others on 3 September 1941, making off with 247 kg of dynamite and 578 detonators.^65^

However, sabotage is not easy and c[an] be very dangerous for the participants. On 11 October 1941, the premature explosion of a device that an OS group had just attached to a gasometer severely wounded René Denys and Béna Olejniczak and killed Paul Henke, a young German Communist. The help of railway workers and civil engineers was extremely useful in the early learning process. Two railwaymen from Amiens acted as consultants having perfected the best way to derail a train.

It seems that you set off the explosive charge under the fifth wagon so that the train drags the engine backwards off the track, thereby causing maximum damage to the trains contents while giving the driver and fireman the best chance of survival.

A group of Yugoslavian immigrants specialised in the destruction of electric pylons, while Eusébio Ferrari, always the perfectionist, developed his “cigar box” to detonate explosives just at the moment when the train arrived. But much of the sabotage was much less sophisticated and involved using pick‐axes and sledgehammers to destroy roadside transformers.

The early sabotage activity was political, to encourage the population and to sap the moral of the [Axis] authorities and [their] collaborators but, as the war progressed, the economic aspect grew in importance. France was by far the most important supplier for the [Third Reich’s] war‐machine and French industry worked flat out to supply [it]. Thus, for the [Axis], social peace in France was a matter of strategic importance, so sabotage was a serious problem.

Faced with frequent attacks by Communist saboteurs, the [Axis] authorities launched a man‐hunt.^66^ Félicien Joly, leader of the young Communists and one of the first to take up arms in the mining country, was also the first to fall in September 1941, followed shortly after by the Yugoslav group from Lens.

The [Axis] had dismantled the entire original OS network by August 1942 and had imprisoned or shot nearly all the militants. Eusébio Ferrari and René Denys fell in February 1942 and Charles Debarge was killed in a gunfight on 23 September 1942. His epitaph was written by his main enemy, the collaborationist préfet, Fernand Carles.

Instigator and author of outrages against members of the occupation authorities, he was certainly the most formidable terrorist chief in the region and perhaps in all France. His death is a serious blow for all those who are living illegally.^67^

If these young men and women, equipped with only an old bicycle, an archaic revolver and some stolen explosives could achieve so much, one can only imagine their destructive capabilities if they had been well supplied with arms explosives and money. However, the Allied high command did not want to encourage working class resistance and preferred aerial bombardments of doubtful efficiency.

(Emphasis added.)