Maquis (World War II) du travail obligatoire, STO") in France at the beginning of 1943, thousands of young men fled and joined the Maquis. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) helped the Maquis with supplies and agents. The American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) also began to send its own agents to France in cooperation with the SOE and the French BCRA agents, as part of Operation Jedburgh. The British government provided supplies and support to assist Charles de Gaulle to unify the Free French resistance movement. Prior to the inception of the maquis, small resistance groups were created in the occupied and unoccupied
Maquis (World War II) In French Indochina, the local resistance fighting the Japanese since 1941 was backed up by a special forces airborne commando unit created by de Gaulle in 1943, and known as the Corps Léger d'Intervention (CLI). They were supplied by airlifts of the British Force 136. Politically, the Maquis were very diverse, including right-wing nationalists, socialists, communists, and anarchists. Some Maquis bands that operated in southwest France, were composed entirely of left-wing Spanish veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Spanish Civil War veteran Carlos Romero Giménez was a center-democratic liberal operating from Bordeaux. When Germany began a forced labor draft ("Service