Rising up in Normandy, where confusion reigned and FFI members could melt into the countryside, was easier than rising up in Paris, which was honeycombed with informers. French agents also ran risks if they tried to move around Paris without proper papers. Nevertheless, many members of the Resistance tried to organize an uprising inside the city. The Comité Parisien de la Libération (CPL), a communist-dominated Resistance group headed by a thirty-one-year-old artisan, labor organizer, and lifelong resident of Paris named André Tollet, ordered its men into action on June 8. Tollet, who had survived fifteen months in a German prison before escaping in June 1942, was one of the many tough, determined communist leaders of the Resistance who both gave the movement its energy and terrified the opponents of communism in Paris, London, and Washington. From him came an order, plastered overnight on kiosks and walls across Paris, that read:The landing of the Allies, so long desired by the population of Paris, has occurred. . . . Sabotage, destroy, or burn anything that can be of use to the enemy. Disrupt his transportation and his production. Paris, capital of combat and capital of insurrection, Paris, capital of liberty, must have the full mobilization of its people.10
The CPL thus represented a way to organize the working class of Paris—but a working class aligned with communism could be a new potential rival as well as a potential weapon. Consequently, Allied agents tried to have little to do with the CPL and its followers.
Good news seemed to follow in the first few days and weeks after the landings. Word quickly spread throughout Paris that Charles de Gaulle had arrived in Bayeux to a rapturous welcome. The leader of Free France, operating as the head of a Provisional Government of the Republic of France, was on French soil. At least a small part of France was back under French control. Parisians also knew that an elite Free French naval commando unit had landed in the first wave of the D-Day assault and had participated in the liberation of the town of Ouistreham on the eastern edge of the Allied lodgment area. It hardly mattered to most Parisians that the unit was small or that its overall contribution to the events of June 6 was minimal. The unit’s appearance meant that French soldiers were fighting the Germans inside France.
But, as Charles Braibant and many others had correctly guessed, the people of Paris would have to wait for the Allied landings to have a positive impact on them. Although the Allies had overcome stiff resistance in places and had liberated the beautiful medieval town of Bayeux within a few hours, the Normandy landings had not been a complete success. The five Allied landing forces did not achieve the linkage envisioned for the first day, meaning that critical gaps existed between them that the Germans might be able to exploit. More importantly, the vital rail and road juncture of Caen, a target for day one of the operation, remained in German hands until July 18.
Parisians quietly tried to learn as much as they could. They emptied bookstores of maps of Normandy and followed the progress of the Allies as closely as they could. Real news was often hard to come by, forcing Parisians to sort out rumor and propaganda from fact, all the while wondering if the Allied forces moving slowly across Normandy would reach Paris in the near future or if they would stall as the Allied advance into Italy had done. Some also recalled the failed Allied raid on Dieppe in August 1942, which cost the Allies 3,600 casualties but did nothing to change the situation in France. They feared that the landings might in the end be nothing more than a repeat of that disaster on a far larger scale. If the landings should fail, moreover, the Allies might not be in a position to try again for several years.11
The BBC and Radio Rome kept Parisians reasonably well informed, as did the informal grapevines and rumor networks that ran through the city. Anyone who could get near a radio and had a means to power it tuned in, hoping to learn what the Allies were saying about the latest events. Listening to the BBC and Radio Rome was illegal but widespread nevertheless. Every night at 9, the BBC broadcast in French. The thirty minutes of news and entertainment included coded messages to the French Resistance as well as a nightly address from Charles de Gaulle. The BBC made de Gaulle something more than just a name; his voice was a nightly reminder to France that an alternative to Pétain and Vichy existed. So many people were listening to the BBC that a grim joke circulated around Paris that a Jew had killed a German soldier and eaten his heart at 9:20 p.m. “Impossible for three reasons,” ran the punch line: “A German has no heart. A Jew eats no pork. And at 9:20 everyone is listening to the BBC.”12
Largely because of the BBC’s nightly updates, the journals and letters of Parisians from these weeks show a remarkably accurate picture of the overall military situation despite the torrent of lies and misinformation that the Germans and Vichy authorities released. Not all of the news was good. The slow Allied advance off the beaches led Charles Braibant to wonder if the landings, rather than being the start of a liberation that “had filled our hearts with hope,” instead were “a new Anzio,” a reference to the frustrating Allied landings south of Rome that had stalled on the beaches from January to May. A repeat of that disaster might delay liberation for months.
Parisians also learned, with mixed emotions, that the Allies had turned their main effort toward the major port city of Cherbourg on June 20. The obvious value of seizing one of the largest ports on the English Channel was evident to all—to Braibant it represented “an enormous step on the road to victory”—but it also meant that the Allies were moving their strategic axis west and therefore away from Paris. Allied progress through the rough hedgerow country that began just inside the coast was painfully slow, forcing the Allies to regroup and rethink their operations and tactics. Supply also remained a problem. Allied inability to capture Cherbourg until June 27 (giving the Germans enough time to do serious damage to its facilities), combined with a storm that destroyed one of the two artificial ports custom-designed for the operation, caused massive logistical problems that continued to haunt the Allies until the end of the war. A lack of supplies and reinforcements and the slow progress through the hedgerows worried not only anxious people in Paris but the officers in Eisenhower’s headquarters as well.13
While Allied operations in Normandy slowed, the Germans reacted savagely to the newfound threat, rounding up any Parisian they suspected of having been involved in resistance activities since the landings. Increased German surveillance sent Resistance leaders in the city even farther underground. The Germans arrested hundreds of men, many of them, the young Gilles Perrault noted, for no crime other than being “caught outside the cinema without papers.” Many such men disappeared into prisons like Fresnes or onto trucks bound for prisons or work camps in Germany.14
The slow pace of the Allied advance thus had direct implications for the members of the FFI in and around Paris who were bearing the lion’s share of the fighting. Just a few days after the landings, Koenig reluctantly ordered an end to FFI sabotage activity because the Allies were still stuck near the beaches; any further sabotage outside the battle area, he felt, only risked exposure and death for FFI agents. His telegram of June 10 read:PUT MAXIMUM BRAKE ON GUERRILLA ACTIONS STOP CURRENTLY IMPOSSIBLE TO SUPPLY ARMS AND AMMUNITION IN SUFFICIENT QUANTITIES STOP WHEREVER POSSIBLE BREAK OFF ATTACKS TO ALLOW REORGANIZATION STOP AVOID LARGE GROUPINGS FORM SMALL ISOLATED GROUPS
Although the order made tactical sense, it alienated members of the FFI inside France who had risked their lives for what they believed was a final fight to the finish for the liberation of France. One FFI leader compared it to the surrender of 1940; another warned that it would lead to mass arrests of French Resistance agents. The order created mistrust between the FFI in France and its nominal chiefs in London.15
While the Allies stalled, the Germans and their Vichy allies increased the repression and harassment of résistants. On June 21 came news of the German killing of thirty young unarmed Parisians in cold blood, their bodies left near the waterfall in the Bois de Boulogne. They had been looking for weapons to purchase but had been betrayed and led to their deaths by a Frenchman they trusted, who w
as in fact on the payroll of the Gestapo. Because of this and other crackdowns, Parisians quickly retreated back into the scared silence that had marked the city and its inhabitants for four long years; it was the same silence that had led its German occupiers to give Paris the nickname “the city that never looks back.”16
Parisians had to deal with much more than just increased vigilance on the part of the Germans. The air attacks that so terrified Parisians before June 6 intensified as the Allies sought all possible means to help get their troops out of the Normandy beachhead. The attacks, part of the Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive, aimed to cripple Germany’s ability to move men and supplies through northern France. Since 1943 the bomber offensive had been striking industrial targets in Europe and forcing German fighters to engage Allied fighters on Allied terms. Because Paris was both the vital center of all communications in northern France and the node through which the vast majority of German rail and road traffic passed, the city was a prime target of this campaign. From a strategic perspective, the transportation network of Paris and its suburbs was the single most important military asset of the capital. Eisenhower’s staff estimated that each of the 59 German divisions in France needed 350 tons of supplies per day plus the operational mobility that the railroads gave them. The airmen concluded that destroying 80 to 90 percent of the French rail network would immobilize those divisions and render them militarily ineffective.
In the months prior to the landings, therefore, Eisenhower ordered his air forces to reduce the amount of bomb tonnage they were dropping on German industry and increase the tonnage of bombs dropped on the French transportation network, especially on the giant roundhouse that Paris represented. The damage to factories caused by an air raid against industrial targets and marshaling yards in the Paris suburb of Trappes in early March inspired confidence in Allied air commanders, who had long believed that air power alone might bring Germany to its knees. Although some of them were reluctant to slow the bombardment of German industry, others saw a chance for air power to make a direct contribution to the success of the cross-channel invasion. Eisenhower, also impressed by the results of the Trappes raid, made the French railway network a high priority for Allied bombers from April to June.17
Given the notorious inaccuracy of aerial bombardment, the so-called Transportation Plan faced enormous odds. The partial success at Trappes did not change the estimates of British analysts who thought that the goal of destroying 90 percent of the French rail network was absurdly optimistic; they estimated that, at best, aerial interdiction could disrupt 30 percent of German supplies, not nearly enough to debilitate enemy operations in Normandy. The Allies nevertheless increased the bombings, dropping more than 500,000 tons of bombs on France in 1943 and 1944. The damage that these operations inflicted was often far less than the airmen had promised, and the Germans more than made good their losses of rolling stock by seizing almost 60 percent of French rolling stock.18
Most of the important French rail yards and stations, of course, were located in urban areas, presenting a conundrum to Allied planners. Paris, the unquestioned center of the French rail system, had eight large stations and a number of smaller substations as well as important stations in the suburbs. Many of these stations were dedicated to moving heavy cargo and equipment and were obvious targets for air operations. The British and Americans, however, were well aware that the Transportation Plan involved bombing not an enemy country, but an occupied nation that they were hoping to liberate. Some of the planners agonized over the estimated 160,000 French casualties to be expected (half of whom they guessed would be fatalities), not to mention the immense damage the bombing would cause to the very same rail network that they would prefer to maintain in order to feed and supply France in the first winter after the liberation. Churchill and the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, also worried that the air campaign—which they described as “criminal” and “murderous”— would give German and Vichy propagandists enough material to turn the French against their liberators, not just during the war but for years thereafter.
Eisenhower, while hoping to spare the city by prohibiting the use of incendiary bombs and promising to do “everything possible to avoid loss of life among our friends,” nevertheless criticized as “sheer folly” any objections that might reduce the Normandy campaign’s chance of success. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, a senior British strategist, dismissed concerns about French civilian casualties as “sob stuff about children with legs blown off and blinded old ladies” that he believed was insignificant when compared to “the saving of risk to our young soldiers landing on a hostile shore.” President Roosevelt, to whom Churchill also appealed, refused to second-guess his military commander. Consequently, Churchill got nothing more for his efforts than an empty promise from the air force commanders that they would take greater care in aiming their bombs around Paris. Given the inability of air forces to drop their bombs with anything that remotely approached accuracy, this promise accounted for precious little.19
Thus the bombs kept falling on Paris and across northern France. And they kept killing. German soldiers, who had access to solid shelters, rarely suffered, but the French people suffered terribly. Allied bombardments killed 67,078 French citizens in all, 35,317 of them in 1944 alone. One raid, on May 30, killed 5,358 Frenchmen, wounded 7,075 more, and left thousands of men, women, and children homeless. Even when the Americans tried to reduce casualties, people still died needlessly, often because of the inherent inaccuracy of aerial bombardment. One raid, aimed at the Paris suburbs of St. Cloud and Sèvres, attacked factories on a Sunday. The commanders had hoped to damage the buildings without killing the workers. But the bombs missed their targets, killing 380 and wounding 446; it was a beautiful spring day, and many of these people had been out for a walk in a nearby park. Another raid in April destroyed the city’s main Red Cross warehouse along with its irreplaceable stores of badly needed medical supplies. Each air raid warning (six on the night of May 28, three more on the night of May 29) kept the city on a razor’s edge and suggested momentous events in the days ahead. The raids also filled Paris’s badly stretched hospitals, leading Jacques Bardoux to wonder “if the military advantages can possibly compensate for their political and moral effects.”20
Allied air strategists, many of whom were contemptuous of French military performance in 1940, thought little of France’s suffering. Concerned with minimizing their own casualties, they saw the air campaign as a legitimate form of warfare even if civilians died. For Parisians, however, the raids seemed a terrible price for people already suffering under German occupation. They left even dedicated résistants furious at what they called the “criminal imbecility” of a policy that killed Frenchmen by the hundreds and thousands but rarely did even moderate damage to German positions. Some on the French Left even wondered if the attacks were part of a larger plan to destroy French industry in order to render it incapable of competing with the British and Americans after the war. André Tollet and others in the Communist Party were stupefied and infuriated at the Allied willingness to drop bombs by the ton on innocent civilians, while simultaneously refusing to drop badly needed weapons to the Resistance from those same airplanes for fear of the weapons ending up in German or communist hands.21
The bombings were foremost on the minds of the Frenchmen who talked to the courageous American journalist Alice Moats shortly before the Normandy landings. Based in Madrid for much of the war and tired of hearing about the situation in France from people who had not been there since 1940, she snuck across the Pyrenees on foot and caught a train into Paris, arriving in April 1944. She stayed for a remarkable three weeks before she decided it was too dangerous to remain any longer, but in that time she saw just how badly the Transportation Plan had failed. The Germans, she found, were able to rebuild rail yards almost as quickly as Allied planes destroyed them. Meanwhile, the people of Paris continued to suffer from both the direct and indirect effects of the bombings. Neither the German
s nor the collaborationist government of the city of Paris provided any aid to those rendered homeless or unemployed by the bombings. On her arrival in Paris, Moats went to the scene of a raid in the La Chapelle neighborhood (near the rail yards of the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est) that had killed 565 people a few weeks earlier. Residents were still digging bodies out of the rubble, and the locals she saw all wore “the same dazed look of suffering.”22
Parisians tried to understand the bombings as a tragic but necessary prelude to their freedom, but the slow Allied progress across Normandy made it harder and harder for them to see any direct connection between their immediate suffering and their eventual liberation. One Frenchman told Moats, “What a terrible thing it is, Madame, to be slaughtered by the very people who are coming to liberate us,” although he believed that Parisians would quickly forgive the Allies if they liberated the city soon. Some, however, feared that there might not be anything left to liberate if the bombing campaign continued. The expatriate English journalist Sisley Huddleston undertook a dangerous trip from his home in the south of France to Paris because he wanted to see the city he loved one last time before, he feared, Allied bombers destroyed it as they had already destroyed Hamburg, Cologne, and Rouen. Jacques Bardoux was also fearful about what might happen if the Allies did not arrive quickly, writing in his journal, “We ask ourselves anxiously what will be left of France if the Anglo-Americans only reconquer it meter by meter all the way to Lorraine!” Bardoux talked with other members of the French Senate of 1940 about ways of appealing to the Americans and the British to warn them that the air attacks were “radicalizing” public opinion against the Allies; they also discussed asking the Vatican to step in and demand that the Allies stop the attacks on humanitarian grounds.23
The Blood of Free Men Page 4
