Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  Some kind of passion or other internal stimulus seems to have peeled away Griff’s mantle of orderly and disciplined command, his deliberate and self-possessed manner, and driven him into a sort of frenzy during the last couple of hours of his life—even perhaps through some personal transformation. Perhaps his short-tempered encounter with Irwin’s battalion at the Thirty-Eighth’s assembly area had triggered it, or perhaps General Walker’s having assigned Griff to watch over the frontline operations firsthand had triggered it; after all, he was suddenly thrust up close inside the corps’ by far most brutal fight yet, called upon to oversee the forward units to ensure that Walker’s orders covering Griff’s sector were being carried out, in the face of such stiff and recurring German defense. Or perhaps it was all of that combined with some feeling of triumph at having cleared the cathedral and—while at the top of the north tower—having seen the bottleneck holding up advance of the Seventh Armored Division.

  Whatever it was that had driven him to such a height of vehement or almost manic frenzy, was it not a combination of circumstances, fatigue, sleep deprivation, and terror experienced by countless thousands of good men in combat, fighting for their lives and those of their men or doing their best to lead? We don’t know what it was, but for Griff it all came to a crashing halt when the thunder of machine-gun, rocket, and rifle fire blew him off the tank, despite his intrepid attempt to somehow fire back until all ammunition was spent.

  That afternoon, a major battle between Germans and Allied forces followed in Lèves and resulted in the destruction of the church, the boys’ school, and a large part of the town. The Seventh Armored Division’s Thirty-Eighth Armored Infantry Battalion carried its attack around Chartres and took the high ground to the northeast of the town and through it captured over a hundred German prisoners.

  Blondel later reported that he and his brother had run out during a lull in the fighting that afternoon and approached Griffith’s body lying in the left lane of the street, his chest riddled with bullets, the rest of his body untouched except for an injured finger. Griff’s left hand still held his carbine, and his right hand held his pistol, which he had fired until empty into the Germans whose fire he had drawn while on the tank. They picked him up and moved him onto the sidewalk in front of the stucco building opposite the windmill.

  Infantry captain Carl K. Mattocks—who led the attack on Lèves—would later report that his unit had escorted Lieutenant Colonel Irwin to General Thompson’s command post, which had eventually been established a block west of the cathedral. When Mattocks left that post, darkness had set in. Mattocks traveled east and then north over the Lèves road via vehicle using only small “cat’s-eye” lights. He drove through the part of Lèves where Griff had been killed but did not see Griff’s body. The lights, he reported, would have prevented him and his team from seeing a human form on the road, so after Griff had been shot off the tank, Mattocks believed, his body would have remained lying on the side of the street the night of the sixteenth.

  He did not know that Griff’s body had been moved to the sidewalk and that by evening local residents had draped it with a blanket and later had completely covered it with flowers and placed in the middle of the blossoms a small American flag that a French family had hidden in their home. They brought chairs onto the sidewalk and held a vigil over the colonel to wait for US Army personnel to come claim his body.

  Some days later, Mr. Pavy would tell villagers, including Mr. Papillon, that shortly after the shooting of Griffith, Pavy had heard a rumor that a young German soldier, whose hand had been bandaged—and who had moved on to Saint-Prest, five miles northeast of Lèves up the Eure River—had boasted, some hours after the incident in Lèves, of having shot an American colonel. Later still, eyewitnesses would come forward, including a woman who said she had seen a German soldier step out of the pathway at the side of the road after the tank passed and shoot Griffith in the back.

  Griff’s reasons for leading the push north by climbing onto the tank and riding exposed will never be known. But in those moments, with the apparent fluid movement of Allied and enemy units, and Germans—even in retreat—who were in the immediate area delaying the forward advance of the corps—by tactical plan, ambush, snare, or vandalism—Griff and the other American commanders had an overwhelming need to discover immediately the Germans’ latest positions, movements, and strengths. What, in addition to those needs, would compel Griffith to so disregard his personal safety has been studied and investigated, but the answer seems to have been lost to history.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Aftermath—Snipers and a Scrappy Lieutenant: Chartres, August 16–19, 1944

  EARLIER IN THE DAY, BEFORE GRIFFITH HAD LEFT CHARTRES CATHEdral to drive to the Thirty-Eighth’s assembly area, he had reported the cathedral clear of Germans. One reason we know it was clear when he did so is that Father Paul Douin, in his diary for the day, described his before-noon encounter with the tall, rifle-carrying American officer who had come into the cathedral through its north door looking for Germans and had sought the priests’ help to locate the tower stairs, had climbed the towers, and had confirmed that at the moment he had found no Germans—neither artillery spotters nor snipers—anywhere in the towers or elsewhere in the building. Douin did not learn the American officer’s name but was struck by his imposing presence and had initially feared that he might have shot Douin and his fellow priest in the chaos of the moment before learning that they were clerics.

  That afternoon, after he had known the American officer had left, Douin heard shots and saw street fighters shooting up at the towers and yelling about snipers hiding there, a sign that Germans must have reentered the cathedral from time to time and somehow gained access to the towers.

  Through the sixteenth, the Americans had sent only the Twenty-Third Armored Infantry Battalion into the zone, not yet sufficient infantry-troop strength to conduct house-to-house searches. During and after Griffith’s drive to the Thirty-Eighth’s assembly area, scores of previously defeated German soldiers, who had escaped from other battles, continued to gather and reassemble at Chartres and were being resupplied and redirected by local German commanders to reenter the city—or may never have left and still hid in cellars and on rooftops sniping to sow chaos and inflict injury and death on American soldiers, French Resistance fighters, monuments, and bridges.

  Thus, toward the mid- and late afternoon of the sixteenth, well after Griffith’s inspection and departure, a Father Launay, along with Father Douin—and a handful of American news correspondents—had witnessed German riflemen shooting intermittently from the cathedral’s towers. And at least once during that period, a half dozen Germans—who had somehow entered the towers and were shooting as a group—and French resisters were shooting back. American infantrymen and armed French civilians had crouched at corners and had peered from behind walls as they fired hour after hour at what they believed were German snipers perched up there. From the street below the towers, numerous nicks were visible in the scrollwork of stone where bullets had hit, but no serious structural damage had been inflicted. Douin reported that he’d heard that German soldiers had been ordered, in the course of their retreat from the city, to snipe from the north tower and to blow up the historic Porte Guillaume gate to the city and some bridges.

  The northern tower’s many openings made it attractive to the German snipers. The sniping and the counterfire peaked that afternoon as the bells rang out at 3:00 p.m. in their normal fashion, as they’d done for ages. Only this time they did so as Germans were despoiling the city.

  Inside, at about the same time, Douin and Father Cassegrain felt things had calmed down a bit. They wanted to leave by the south door but thought it wasn’t prudent to do so, because when Douin had looked out that door, he saw an American soldier, with a carbine, at the corner of the small street running up to the south door of the cathedral, shooting in the direction of the bell towers. The priest thought the soldier didn’t know that there were America
ns in the gallery and that he risked shooting at the first head that he saw up there. Having seen the priests signaling to him, he ran over to the entrance of the south door and finally understood that there may not just be suspected Germans up in the towers but also at least one American soldier in pursuit of Germans. Earlier he had heard the snipers in the tower sniping busily and armed civilians in the streets and alleys returning the fire ten for one. By 5:00 p.m., the sniping from the tower had died down, the city at last appearing to be under American control.

  According to the notes of Father Douin, he and his companion priest spent the remainder of the afternoon with scraps of boards, hammer, and pincers, repairing the doors to the cathedral’s kitchen storeroom and its Chapel of the Sacred Heart, which had been battered by explosions during the night.

  At about 6:30 p.m., Douin was about to set out to pay a long-delayed visit to the Carmelite convent, two miles north of the cathedral, to deliver a bundle of old newspapers and clean white leaflets salvaged from the office material in his seminary quarters. But as he was leaving the cathedral via the west doors, rain started to fall again. He went back in through the same doors but learned that the north doors had been locked. He was standing by the south door thinking about what to do when he saw three people walking around the choir toward him in front of the Chapel of the Sacred Heart.

  One was Father Guédou, who was accompanied by an American officer in uniform and a young girl. She was a “Nogentise,” a former prisoner of the Germans at Nogent, who explained that she was acting as the interpreter for the American and that he had come to investigate reports that that morning Germans had been in the bell towers. As he left, the officer asked everyone to repeat the names and duties of the two priests, Fathers Finet and Guédou, who were interrogated, so he could make a written record. When he was done, he walked out the south door into the square where his jeep was waiting. The officer jumped into the jeep, and the driver pirouetted the jeep south, away from the cathedral, to pursue the investigation.

  Father Douin talked then with Monsieur Manuel, who recounted German atrocities that had occurred that morning against Resistance members near the Place des Épars and the Avenue Maunoury, three blocks south of the prefecture. Monsieur Manuel said, “Mr. Tuvache managed to survive by pretending he was dead, but his son didn’t make it, the Germans firing their machine guns without pity on the pile of cadavers in front of them. So this is war, and this time, here.”

  Thus, through the evening of the sixteenth—the Germans continuing to reenter the city of Chartres, counterattack, and redeploy to oust advancing American units and defend against their penetration—the battle for Chartres continued around the city, despite intervals of relative peace and quiet, which had drawn Chartres’ citizens out into the streets for intermittent celebrations and displays of reprisal against collaborators.

  The next morning, the seventeenth, at 06:00, a Captain Johnston of the Seventh Armored Division Eighty-Seventh Cavalry Mechanized Reconnaissance Squad, while scouting through Lèves, discovered Griffith’s body and notified corps headquarters.

  At CP 7 in Courville-sur-Eure, Griffith’s corps headquarters colleagues and superiors took his death hard. The corps had suffered significant losses. That morning’s casualty list handed to General Walker reported eleven killed; twenty wounded, sick and injured; and forty-nine missing. The corps had captured three hundred additional prisoners besides the three hundred they had already evacuated. More than one hundred other prisoners still huddled under corps detention during the night in an area threatened by enemy troops, requiring reassignment of an antiaircraft battalion for protection during the night.

  Even in the feverishly busy headquarters, so close to the corps’ next objective, all took time out to honor Griffith. Staff officers located the best casket available in Chartres, and an Army mortician prepared him for a temporary formal military burial, which was conducted by the corps on the afternoon of the seventeenth in a temporary cemetery in a plowed-up field surrounded by trees at Saint-Cornielle, seventy miles southwest of Chartres, nine miles northeast of Le Mans. A bugler sounded taps, and more than two dozen corps headquarters officers and staff stood at attention, facing Griffith’s flag-draped and flower-covered casket, which would be marked by a simple white wooden cross until later reburial.

  Back at Chartres, more Germans were showing up as each hour passed. According to eyewitness newspaper reporters at the scene, late that afternoon street fighting was still going on, and snipers were again firing persistently from the north tower of the cathedral. Rather than destroy the tower with heavy fire to dislodge the German gunners, Americans and Frenchmen used only small arms. Hence the lengthy resistance. It is not clear why the cathedral had not been secured by the Americans.

  Late that afternoon, snipers were still firing from one of the bell towers as the American forces consolidated their position in the area and pressed on and after the Germans, who were fleeing in several directions. Another reporter wrote that into the afternoon a half dozen snipers were still holding out in the tower and drawing counterfire from local patriots which put fresh nicks in the tower’s tracery. The houses along the streets showed marks of a tank battle and one disabled American tank was pulled up on the sidewalk.

  But even on the afternoon of August 17, German attacks continued in the city. At 2:00 p.m., two American newspaper reporters were in the cathedral being shown around by the curate and cathedral historian.

  They had begun in the parapet below the Roman tower, from which they’d heard Americans firing on German snipers. They climbed further into the tower hoping to get a view through binoculars all he way to Versailles, but as they reached the midway point, above the belfry on a narrow, winding stone stairway, a shell hit the other tower, sending masonry and clouds of stone dust billowing over the towers and rooftops. In less than a minute, two other shells came over, one of which hit the other tower. The reporters’ driver was waiting in the street. They tried to take a shorter route down, but the curate struggled to unlock an ancient door, and they had to retrace their steps and went instead onto a catwalk around an outside railing never meant for support and within view of anyone, including any snipers, below. After climbing, crawling, and stooping, they arrived behind the main altar and made their way to the street and safety.

  At 3:00 p.m. on August 17, the Seventh Armored Division was ordered by General Walker’s Twentieth Corps to clean out Chartres completely, commencing its attack at 4:00 p.m. with additional artillery support.

  Still, the Germans weren’t giving up. Walker realized that the corps faced losing the newly liberated city, so he rushed in a combat team of the Fifth Infantry Division. Large and still organized groups of German troops occupied portions of the city and the woods to the south with many forty-millimeter and eighty-eight-millimeter antiaircraft weapons, but corps troops eliminated those pockets of resistance with hard, close fighting, supported by concentrations from corps artillery. One group of over eight hundred Germans, commanded by a colonel, surrendered as a group.

  On the eighteenth, General Walker ordered his Seventh Armored Division to pull its tanks away from the city into an improvised tank park. He gave his Fifth Infantry Division the mission of taking the town with a third attack, following the Seventh Armored Division, as the Fifth Infantry Division had done with prior towns in the race across France.

  This task fell to the Fifth’s Eleventh Combat Team, including the Eleventh Infantry Regiment and others, to provide more riflemen, and it secured the town by a final assault on the morning of August 19, taking more than 1,500 German prisoners, with an estimated 1,800 German dead, and capturing many vehicles and stores and two airfields in the vicinity together with thirty to forty destroyed planes. A separate task force of the Thirty-Eighth Armored Infantry Battalion took control of the area around the airport. The American forces suffered approximately one hundred casualties during the battle for Chartres.

  On the seventeenth alone, more than a dozen FFI members had
been killed in Chartres’ city center, and many more were injured, including both FFI and among the civilian population, due to artillery fire from unknown sources.

  Many FFI complained that they could have avoided many losses of men had they received from the Americans the use of one or two armored vehicles, but the US Army was not inclined to receive directives from such unofficial soldiers with little experience. Firemen of Chartres intervened to fight blazes ranging from Lèves on the north to Luisant on the south along Maunoury Avenue, but lack of water made the fight impossible.

  Kenneth Foree, a prominent editor with the Dallas Morning News, would investigate Griffith’s death during the year following, and he interviewed General Walker and various corps headquarters officers and other witnesses. Foree would write in mid-1945 that “Young as colonels go, being only forty-three,” Griffith was

  a big, bulldog, driving fighter who had everything, said his associates, that could be expected of a West Pointer, [and who’d] proved a marked addition to the desert staff, became a training expert and had so much punch that at times he had to be held back. To him there was only one kind of soldier—one who gave everything he had.

  At Chartres Griffith gave everything he had.

  But two decades later, Reader’s Digest published in its August 1965 issue a story written by a renowned war correspondent, Gordon Gaskill, for its series of First-Person Articles (inviting “hitherto unpublished narrative” stories of “an unusual personal experience,” for which the magazine had awarded Gaskill one of its First Person Awards). In his story, “The Day We Saved Chartres Cathedral,” Gaskill claimed that he and his fellow correspondents in Chartres on August 16, 1944, had saved the cathedral by staring down a young trigger-happy artillery lieutenant.