Obituaries - March 3, 2000

Jean Vallette d’Osia; Resistance Leader in WWII

Jean Vallette d’Osia, 101, French resistance leader during World War II who leaped from a moving train in handcuffs to escape from the Gestapo. Vallette d’Osia was a graduate of France’s St. Cyr Military Academy and a veteran of World War I when he entered World War II as a major in the Resistance. He was organizing guerrilla bands in the Haute-Savoie area of the French Alps when he was captured by German forces in September 1943. On the train that was taking him to his interrogators, he was surrounded by Gestapo secret police officers. He pretended to sleep and when the Germans appeared to be dozing off, he leaped from his seat, smashed a window with his manacled hands and jumped to freedom. The Germans stopped the train to search for him, but Vallette d’Osia managed to reach an isolated farm where he commanded the owner to help unshackle him. He fled to Spain and later made his way to Allied-controlled French North Africa, where he was immersed in Resistance planning to support Allied D-Day landings in France. He ended his wartime service as deputy commander of an Alpine division facing Nazi troops on the Franco-Italian border and retired from the army in the late 1950s. Over the past decade he stirred controversy when he became the honorary head of a veterans group lined to France’s extreme-right National Front. On Monday at his home in the French Alps.