Stark likely arranged for one of the battalion’s couriers to carry Griffith’s message to Third Army HQ, because Griff ordered him, Cullen, and Dugan to get back into the jeep and for Dugan to drive them to the bridgehead east of Luisant across the Eure River to find the place between Le Coudray and Bonville where that north-pointing column was sitting. Griffith told Dugan to navigate through the city on a route that would take them within sight of all crossroads to confirm that blockades had been cleared along the major routes that armored columns would encounter on their way back north through Chartres.
In the front passenger seat, Griff refocused on his mission: to check on the true locations and dispositions of units in order to more effectively direct and supervise execution of General Walker’s orders. First he had to find out what the logjam was holding up that column. It should have recrossed the Eure River much earlier and passed through Lèves already.
Griffith and his companions knew they would be exposed to enemy fire as they worked their way south through the tight streets of the old part of the city. On Rue Saint-Michel, almost a half mile south of the cathedral, they passed the place where Father Drouin reported having spotted one of the last German lookouts early that morning.
The jeep turned northwest onto the Rue des Bouchers and then south two blocks toward the Place de La République, next to the prefecture, a third of a mile southwest of the cathedral.
They came across a crowd of armed civilians in the courtyard of the prefecture and stopped to determine what was happening. Every few minutes in the courtyard, small groups of partisans brought in men and women accused of being collaborators. Street-fighting sounds echoed on all sides, stimulating a scene of hysteria. Shots reverberated as a German sniper was fatally dislodged from his perch. A group of armed civilians led a screaming woman who struggled to break away. She sought to explain to anyone who would listen that she had not worked with the Germans.
Mr. Chapelier, the prefect newly appointed by the Free French, stood at the center of the courtyard and intervened on the woman’s behalf, ordering the partisans to stop their manhandling and permit her to speak. She faced one of her captors and accused him of being a German collaborator. He shouted back, waving his pistol at her. Gendarmes rushed him. They restrained his pistol arm, and others took her away.
In a corner of the courtyard, a gruesome scene unfolded. Men with FFI armbands brought in three young Frenchmen accused of working for the Germans, as members of Joseph Darnand’s Milice française—the most hated French militia—who had served as informers to the Gestapo, denouncing other French men and women. The three men admitted that they’d received 3,250 francs every month from the Gestapo in return for supplying the names of townsfolk working against the Germans. Resistance fighters took them into a narrow alley off the courtyard and shot the accused men in their heads. Their bodies lay piled atop each other. The spectators, young and old, looked on without a word as the corpses were loaded into an ambulance, each face covered with a copy of the most recent proclamation from Vichy. The ambulance drove them off to their graves.
Several citizens stepped forward and asked whether the three executed men had been given a trial. One local woman replied with a grim smile and a pert voice, “Yes,” they had had a trial—a short trial. She said they had been court-martialed and added, “It was not necessary to hold a long trial. The lives of these men had been known for the past four years.”
At an end of the courtyard, twelve women and four men had been lined up against a wall. A barber had roughly shorn off the hair of most of the women as close to the scalp as possible, carrying out a decree that they be publicly shamed for their acts. One woman stood on an overturned beer box while the barber did his work. Strewn around the box on the ground were a half dozen shades of hair—some straight, some curly, some natural, some dyed, some still with bobby pins and combs. The women—collaborators—stood helplessly against a wall. Terror showed in their faces. One woman concealed her face with a handkerchief. Another sobbed. A stout young woman in a white peasant smock held hands with her thinner mother, who wore a dark peasant dress and silver spectacles.
Overall, the scene brought together a mix of civilians dressed in coats—some wearing their Sunday best, including earrings, for the occasion—plus FFI and other Resistance fighters and police and veterans, many wearing uniforms taken out of mothballs for the first time since the German invasion in 1940. These uniformed included characters with swords and stern faces and many French youths with Tricolor armbands and pistols.
This taste of the locals’ passions gave Griffith, Stark, Dugan, and Cullen a sense of the stakes confronting the people of Chartres.
The jeep continued another four blocks south to the Place des Épars, at the intersection of five streets—only blocks from the cathedral. They saw more groups gathered in the football-field-sized oval, paved plaza surrounding a statue of General Marceau of the French Revolution. Some shouted in celebration. Others called for vindication and revenge.
Griff’s group spotted two abandoned American tanks that had broken down and been looted. The area surrounding the tanks revealed that a battle had been fought during the night a few blocks from the hospital. The tanks had bypassed the hospital, but the building had been hit from all sides. It overflowed with wounded lying on the sidewalks. Dugan swung the jeep west and north a block to the Rue du Grand Faubourg, where another abandoned American tank had run up against a wall during the night battle. Those of its crew who had survived had taken defensive positions around the tank to wait for the main part of the force to arrive.
Griffith again looked around for Germans and saw none, nor did he spot any German roadblocks, so they continued east on Boulevard Adelphe Chasles and Boulevard de la Courtille, detoured around the blown-out Courtille bridge, and crossed over the Eure River on a lesser bridge a few blocks south. He then sped south down tree-lined, narrow streets, past closed shops, small houses, and two-story apartments on both sides, with doors shut and window blinds closed.
In the two remaining miles between Le Coudray and Bonville, buildings stood progressively farther apart, and in the next half mile south, the houses gave way to wheat fields, and the jeep approached combat elements of the Seventh Armored Division. Those elements had formed a defensive circle like an American frontier wagon train while waiting for their order to head north and enter the city. Around the outside, like the rim of a wheel, infantry regiments were deployed, with their supporting tank and tank-destroyer units, so as to draw a ring of protective infantry around the entire division. Within this ring, transport and supply elements and command posts were dispersed. At the hub, artillery batteries would be able to fire in a 360-degree circle, and antiaircraft batteries sat deployed, ready to protect against air attacks.
By the time Griffith and his companions had arrived at the assembly area to see the forces still waiting, his jubilation from inspecting the cathedral and clearing it had turned to frustration and anger. He saw no progress, so he jumped out of his jeep to determine why.
Griffith and Stark together located the Seventh Armored Division’s three-shop tent and soon determined that the division’s Thirty-Eighth Armored Infantry Battalion had been assigned to reach Lèves. The two tracked down Lieutenant Colonel Samuel L. Irwin, the battalion’s commander, but by the time they found him, Griff was likely fuming mad, trying to determine for himself why Irwin hadn’t implemented the corps’ order hours sooner. Griff and Stark knew that the whole division—which was commanded by Major General Lindsay Silvester—was a “green” one, in its first fight at Chartres, and the division’s sector included the whole city of Chartres, so they had a lot of action on their hands. That said, though, as soon as Griff realized that Silvester and Irwin had permitted Irwin’s battalion to just sit there, frozen in place, he lost his temper.
Griff demanded that Irwin explain the delay. Irwin no doubt tried to explain, but Griff, in his anger, wouldn’t hear it. Irwin had been waiting for something but failed to co
nvince Griffith why it justified delaying the battalion’s departure. So Griffith took charge himself and probably on the spot as much as relieved Irwin of command, leaving it to the battalion’s chief of staff to get it moving. And Griff may well have told Stark to remain on-site to oversee the dispatch of a column northward around the east side of Chartres to Lèves while Griff himself would set out ahead. The column would need enough men and equipment to first secure the crossroads north of Lèves and then send forward two separate units—one to head north the twenty miles toward Dreux and beyond that to the Seine, and the second to head from Chartres eastward fifty miles to the Seine crossing near Melun.
Leaving Stark behind with the battalion, Griff and Cullen climbed in the jeep, Griff carrying his carbine and pistol. He ordered Dugan to drive fast, back the way they’d come, through the east edge of Chartres and around the hill and then across the Eure and up its western bank, toward Lèves, the column to follow, and as they traveled north, to check to be sure all intersections were clear. The column had to get through to Lèves and then would send its two columns north to Dreux and east to Melun.
They likely checked both routes around the hill, east and west, and on the north side reached the Place Drouaise and then headed north toward Lèves along the two-lane N10, the main road north out of Chartres to Paris, lined by trees on one side or the other and then passing through patches of woods on both sides and relatively few buildings. The road curved gently to the right and approached Lèves’s town hall from the south, near the village’s center.
They suddenly came upon a remnant of fifteen soldiers from a German army corps milling in the street. Dugan hit the brakes. Griffith jumped out of his front passenger seat with his rifle and fired a series of shots to hold the Germans at bay to give Dugan a chance to turn the jeep around with Cullen in the back seat. Griff fired first, continuing until he’d emptied his rifle clip, before the Germans could respond. The enemy soldiers scattered for cover in bushes and behind trees before returning fire. Griff grabbed Dugan’s carbine and fired it until empty as well and then leaped back into the jeep, which sped back south out of Lèves and around the curve along the route from which they’d come. They headed back in the direction of Chartres, searching for American troops or an outpost.
Within minutes, they spotted an oncoming American M5 light tank sitting beside the road with its turret open. It was from the Seventh Armored Division’s Eighty-Seventh Reconnaissance Battalion, heading north out of Chartres. A helmeted soldier stood in the open hatch. He had removed his goggles and pulled them up and onto his helmet and was examining a map. He looked up at the approaching jeep. Griffith told Dugan to stop the jeep, called out to the tank commander—a sergeant—and asked what he and his tank crew were doing there. The sergeant said he was trying to reach the crossroads beyond Lèves—the intersection of N10 and N1154, the road north to Dreux—and that he’d been ordered to get there that morning, so he was at least a couple of hours late. Griffith told the sergeant to continue on with his crew and be fast about it.
“Get going,” he said. “You’ll find a bunch of Germans in Lèves. You go through firing,” he yelled, “and when you turn that corner, go like hell.”
He motioned for the tank to move out and looked back at the jeep, but after a few breaths of hesitation he looked back at the tank and added, “I’m going with you.”
And with that, he climbed up the rear of the tank and called to the sergeant to move out, leaving Dugan and Cullen behind with the jeep. Griff may possibly have stood on a tow hitch attached to the back of the tank, but more likely he just climbed on top, while the sergeant climbed back inside and closed the hatch.
Griff was too large to squeeze inside the tank. The M5—about the size of what we would today know as a minivan—held a four-man crew but, with ammunition onboard, no space inside for an extra man, and on the outside it had neither endboard nor sideboard for standing. In fact, it probably also carried an armored case on top of its rear armor panels that hung over the back, so that, although Griff could have gripped onto hand-holds to climb up and may have found some way to stand and hold onto the back, most likely he merely knelt on the top of the tank and huddled behind the turret, where he exposed himself to attack on both sides and the rear, and likely also from the front, because the turret extended barely chest high above the tank’s top surface and wasn’t much to hide behind.
Griff held his M1 semiautomatic carbine in one hand and pistol in the other and looked up the road, searching for the curve leading to the spot where his jeep had encountered the German soldiers and survived the shoot-out. The tank roared toward Lèves. Griff gazed around continuously for signs of any of the Germans who had scattered in all directions from the would-be roadblock during the shoot-out, and he likely figured there would be other enemy positions along the way. The tank charged ahead, likely at its maximum speed of thirty-six miles per hour, with Griff on top. Had he planned to do this? Had he thought about riding on the tank, or inside it, before he and Dugan and Cullen had spotted the tank on the side of the road pointed toward them? Or was this a spur-of-the-moment decision that had somehow been stimulated by the combination of his triumph at the cathedral a couple of hours earlier, followed by his confrontation with Irwin at the Thirty-Eighth’s assembly area?
He must have felt terror from being a sitting duck on the tank—or nearly a clay pigeon—exposed at the rear and on the sides and only barely able to fit a portion of his body behind the turret of the tank to hide from shots coming from the front. But he also likely felt some intense excitement. After all, he was in command, even if exposed, and somehow probably felt some protection from the roar of the seventeen-ton machine beneath him and the solid steel turret in front of him. The tank could fire one hundred or more rounds from its thirty-seven-millimeter main gun and 7,500 rounds from the 0.30-caliber Browning machine gun mounted on the side of the turret. Knowing that, Griff may have felt some sense of protection, but what about simple small-arms fire coming potentially from all around?
They passed the shoot-out site, but no Germans remained. Griff must have felt a measure of relief, and then the sun came out, but he continued to look high and low and around every building, tree, and bush as they passed through the center of town. Doors and windows were shuttered, with no residents in sight.
At the center of the village, they turned left onto Avenue de la Paix to head westward, and the sun shone in his eyes. They continued up the route that led out of town northward to the crossroads. The two-lane street narrowed, with trees on both sides, but the sun was shining through into his eyes between spaced-out single-story and two-story houses and other buildings, including, on the right side of the road, a single-story windmill structure with a pitched roof that slanted toward the street. Just beyond it was the edge of a wooded area, heavy with underbrush. A dirt pathway, hidden from view of the approaching tank, ran from the street to the right and up the hill. A small stucco, one-story warehouse stood opposite on the left side of the street. Trees and shrubs obscured the tank crew’s and Griffith’s view of the path as they headed west from the center of the village.
Griff knew they’d made it through the center of town with no sign of Germans, so he was probably feeling some confidence that they could get to the crossroads and find it clear, or else guarded with a small-enough enemy force to be manageable. In fact, he may have even felt a little rush—maybe even a vague kick of freedom—as he held onto the top of that tank. The tank barreled up the street and passed by the windmill, and Griff and the others could see that the street was about to curve to the left and up a gradual hundred-foot hill with a clear path ahead. Griff perhaps thought they were in the clear. He might even have found a moment to think of Nell back home, glad she was in the safety of her parents’ Brooklyn house, and how nice it was going to be when the two of them could be together again. Or he may have thought of his daughter, Alice, confident that she was ensconced with her grandparents in the shady, peaceful, lawn-covered seclusion o
f the Commander’s House back on Governor’s Island; Griff was likely unaware that she was away those weeks at her favorite summer camp in upstate New York.
But out of nowhere, Griff felt the hot spike of a machine-gun round tear into his back. He probably had no idea what hit him. A young German soldier with a machine gun had been hiding in the brush along the path on the right. As Griff passed by on the tank, with no idea of the soldier’s position, the soldier let loose with a burst of fire, with bullets striking Griff before he could react. Shots from other enemy rifles and a rocket launcher flew by also. Griff spun around and fired as many shots as he could from his M1 semiautomatic carbine and from his pistol, but he fell off the tank and died then and there. Bullets may have ricocheted off the tank or its turret, but the noise of the tank engine must have muffled them, because the crew inside the tank did not realize what had happened until long after. Once the shooting erupted, they must have just fought through and continued, going “like hell,” as Griff had ordered, without knowing that Griffith had been hit, leaving his body behind, lifeless, on the pavement.
Locals had seen the German soldier shooting at Griff and the tank and then running away up the path. They included a Mr. Pavy and a fourteen-year-old boy named Bertrand Papillon who lived in Lèves. Pavy and another local teen, Blondel, from a distance, witnessed Griffith dying.
Saving the Light at Chartres Page 29
