Force 2 launched the attack as planned, from the assembly area to the southeast of Chartres. Company C of the Thirty-First was to leave Force 2 as they passed through Luisant and drove on into Chartres to help Force 1 mop up the city. Force 1 penetrated enemy defenses with infantry and established a command post in the city’s northeast quarter.
Force 2 encountered heavy antitank fire in the southwest suburbs of Lucé and Luisant. It drove to the edge of the old town in Chartres but failed to maintain continuity of attack and suffered heavy losses in the very narrow streets that impaired the tanks’ ability to maneuver. Force 1 remained and maintained continuous pressure on the enemy through the night, but Force 2 withdrew and resumed the attack at daybreak.
During the battle, many officers showed valor. When the vanguard tank of Major Leslie A. Lohse, acting battalion commander, was set ablaze and disabled by an eighty-eight-millimeter shell and antitank rockets, while under heavy fire Lohse helped put out the fire and took cover only after members of the crew had done so, concealing himself in an enemy headquarters. The lead tank, which carried the company commander, was destroyed after enemy forces fired Panzerfausts and antitank mines from concealed positions, killing the company commander and knocking out the second tank. That meant First Lieutenant George C. J. Racine, in his column’s third tank, took over command of the column and led it through heavy fire to the center of town. Enemy volleys then wrecked a half-track in the column and cut off two platoons. Racine heard of the wreck by radio, stopped his tank, entered the fire-swept street, and signaled his location by flashlight. He made his way back to the enemy-occupied square, ignoring machine-gun cross fire from street-facing windows; he cleared out the shattered half-track, reformed the disorganized column, and led the company out of town. In all, four US tanks were destroyed. The corps retreated to regroup and rallied for a dawn attack.
The forces ran into murderous antitank fire, flares, and mines in the outskirts of Luisant, and the two rear tank companies were forced to withdraw to their alternate rallying positions. Company C of the Thirty-First went on into Chartres as planned but was unable to gain contact with Force 1 and suffered loss of both vehicles and men and became disorganized after the company commander was killed and the battalion commander’s tank was blown up. The remaining elements reorganized and pulled out of the city to the south into an assembly area, and on the morning of August 16 they rejoined the combat command.
The initial fighting for the city took two days, with the Seventh Armored Division constrained from using heavy-artillery support because of concerns about damaging the cathedral.
Near the cathedral, two priests endured the night of fighting. Father Paul Douin was on temporary assignment from his permanent home, a monastery in Le Theiulin, almost twenty miles west of Chartres, and Marcel Cassegrain was a professor at the Major Seminary and master of pontifical ceremonies. Douin woke from his brief spell of sleep and wrote in his diary that “daybreak had finally arrived after a long night.” It had been the first night of the four-day battle for Chartres. The two priests had huddled outside the cathedral school, avoiding bullets, and then had run through neighborhoods, looking for wounded. They saw burned-out tanks and bodies everywhere. Casualties overwhelmed the hospital.
Before dawn on the morning of Wednesday the sixteenth, Joe Messner worked the night shift as clerk to the G-3 at CP 7. Following his all-night shift on the previous night, he had been unable to get any sleep because he and the other headquarters enlisted men had been required to spend the day moving the CP, including tents, food, and other supplies and command and communications equipment from CP 6 in La Ferté-Bernard to CP 7 in Courville-sur-Eure.
During Joe’s shift, in the dim light of kerosene camp lamps, he read dispatches that reported the heavy fighting through the night and into the dawn hours. He plotted the latest information in grease pencil on the situation map, sipping coffee and chewing gum to stay awake. He had become adept at translating the flow of information into moving rectangles, each containing a unique symbol identifying each fighting unit, and its class as infantry, armor, artillery, cavalry, or other.
Before dawn, General Walker gathered his section heads, including colonels Collier and Griffith, Colonel Zeller, who was the G-2 officer, and other group heads and staff around the situation map. Messner stayed for the briefing, and Gene Schulz joined upon commencement of his shift. While artillery bursts and airplane engines droned from the front lines, Walker with his staff reviewed the current situation in Chartres: Force 1 had captured its sector in the north part of the city by 1:30 a.m. after ferocious fighting in the storm followed by sporadic unorganized resistance. Although the Germans had started withdrawing in the afternoon of the fifteenth, some had succeeded in infiltrating back into the city during the night and were expected to continue. Sniper fire was to be expected throughout the day and into the night of the sixteenth, at least at routes of entry to the city and likely inside as well. Walker and the staff reviewed battle strategy, tactics, and timing.
The corps’ standing order remained in place—that all units, including artillery, armor, and infantry, were to avoid shelling near the cathedral and were to employ spotters to ensure accuracy and avoid accidental hits on or near it. German machine-gun and mortar emplacements still occupied strategic spots in Chartres. During the briefing, according to one source, Griff was reported as having learned that corps artillery had received an order to destroy the cathedral, the order coming from someone who believed the Germans were occupying the twin towers as observation posts, but no record of any such order has been found. Griffith and Stark thought there was no reason to fire on the cathedral, as the two of them had been in it the day before and had found it clean.
During the briefing, Walker also reacted to Force 2’s having failed to hold its position during the attack and its forced retreat, so Walker ordered the force to launch a dawn attack, and he reportedly appointed Griffith to be first-line director of military operations in the sector that included the cathedral and units of the Seventh Armored Division that were to pass through Chartres and proceed north through Lèves and toward the Seine.
Griff emerged from the briefing and as usual drafted orders reflecting decisions reached, for Gene Schulz to promptly type onto mimeograph stencils from the handwritten instructions. Liaison officers, second or first lieutenants, or even senior officers such as Mel Stark, stood by waiting for Schulz to finish and Griff to approve and shoved the orders into their courier cases to head by jeep for the front lines to deliver the orders to division and battalion commanders.
But Griffith couldn’t let things just stand as they were. Something about the situation troubled him, so he took it upon himself to investigate. As he left the G-3 office, he told Schulz and Messner he would be going into Chartres on a personal mission without giving any details.
“Goodbye, be careful, and God be with you,” Schulz said to Griffith.
Griffith, with his pistol and M1 semiautomatic carbine, hopped into his jeep along with Mel Stark and Colonel Robert E. Cullen, who also carried weapons, and, with William Dugan back at the wheel, drove out of the CP toward Chartres.
Cullen was the corps’ adjutant general—the principal administrative staff officer, responsible for procedures affecting awards and decorations, casualty operations, and administration and preservation of records of all personnel, normally subordinated to the chief of staff and known as the G-1. The adjutant often works directly for the deputy chief of staff, the position in which Griffith also served in addition to preforming his duties as G-3.
Griffith left to determine whether German forces had now occupied the cathedral, despite the fact that his job and training were all to plan, oversee, receive information collected by G-2 through proper channels, and draft and disseminate orders to others at the front to carry out. Why did Griffith take it upon himself to investigate what Eugene Schulz, in his 2012 memoir, would call a “personal mission”? It is likely that requests had been received during
the night from field commanders whose troops were being hit by what appeared to them to be coordinated fire. Those commanders could have been likely to order artillery and mortar fire to protect their troops. Sources are in conflict as to whether anyone had sought to change the standing order.
What is clear is that corps artillery was under the overall command of corps headquarters, and specifically its G-3 Section. Griffith’s job was foremost to administer tactical plans and develop orders for battle in conjunction with the location and strength of the enemy as assessed by the G-2 Section and then write battle orders and assign units to execute them. G-3’s function was not to engage in surveillance, much less to do it personally. It appears, then, that Griffith’s personal investigation was more than a standard inquiry he could have undertaken simply by asking the G-2 to look into it.
Within a couple of hours after General Walker’s briefing, two local priests began daily Mass before a small group of congregants in the cathedral’s Chapel of the Sacred Heart, which was tucked along the south hallway on one shoulder of the main altar. Those attending the morning services entered the cathedral through the rampart-shrouded west portal and one of its great west doors, which opened into a Gothic 125-foot vaulting-capped nave, supported by huge marble-faced pillars running the distance of one and a half football fields along the marble floor through the nave and then the choir, leading to the altar poised at the east end.
One of the two priests who conducted Mass was Father Cassegrain, and the other was Douin, who also served in temporary assignments as vicar for the cathedral’s adjoining seminary and of the hospital in Chartres. Douin had walked all the way to Chartres the prior Sunday, August 12, carrying his bag and seeing along the way charred vehicles on the roadside. He had spoken with locals concerning the movement of the Germans in retreat from the Allied forces and of the acts of sabotage and skirmishes between Resistance fighters and the Germans. He also passed through German checkpoints and learned of their actions to seal up the city—permitting people to enter but none to leave.
The morning of the sixteenth, Father Douin felt the air still moist from the night’s rain. He heard another priest’s voice reverberate through the vast, open cathedral, as well as bursts of rifle fire and occasional explosions in the distance. These sounds also echoed through the narrow streets, reminding the parishioners who attended the Mass that the cathedral provided both physical and spiritual sanctuary.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Clearing the Church: Chartres, August 16, 1944
IN LATE MORNING, GRIFFITH, STARK, CULLEN, AND DUGAN HAD NAVIgated in an open jeep through the city, hearing explosions crackling in the streets and on rooftops, and finally crossed the railroad tracks a block before the Place des Épars and approached the base of the five-hundred-foot rocky hill that rose from the river at the center of Chartres. Dugan was driving, with Griff riding shotgun and Stark and Cullen in the back, each with rifle ready. In front of them, the cathedral’s twin towers reached forty-five stories above the hill. Guns exchanged volleys. Artillery and mortar explosions erupted with surprising accuracy. A shell hit high above, grazing the cathedral’s north tower, about halfway up. Was it American or German? A cloud of stone chips and dust floated down the cathedral’s west and north facades.
It felt to Griff as though shots from small weapons were closing in. The jeep jolted and jostled around obstacles, maneuvering from position to position, through intermittent street fighting on winding, wet streets, around blind corners, probing forward and back, side to side, dodging fire. Carcasses of cars and fallen bricks lay in the rain-soaked, mud-filled streets. Smoke rose from buildings. Shots rebounded off walls, resounding through deserted passageways, with shops and houses locked, windows shuttered, and no civilians in sight.
Griff suspected at once that German spotters were directing artillery and mortar fire from the cathedral. That was the vantage point, after all. You could see everything from that hilltop. If he was right, well, corps units presented a clear target for the Germans. All they could do was keep moving. That wasn’t easy. Progress was slow through the city, due to the expected snipers. If there were German spotters in the towers, the Americans and supporting Resistance fighters might also be forced back in retreat—or, worse yet, more likely to be shot and killed.
The jeep wove through cobblestone alleyways to reach the hilltop, arriving at a gravel concourse a block west of the cathedral, the site for generations of pilgrim gatherings and carnivals. Antique walls surrounded the cathedral, encompassing a Vatican-like close (or walled-in place) above the town of centuries-old two- and three-story stone and stucco houses and other structures.
They dismounted in the concourse and entered the court on foot, shots still discharging all around. Griff motioned for Dugan to bring with him the American flag that Griff had thrown into the back of the jeep and told Dugan to keep it folded up and carry it with him.
Griff saw that GIs and FFI scattered all around the court were shooting upward. He couldn’t tell whether the Frenchmen were the trained, sharp Resistance fighters whom he’d met two days before at La Ferté-Bernard, led by Madame Clavel. Or were they just disconnected, trigger-happy partisans out for revenge? And who was in charge of those GIs?
He felt his pulse throbbing, body vibrating, and vision narrowing. He played over the scene in his mind, debating whether they should follow through with his urge to get inside the cathedral and settle once and for all whether any Germans were hiding inside or in the towers and posing such a threat or if they should instead just move on—to explore what was holding up the armored column. Maybe the field officers who had called in to corps CP had been right: if there were spotters up high, directing fire, massacring corps troops, the towers damn well should be flattened!
The GIs around him were stymied. This wasn’t how they’d been trained.
Griff didn’t like what he saw: American soldiers exercising caution during an attack. In front of buildings on the courtyard, GIs were foiled, just taking sporadic potshots, striking the cathedral’s walls up high. Stone fragments, sparks, and powder clouds were drifting down past sculptures and boarded-up Gothic windows onto the courtyard’s surface.
Griff anchored himself momentarily and watched. But he saw no snipers, no enemy fire.
So he called to the gunners to stop their shooting: “Hell, there are no snipers here.”
They shouted back that there were—up in the spire of the cathedral.
He looked up again and waited for shots from above.
There were none. Maybe the men had just seen falling fragments of damage from shelling that they’d mistaken for a sniper, or maybe they’d just seen companions’ shots ricocheting off the walls that they’d then thought was sniper fire. He told the gunners to wait and ordered Dugan to hand him the folded-up flag, which Griff then stuffed into the back of his shirt. He would inspect the cathedral to see whether there were Germans inside. He would settle the matter.
He checked that he’d released the safety switch on his M1 for firing and set out to investigate. He prowled into the now-silent street and across the open courtyard, exposed to enemy guns, and then ran to the base of the cathedral’s stone wall. He eyed the perimeter in front and behind him at ground level and looked up, all around. He started at the northwest corner of the church courtyard. Almost frozen with fear, crouching, he scuttled from one point to the next.
He sidled up to the open doorway of the rampart that covered the west portal of the cathedral, looked inside, searching right and left for any sign of life, but he saw only the sandbags stacked in between wooden framing protecting the sculptures surrounding the portals. He advanced south and then turned left at the corner to the south wall, hugging close to its base. He could sense that he was in and out of potential sight of snipers high up. He trembled and worked hard to keep his eyes and ears clear, listening for any signs or sounds of Germans. He headed slowly counterclockwise around the structure. Approaching the rampart that protected the south porti
co, he again stepped inside, searching slowly for any sign of sentries, but sensed none.
Inside, along the south wall inside the rampart, among the hundreds of its portico’s sculptures—saints, kings, apostles, and other biblical characters—he could make out the revealing detail of one of them that caught his attention. In the central tympanum, above the middle door, in a depiction of the Last Judgment, Christ sat with arms raised, angels above him, Saint Michael at his feet, holding scales, the damned on the right and the saved on the left. Griff recognized this Jesus as the same one to whom he’d first been introduced as a kid, in Quanah’s simple brick Baptist church, with its warm-hearted minister who waited at the door, welcoming congregants and later bidding them goodbye. Griff wasn’t a Catholic, only an incidental Baptist, but he recognized this Jesus as the one he’d known, by whom he’d felt embraced.
He wasn’t an art buff, but his love of beauty was no less than the next guy’s, and he hated useless destruction and was intent on doing his part to prevent it today.
He continued around the curved wall of the chapel at the east end and then ahead around the corner of the north wall, where he gazed up at to the north tower. He saw damage halfway up. Chips of stone and dust blown by wind gusts still brushed down from the tower walls. Another chill came over him, his confidence wavering intermittently with alarm and dread.
Toward the top of the north tower, through his field glasses, he spotted one of the many carved-stone gargoyles jutting down from the roof’s edge, guarding the high balustrade. The group had watched over the whole complex, including the hilltop buildings of the close, the seminary and school, the city, and the surrounding countryside, for centuries. The gargoyle’s neck bent down, its eyes searching, as if to snarl, “Friend or foe?”
Griff passed through the north portico and found himself back at the west end. By God, he’d done it! He’d covered the whole visible exterior of the cathedral and lived.
Saving the Light at Chartres Page 27
