Other gifts were offered as well. Just after arriving, war correspondent Vaughan-Thomas was sitting at an outdoor café, rhapsodizing about how the wine he was sipping reminded him of a beautiful woman, when he was suddenly confronted by “a large imposing lady followed by five charming girls.” It turned out she was the madame from the local maison de tolérance. Pointing to her girls, she said, “For you, the brave liberator.” When Vaughan-Thomas drew back, she quickly added, “Have no fear. My ladies have been patriotic. Only the one with crossed eyes slept with the Germans.”
While the Champagne Campaign never captured the public’s imagination as D-Day did, it did signal the first time, and probably the only time, that gastronomic considerations had a direct bearing on military planning. It was not by chance that French general Lucien de Monsabert, who helped plan the campaign, made sure that French troops advanced up the western side of the Rhône, where the best vineyards were planted. The Americans went up the other side, where the lesser growths were.
The French general later explained his strategy to Vaughan-Thomas. “Their job was vital,” said Monsabert of his American allies, “but the vinously minded historian will note that it did not take them near a single vineyard of quality. Now follow the advance of the French army. Swiftly they possessed themselves of Tavel, and after making sure that all was well with one of the finest vin rosés in France, struck fiercely for Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The Côte Rôtie fell to a well-planned flanking attack.”
Vaughan-Thomas captured the spirit of the Champagne Campaign in a delightful reminiscence entitled How I Liberated Burgundy. At one point, he described meeting an American officer who was clearly disturbed about something.
“Thomas,” he said, “you’re going back to see the Frogs this afternoon, I hear. Well, there’s a little problem that’s got us kinda worried. I’ve got a feeling that the Frogs are doing a little bit of a go-slow on us. I’ve a hunch that our friends are staying a bit too long in this place Chalon something or other.”
“Chalon something or other” was actually Chalon-sur-Saône, the southern gateway to the famous slopes of the Côte d’Or, or the Golden Escarpment, where Burgundy’s greatest vineyards lay. And the American officer was right; the French were doing a “go-slow” in order to avoid turning the vineyards into a battlefield.
“I need hardly tell you,” a French intelligence officer told Vaughan-Thomas later that day, “the terrible consequences of such a decision. It would mean war, mechanized war, among the grands crus! Would France forgive us if we allowed such a thing to happen? We must not forget 1870.” That was when one of the last battles of the Franco-Prussian War took place around Nuits-Saint-Georges as German troops swept through the vineyards of La Tâche, Romanée-Conti and Richebourg.
“This must never be allowed to happen again,” the officer said.
Moments later, a young officer burst in, hurriedly saluted and, with a smile illuminating his face, declared, “Great news, mon colonel, we have found the weak point in the German defenses. Every one is on a vineyard of inferior quality.”
General de Monsabert was quickly informed and the attack began. Within twenty-four hours, the Germans were “bundled out of Burgundy,” Vaughan-Thomas said. “A blown bridge here, a demolished house there, what could these matter beside the great overriding fact of the undamaged vineyards stretching mile after mile before us.”
Ten years later, Vaughan-Thomas wrote, “Time softens controversy and the history of distant wars grows mellow like ’49 Burgundy.” The controversy he was alluding to involved a gift the French military gave to their American allies as their drive up the Rhône reached its end.
To show their appreciation, the French decided to present the Americans with an assortment of the finest wines Burgundy had to offer. Vaughan-Thomas volunteered to help collect wine for the occasion, a mission that led him to at least twenty wine cellars and enabled him to fill his jeep with some of the rarest treasures of Burgundy. These he then handed over to the Americans.
“All of them? Let me be honest,” Vaughan-Thomas wrote. “Some of them, by an unaccountable chance of wartime transport, found their way to my cellar in the year after the war.” The rest, he dutifully surrendered to a young officer.
“These are the greatest wines of France,” he said. “Guard them with care; rest them; then make certain they are at room temperature before they are served.”
“Don’t worry,” the American replied. “The Doc knows all about this Frog liquor, and while we are about it, we’ll invite them over to drink it.”
The party took place in an eighteenth-century palace with the French guests advancing up a flight of stairs while the American command, as Vaughan-Thomas noted, “awaited them in a salon worthy of a reception for Madame de Pompadour.” As trumpets sounded, a column of waiters marched in bearing the bottles on silver trays. Immediately, Vaughan-Thomas sensed something was wrong. “My heart gave a warning thump—the bottles of Burgundy were bubbling gently. ‘We’re in luck,’ my American colonel whispered to me, ‘the Doc’s hotted up this stuff with medical alcohol!’ ”
As Vaughan-Thomas later described it, “A look of incredulous horror flickered over the faces of the French. All eyes were turned on General de Monsabert. He had led them through the deserts of North Africa and over the snow-clad mountains of Italy. Faced with the greatest crisis so far in Franco-American relations, how would he behave? He fixed his staff with the stern glare of command. ‘Gentlemen, take up your glasses.’ Reluctantly the French reached out their hands. ‘To our comrades in arms, les braves Américains,’ he ordered in a ringing tone. He drained his glass with panache—every drop. Then, in a quieter voice that only the nearest Frenchmen and myself could hear, he murmured, ‘Liberation, liberation, what crimes have been committed in thy name!’ ”
Despite that hiccup, there is no denying that the Champagne Campaign was one of the most successful operations of the war. Meeting only token resistance, the French and American armies moved faster up the Rhône Valley than anyone dreamed was possible. Along the way, they were aided by an unusual kind of early-warning system: if towns and villages were decorated with flowers and flags, and people were standing along the roadside holding out bottles of wine, they knew the Germans had fled and the way ahead was clear.
“Of course, we drank some very good wine, but not as much as we would have liked because we were pretty busy and moving quite fast,” Jean Miailhe said. A few months earlier, Jean had been making copper sulfate under the noses of the Germans. When Bordeaux was liberated, he joined the French army as it fought and imbibed its way up the Rhône. Sometimes people would invite Jean and his buddies into their cellars and uncork a few bottles they had hidden away. “One thing I remember was finding a lot of bad bottles with good labels,” Jean said. “This was the wine people had been passing off to the Germans. They saved the good stuff for us.”
During the night of September 6, Robert Drouhin was awakened by something he had not heard for days: silence. He, his mother and sisters had been spending most of their time in their wine cellar because of heavy bombing and shelling near Chalon-sur-Saône. That night, however, the bombing suddenly stopped. They all sat up on their mattresses on the floor of the cave and listened. There was no doubt about it. The bombing had ceased. When they verified that it was safe, the family emerged from the cellar and went upstairs to bed.
Around six o’clock in the morning, they were awakened again, this time by a different sound. Robert jumped from his bed, went to the window and peeked out. There, he saw an American jeep make a U-turn in the square in front of the church, then leave. A short time later, another vehicle arrived and soldiers got out. They were wearing American uniforms. Robert watched as they undid a large roll of white fabric on the paving stones and made a cross with it. The cross was a sign to let Allied planes know Beaune had been liberated.
It was the beginning of what Robert would later call “a day when everything was extraordinary.” Church bells began rin
ging as Beaune filled up with tanks and other military vehicles. People poured into the streets to celebrate what the local newspaper called “this blessed and magnificent hour of liberation. French and Allied flags bloomed from the windows. Long-hidden in the attics, they now came out to float on the wind of liberation.”
Bottles and barrels of wine also came floating out as residents toasted and cheered their liberators. The cheers, said one person, could be heard forty kilometers away.
“Beaune was liberated with American equipment and American chewing gum,” recalled Robert Drouhin. “It was a scène classique, like something out of the movies.”
Yet while celebrations were happening in one place, fighting was still going on in another. Mademoiselle Yvonne Tridon, secretary for the Syndicat des Négociants in Beaune, was dancing in the street with an American soldier when someone stopped and began berating her. “Aren’t you ashamed to be celebrating when people are still fighting?” the person asked. Tridon was taken by surprise. It had never occurred to her that the war was still going on.
Less than twenty kilometers to the north, German troops were trying to escape from the Château du Clos de Vougeot, a Burgundian landmark which they had seized at the beginning of the war to store their ammunition. They had loaded the ammunition on a train and were trying to get it back to Germany. A few hundred meters from the château, the Resistance opened fire on the train, setting off the ammunition it was carrying. The explosion blew the roof off the château, scattering its 200,000 ancient tiles over a three-acre area. The sound was heard all the way to Beaune.
But it was the sound of a quiet knock on the door that Robert Drouhin remembers most. He ran down the stairs to see who it was. Standing there was his father. Nine months after fleeing through his wine cellar to escape the Gestapo, Maurice Drouhin, who apparently had been hiding in the Hospices de Beaune, had come home.
“Hey, Al, get over here! We need you right away.”
Al Ricciuti, a boy from Baltimore and lifelong Orioles fan, was a translator in Patton’s Third Army. He had been drafted and landed on Utah Beach just after D-Day. Now he was participating in the liberation of France. His unit was bivouacked outside the Champagne village of Avenay-Val-d’Or, a town his father had marched through in World War I.
Al was planning to do some sightseeing and take a few pictures for his father, when his buddies suddenly hollered at him. He rushed over to see what they wanted. “These girls are trying to tell us something and we can’t understand a thing they’re saying.” There were three girls and they were all talking at once, and pointing back toward a house. Al, whose mother was French, listened and then explained, “These girls are sisters. They say they’ve hidden two U.S. airmen from a B-17 in their house.”
Al and the others followed the girls to their house to get the airmen who had been shot down. After the fliers had been taken to the American camp, Al went back to talk to the girls and their parents. They described how they had found the men and took care of them during the last days of the German occupation.
The Revoltes, a family of small champagne growers, invited Al to stay for dinner. Paulette, one of the daughters, took him on a tour of their vineyards. “We were lucky this time,” she told Al. “No real battles here, not like World War I, but we’re still worried.” Like many throughout Champagne, the Revoltes had heard that the Germans had planted dynamite in some of the cellars of the big champagne houses. Paulette wondered if it were true.
Al confessed he was not sure. He said the Germans had mined some of the bridges but did not have time to detonate them because Patton came in so fast. Patton, he said, laughing, would be very upset to see any champagne ruined. “He is a man with a terrific palate,” Al said. “He usually drinks the best whiskeys, but he loves champagne too, and he knows his stuff.”
Champagne, however, was something Al knew nothing about. He admitted he had never even tasted it. At dinner, the Revolte family made sure he could never say that again as they brought out the whole range of champagnes for him, from the sweetest to the driest. It proved to be a revelation to the young man from Baltimore, who had, until then, considered himself a beer man. “I tried some, and I thought, ‘Hey, this is for me.’ ”
But there was little time to savor it. Patton was moving swiftly, and the following morning the U.S. Third Army was on the march again. Paulette came to see Al off. “I’ll write,” he promised as they moved out.
When the Germans in Alsace realized how fast the Allies were moving, they began raiding the cellars of winegrowers. People including Georges Hugel watched in dismay as soldiers went from one cellar to another, loading as much wine as they could carry onto trucks and driving it to an airstrip outside Riquewihr. Some of the cargo was then transferred to airplanes, which began revving up their engines. The first plane lurched forward fifty meters, then came to a stop, as if someone had thrown out an anchor. None of the other planes, their engines groaning under the exertion, could take off either.
“Their planes were too light,” Georges said, “and they didn’t have enough fuel to take off fully loaded. Even the trucks were short of fuel, so, fortunately, most of our wine remained in the country.”
Alsace was the last part of France to be liberated, and it happened just as the harvest was getting under way.
“It was a huge harvest but also a sad one,” said Georges’s brother André. Their father, fearing arrest by the Gestapo, had gone into hiding, and their brother Johnny was still in the German army. Georges himself was still recuperating from the wounds he suffered in Russia and could get around only on crutches.
Bringing in the grapes was nearly impossible. Many vineyards had been sewn with antitank mines in anticipation of an Allied attack. There were also unexploded bombs that had been dropped by the Allies, a few of which went off when vineyard workers stepped on them. As grape picking got under way, Allied planes began attacking departing German convoys. Georges and André were bringing in a load of grapes when a plane, its machine guns firing, passed just yards over their heads. Georges pushed André down and fell beside him. Grapes and chunks of earth flew everywhere as bullets from the plane riddled the vineyard. When the two brothers got up, the first thing they saw was a German truck a short distance away in flames. Several German soldiers were killed.
When Georges and André returned home, their mother told them that a German officer had just been there. She said she had been reluctant to let him in, but he had insisted. “I have a message for you,” he told her. “Madame, you may tell your husband that it is safe to come home.” Fearing a trap, Madame Hugel replied that she did not understand what the officer was talking about and that, in any case, she had no idea where her husband was. The German smiled grimly. “Madame, you understood me perfectly. There is no longer any risk of him being arrested. The air is pure now. Everything here has changed.”
As the rumble of Allied artillery became louder, the Hugels and others huddled for protection in their wine cellars. On the night of December 3, mortar and artillery shells began landing in Riquewihr.
Two days later, the streets of Riquewihr were full of Texans, some in tanks, some herding German prisoners and others conducting house-to-house searches.
“We were stunned by how laid-back the Americans were and the absence of noise,” André Hugel said. “The sound of their rubber-soled boots was such a change from the hob-nailed boots the Germans wore.”
It was 7:30 in the morning when the Americans, part of the 36th Infantry Division, based near Houston, arrived. Grandpa Emile Hugel had awakened an hour earlier. When he realized Riquewihr had been liberated, he decided to put on his best suit to greet the Americans. As he was pulling on his pants, however, a nervous young GI looking for Germans burst into the room. At first, the nearly eighty-year-old Hugel, whose eyesight was weak, did not realize who it was, but his grandson André, who accompanied the soldier, quickly explained. The old man was so overjoyed that he rushed across the bedroom and threw his arms around the American.
As he did so, his pants dropped to the floor. The soldier was so startled that he leveled his gun at Hugel. The misunderstanding was quickly cleared up and the now impeccably dressed Emile soon joined the jubilant throngs outside.
The celebration was even more special for the Hugel family because Jean Hugel had emerged from hiding. He had been ensconced in a hotel in nearby Colmar, pretending to be one of the staff, when a friendly telephone operator called him and said, “Monsieur Hugel, you can quit hiding now. The Americans are here.”
Once he was back, he began doing a little horse trading, bartering wine for fuel, one jerry can of wine for two jerry cans of fuel. The Texans considered it a bargain. So did Jean, who now could drive his car and truck again.
A week after Riquewihr’s liberation, the Germans launched a counterattack to retake the town. As they raced through the village, the Texans fired at them from the windows of homes and buildings. Soon the cobblestone streets were filled with dead and wounded. Casualties were carried to the courtyard of the Hugels’ winery, which the Americans had converted to a first-aid station and morgue.
Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 21
