The Allied landings, which had inspired so much hope on June 6, had therefore made Paris an even more desperate and anxious place. Streams of alternatively bad news and good news arrived in the city constantly, adding to the fears and uncertainty so many felt. On June 18, Parisians learned of a massacre that had taken place a week earlier in the town of Oradur sur Glane, near Limoges. There, members of the 2nd SS Panzer Division had rounded up the town’s inhabitants into churches and barns then set those buildings on fire, burning 425 men, women, and children alive. Only 17 people survived. The Germans defended their actions by claiming that locals had thrown rocks at them, using this excuse to justify their decision not to punish a single German for the atrocity. The horrors of Oradur were too much even for the officials in Vichy, who demanded that the Germans at least apologize. One German general did go to Oradur to make amends; the local bishop told him, “God may forgive you, but France never will.”43
Oradur was far from the only place that suffered the wrath of the Nazis in the wake of the Normandy landings. At the end of July, the Germans landed glider planes filled with SS troops in Vercors, a southern stronghold of the rural maquis. The Allies had in fact dropped supplies into Vercors in July; tragically, though, these supply drops were enough to rouse the Germans into taking action without giving the maquisards sufficient arms to defend themselves. At the end of July, the Germans wiped out Vercors, killing 830 people amid atrocities that rivaled in brutality those committed at Oradur. The Allies ignored the final desperate pleas of the men and women in Vercors for more arms, reinforcing the view in Paris and elsewhere that the Resistance could not count on help from de Gaulle, the Americans, or the British. One of those final messages read, “If no aid [arrives] we and population will consider [the Free France government] criminal and cowardly.” The Allied abandonment of Vercors underscored to the FFI in Paris the dangers of rising against the Germans prematurely. Similarly, the Resistance, responding to the Allied landings in Normandy, managed to liberate the town of Tulle in central France for a few hours on June 7 and 8. The Germans responded by hanging ninety-nine people in the town square.44
Fierce fighting erupted in many places. St. Lô, Caen, and many other towns and cities suffered near total destruction. Some became sites of intentional German atrocities; others were simply caught in the middle. FFI commander Raymond Massiet was among those who saw in the fates of those towns, “caught mercilessly between two armies fighting on soil that was not theirs,” a terrible omen for Paris. The Germans had already shown themselves capable of committing mass atrocities in Oradur, Tulle, and Vercors. Other cities, like Stalingrad in southwestern Russia, which had been directly on the front lines in 1942–1943, had been completely destroyed. Parisians knew that their city sat at the edge of an abyss and that calamity was just as likely as liberation. One resident noted that “the Paris air is more highly charged with menace than at any time since the French Revolution. Invasion, civil war, siege, famine, prison—whatever the future may take—Parisians are ominously expecting the deadliest phase of the war.”45
Before she left Paris, Moats talked to an FFI member about the future that awaited Paris. He compared Paris, and France more generally, to a woman in labor: “At the moment . . . she doesn’t say to herself ‘This is going to be a boy, and I shall educate him to be an engineer.’ All she can think of is getting rid of the burden she has carried for so many months and having the pain stop.” If the pain did not stop soon, he feared, Paris itself might die from the labor it was then suffering. Another Parisian later recalled, “We just could not go on any longer. There was absolutely nothing left. We had thought we had reached the end so many times, yet the finish line kept on moving further back.” With its population depleted both physically and psychologically, the city seemed close to the breaking point. As a symptom of this decline, street violence also began to increase.
While most of Paris was engaged in a desperate struggle for survival, a small but determined band of Parisians planned and prepared to move that finish line forward. They hoped not just to end the German occupation, but to settle old scores and give France a future of security and safety from enemies inside and out. The Resistance had waited for years for this moment and now would attempt to seize it.46
2
RESISTANCE
IN OCTOBER 1941, A HANDSOME FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD MAN arrived in London to meet with Charles de Gaulle. With the help of British agents, de Gaulle’s visitor had managed to travel from Marseilles to Barcelona to Lisbon, with the original intention of going to America. While living in Lisbon, he had used fake names and changed residences frequently, trying to avoid both German agents and the Portuguese police. He had also begun to write down his observations of the nascent Resistance movement developing in France. The British agents with whom he worked in Lisbon read those notes and, convinced that he was too valuable to leave Europe, insisted that he go instead to London. When he met de Gaulle for the first time, the charismatic fugitive was wearing the silk scarf around his neck that soon became his trademark. It hid a telltale scar that resulted from a failed suicide attempt following his torture at the hands of France’s new German masters.
The man’s name was Jean Moulin, and just a year earlier he had been the youngest prefect in France and a fast-rising star in French politics. Now he had arrived in England with news for de Gaulle that promised to transform the nature of French resistance to the Nazis and Vichy. Moulin had already showed a deep reservoir of courage. After the German takeover of Chartres, the city outside Paris where he was based, Moulin had refused to sign a Nazi document that falsely blamed Senegalese soldiers in the French Army for the deaths of civilians that had obviously resulted from German artillery. For his refusal, the Germans tortured him, only reaffirming in his mind the necessity of opposing the new regime and its vicious racism. After his failed suicide attempt, the Germans, figuring that he had learned his lesson, released him, but they refused him permission to return to Chartres. With the help of an American consul in Marseilles, he boarded a train for Barcelona under an assumed name. Then, finding Francisco Franco’s Spain too dangerous, he carefully made his way to the British embassy in Lisbon.
It took Moulin almost six weeks to convince British diplomats to put him on a plane to London, probably because the information he wanted to bring to de Gaulle seemed too fantastic to be believed. When at last they met, Moulin told de Gaulle that he had spoken to the leaders of three different Resistance groups in France and they had given him authorization to speak on their behalf. They were willing, Moulin said, to swear their allegiance to de Gaulle and join his movement. The Free France movement in London and the French Resistance in France itself now had their first true linkage. Despite his discomfort with Moulin’s socialist politics, de Gaulle immediately saw the value in Moulin’s offer of alliance. He gave him the title of delegate-general to the occupied territories, making him a kind of ambassador to the various Resistance groups within France. Knowing that Moulin’s politics and his heroism gave him a legitimacy in the eyes of French socialists and communists that he himself did not have, de Gaulle assigned Moulin to fuse together the various elements of the French Resistance and, more importantly, to find a way to tie them to the movement de Gaulle was building in London.1
De Gaulle badly needed Moulin because his own support inside France was thin. Before the war, de Gaulle had been a tank commander and undersecretary of defense who had made a name in French military circles by criticizing the Maginot Line and advocating the development of a modern mechanized army. Well known, but far from universally admired, inside the French Army for his prewar critiques, he was almost completely unknown to those outside the army. Having led well in the early battles of the war, he had left France in a British airplane on June 17, 1940, rather than accept the armistice that Pétain had signed with Germany. The following day, de Gaulle tried to rally his countrymen with an appeal broadcast over BBC Radio. He said, in part:Believe me, I who am speaking to you with full k
nowledge of the facts, and who tells you that nothing is lost for France. The same means that overcame us can bring us victory one day. For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone! She has a vast Em- pire behind her. She can align with the British Empire that holds the sea and continues the fight. She can, like England, use without limit the immense industry of the United States.
This war is not limited to the unfortunate territory of our country. This war is not over as a result of the Battle of France. This war is a worldwide war. All the mistakes, all the delays, all the suffering, do not alter the fact that there are, in the world, all the means necessary to crush our enemies one day. Vanquished today by mechanical force, in the future we will be able to over- come by a superior mechanical force. The fate of the world depends on it.
The appeal of 18 June, touted as the start of the Resistance movement that eventually led to the liberation of France under de Gaulle’s leadership, became an important part of the Gaullist legend. According to this legend, de Gaulle, France’s man of destiny, had divined the general outlines of the next four years of war and had developed a strategy for leading his countrymen to victory. After the war, the French government printed copies on metal placards and affixed them to public buildings across the country to remind Frenchmen of this historic moment. De Gaulle’s words also appear on a tablet under the Arc de Triomphe as a testimony to his foresight during his country’s darkest hour.
The acclaim came later. In 1940 de Gaulle was virtually alone in London with his small handful of supporters. His words did inspire some, such as Agnès Humbert, a courageous woman who helped to form Paris’s first major Resistance cell before her arrest and deportation to a German labor camp. Although she did not know who de Gaulle was, she listened carefully to the “jerky and peremptory” broadcast that moved her to chase away the thoughts of suicide plaguing her mind. Even by the end of the broadcast she still did not know who the voice belonged to, but the words had deeply moved her. “I feel I have come back to life,” she wrote. “A feeling I thought had died forever stirs within me again: hope. There is one man after all—one alone, perhaps—who understands what I feel in my heart: ‘It’s not over yet.’” Days later she marveled at having been so inspired by a man whose photograph she had never seen and who was being dismissed by most Parisians as some kind of crackpot.2
The British put so little faith in de Gaulle that they did not even bother to record the appeal, which happened to fall on the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, an unfortunate omen for Franco-British cooperation. Rather than rally to de Gaulle, most of France came to terms with the new collaborationist regime under Pétain. Thousands of French soldiers who had been evacuated as part of the Dunkirk operation, who might have formed the core of a Free French Army based in Britain, instead went back to France under an amnesty provided for in the armistice. Known as “de Gaulle le Seul” (de Gaulle the Lonely), the self-styled leader of Free France was then little more than another defeated soldier in a humbled army. He was in fact the most junior general in the French Army, having been promoted just before the armistice. Sentenced to death in absentia by a Vichy court for treason, de Gaulle also saw his property seized by the Vichy state. He was literally a man without a country.
The only resources de Gaulle had in 1940 were a dedication to a vision of a France cleansed of its occupiers and a relationship, however tenuous, with the British government. He certainly did not hold much influence with his hosts. Although he was a determined enemy of Germany and Vichy, and the British could have used him for propaganda purposes, de Gaulle had no real power and little influence outside his small circle of followers. He struggled in vain to get the British, and later the Americans, to recognize and empower him as a leader of Free France, which was then still much more a vague idea than a political entity. The Americans infuriated him by refusing to allow Free France to open an embassy in Washington, choosing instead to exchange ambassadors with Vichy. Not seeing him as a leader in exile or a military commander in anything but a nominal sense, both the British and the Americans largely kept him in the dark on matters pertaining to France. Nor did they seek his advice.
Both Roosevelt and Churchill mistrusted de Gaulle’s ambitions and disliked his arrogance. Acting as if he were the legitimate head of the government of France in exile, de Gaulle had a way of infuriating the same people on whose support he so deeply depended. In return, the Allies infuriated de Gaulle by, for example, landing troops in Madagascar (then part of the French empire) without informing him and, worse still, retaining the pro-Vichy governor there rather than replacing him with a representative of Free France. Later, they invited de Gaulle to attend the Casablanca conference, which, held in the nominal French protectorate of Morocco, de Gaulle felt he should have hosted. He almost refused to attend because of the slight he felt to his, and to France’s, honor. The relationship between de Gaulle and the Allies improved over time and became functional, but it was never warm. At one point, de Gaulle threatened to move his headquarters to Moscow; at another, Churchill threatened to send the obstinate Frenchman to Algiers—“in chains if necessary”—to get him out of London.3
Moreover, de Gaulle was not the only French leader trying to gain recognition as the face of opposition to the Germans. General Henri Giraud, who had led a French Army Group before being captured by the Germans in 1940, also sought the mantle of leadership for Free France. In April 1942, a group of right-wing but anti-German (and also anti–de Gaulle) army officers from a prewar paramilitary group known as the “Cagoule” sent French commandos into Germany to free the sixty-three-year-old Giraud from the prison at Koenigstein. Giraud scaled down a 350-foot cliff to escape the hilltop fortress and dodged German assassins all the way to Algiers. He briefly became a folk hero for this daring exploit and the obvious embarrassment it caused the Germans. Hoping to lead the new state’s army, he came to Vichy, but his presence there proved to be too politically charged for Laval and Pétain. They could neither allow him to remain in Vichy nor turn him back to the Germans. Giraud refused to go to London despite British attempts to lure him there, largely out of his disgust for de Gaulle, whom he saw as a disobedient subordinate. Eventually he decided to go back to Algeria.
Despite Giraud’s right-wing politics and his close personal and political connections to Pétain, the Americans initially saw him as a viable alternative to the difficult and ambitious de Gaulle. The need for a reliable partner increased after the Allies landed in North Africa, because the Americans hoped to turn civil administration over to French officials as quickly as possible. President Roosevelt and General Eisenhower, who came to think of Giraud as a friend, both much preferred to work with Giraud instead of de Gaulle. They got their chance when a monarchist French student assassinated Admiral Jean Darlan, the head of Vichy’s armed forces, during a visit to Algiers to see his ailing son. The Americans had been working with Darlan, much to de Gaulle’s ire, but they disliked him even more than they disliked de Gaulle. Needing a Frenchman with whom they could work, the Americans named Giraud as Darlan’s replacement and gave him authority over the civil and military affairs of the French colonies in North Africa.
Giraud proved to be a disappointment. His ultraconservative politics and disdain toward democracy offended both the Allies and the French people whom he would need to inspire. He also refused to repeal the anti-Semitic laws Vichy had put in place in North Africa and demanded the right to command all Allied forces, including British and American forces, deployed anywhere in the French empire. His views on the conduct of modern war, moreover, resembled “a sort of strategic delirium,” according to one of his own intelligence liaisons to Allied headquarters. Whatever courage he had displayed as a soldier, he was obviously unsuited to the world of politics and civil government. His feuds with de Gaulle only intensified as the two men postured for control over the nascent Free France movement.4
Still, the Americans needed French allies, and they wanted above all to avoid a wasteful powe
r struggle that could tear apart the small but growing Free French movement. In early 1943, under American pressure, de Gaulle and Giraud reached a compromise. Giraud agreed to serve as a copresident alongside de Gaulle, even though the animosity between the two men had intensified. The Americans insisted on the arrangement, which they cemented with an awkward handshake in front of cameras at the Casablanca conference in January. The plan to share power never stood a chance of success, and de Gaulle soon proved to be the more skilled operator of the two, slowly edging his rival out of the political picture. Giraud eventually tired of the infighting and the politics and went back to a field command instead. He led the liberation of Corsica in September, then disappeared from the picture altogether. Thereafter, de Gaulle became the unquestioned leader of Free France. The Americans and the British would need to work with him whether they liked it or not.
Neither de Gaulle, based in London, nor Giraud, based largely in North Africa, had much impact in Paris. Neither had any power to change conditions on the ground in the capital, and neither could provide material support to those who wanted to lead a Resistance movement. Nor was it obvious, as late as 1943, that de Gaulle even wanted to help establish a major Resistance movement inside France. In part, de Gaulle feared such a movement would develop into a rival that could challenge his own claims to speak for and lead France. As a professional officer, de Gaulle also tended to discount the military value of civilians in arms, especially lightly armed civilians trying to fight the most powerful army in the world. He much preferred to liberate France with a regular military force armed with planes and tanks and led by skilled professionals like himself.
De Gaulle also recognized that the various Resistance groups did not form a single, unified movement. Coming from diverse political backgrounds and necessarily operating under the strictest security, they had few links between them. They also lacked common goals, other than the obvious one of getting the Germans out of France and the collaborators out of power. Some were communist based; others, like those who supported Giraud, favored the restoration of the French monarchy or the imposition of an authoritarian form of government. In mid-May 1943, there were no fewer than sixteen Resistance groups operating in Paris, and de Gaulle only had tenuous links to a few of them.
The Blood of Free Men Page 6
