The slow approach of the Allies made many Resistance leaders fear that the Germans would break them before the Americans and British could get close enough to give an uprising a reasonable chance of success. Others continued to worry about the risk of widespread famine if the Allies did not get to the city by the end of August. Some Parisians on the Left half-jokingly observed that if current operations proceeded at the pace of late June and early July, the Russians might even get to Paris before the Americans. Most Parisians failed to see the humor, although another joke at German expense spread through the city in the wake of Bagration. In this joke, four men are sitting at a dinner in Paris when one, obviously a German, asks another where he is from. The man replies that he is Polish, to which the German says, “Nonsense! Poland is now part of the German Empire, you are German.” He asks the third man where he is from. The man replies that he is Danish, to which the German says, “Nonsense! You are also now German.” He then turns to the last man, who says, “Well, I was raised in Paris, but since we are all Germans here, isn’t it a hell of a beating those Russians are giving us!” All jokes aside, given the threat that communism posed to the return of democracy in Europe, neither de Gaulle nor the Americans welcomed the idea of the French people looking to the Soviet Union as a viable postwar partner.32
Parisians in June and late July remained for the most part spectators to the great global dramas unfolding around them. Most remained obsessed by the daily need to find food for themselves and their families. A few found ways to show their patriotism, such as the old men who played patriotic French songs, or even a John Philip Sousa march remembered from World War I, in the corridors of Parisian Métro stations. “No French person,” Alice Moats noted, “passed without giving [them] some money.” Others wore the French national colors of blue, white, and red in some combination, but these were all silent, passive, and largely futile acts of resistance from a powerless citizenry. None of them posed even a remote threat to German control of the city.33
The communist Resistance leaders of the CPL found the inaction of Paris unacceptable. Praising the effort of the Soviets, they put up posters across the city urging Parisians to begin a major uprising on July 14, Bastille Day, the national holiday commemorating the French Revolution, which had been banned by Vichy. The French had not celebrated the holiday since 1939. Chaban and Parodi opposed the idea, saying that the insurrection was premature and would only result in needless bloodshed. Rol, too, was against it. Through his contacts in his intelligence network, Rol knew that the Allies were still hopelessly stuck in Normandy. He therefore also knew that an insurrection on July 14 was unlikely to succeed. Consequently, he did not lift the order to remain underground.
Rol may not have backed the plan for a July 14 uprising, but he had not given up the idea of a preemptive strike against the occupiers. He had told his men that in his mind a free Paris was worth 200,000 dead. If the Allies were not willing to make the sacrifice, perhaps the people of Paris would be.
3
BERLIN, WASHINGTON, LONDON, AND PARIS
“EVERYBODY, IT SEEMED, WANTED TO LIBERATE PARIS,” AMERICAN general Omar N. Bradley recalled after the war. “Everybody, that is, except me.” Bradley was the commander of the American First Army that landed on Omaha and Utah beaches on D-Day, a role that gave him tremendous influence over Allied operations in Europe thereafter. Because of his reputation for honesty and integrity, he had the trust not only of his former West Point classmate Dwight Eisenhower but of almost everyone in his command. More than anyone else except maybe Eisenhower, he represented American power and authority in France. And in his eyes Paris counted for almost nothing.1
Bradley, fifty-one at the time of the liberation, was not quite as alone in dismissing the strategic value of Paris as he later made it seem. The city did not figure highly on the list of priorities for almost anyone inside Eisenhower’s Allied headquarters in June and July 1944. While war correspondents wrote wistfully about the anticipated liberation of a city they had known and loved before the war, and while war-weary GIs dreamed of the luxuries that Paris might offer, serious strategists in the American command structure barely gave the city a second thought. Paris mattered even less to the British and the Canadians. To British general Sir Bernard Montgomery, commander of Allied ground forces in France, the city might as well have been on the other end of the earth as he cast his eyes toward the German V-1 launch sites on the English Channel that were threatening London and the large port at Antwerp, which was capable of supplying Allied armies deep into Germany.
Nor did Paris figure highly in German strategic thinking. The difficulties of defending the city against a determined attack led most German strategists to assume that any battle for northern France would need to be fought and won in Normandy, not in the Seine valley. German forces were not equipped or designed for urban fighting, which required a specialized kind of fighting at close quarters. Any battle for Paris, moreover, would take place among a hostile population and with tenuous supply lines that ran through areas vulnerable to attack by the French Resistance.
Ironically, the City of Light, whose liberation became such a symbol of freedom to the entire world, was an afterthought in the minds of most senior decision makers in the American, British, and German high commands. Nevertheless, leaders in all of the armies fighting in France would have to rethink the importance of Paris, in large part because of the actions of the Parisians themselves. As the British, Americans, and Germans came to learn, Paris was too important to be ignored.
For the strategists behind Operation Overlord, the code name for the Battle of Normandy, Paris was simply too far from Normandy to merit much attention. Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley, and the planners of the Normandy landings devoted most of their efforts to dealing with the immediate problems of how to land and sustain their infantry divisions on the French coastline. The major obstacles they identified were the neutralization of German air power over the beaches, the need to support the initial waves of Allied soldiers with heavy weapons, and the overwhelming problem of supplying hundreds of thousands of troops in the days that followed. The enormous stakes that were riding on Overlord understandably led them to focus most of their energies on the problems of the first few days of the landings. Paris, more than 150 miles of bombed-out roads away, did not figure into their thinking much at all. To the extent that it did, Paris was largely a problem for the Allied bomber commanders who hoped to neutralize its role as a German transportation hub.
Nor did the Allies have a clear sense of when they might be in a position to take the city. The original Overlord plans did not call for the Allies to be in Paris until mid-October, by which time they expected to have cleared the Île de France region around the city of all serious German opposition. Even that timetable struck many Allied strategists as overly optimistic. Winston Churchill, with his sharp political and historical eye, clearly understood the political and symbolic significance of the city. He nevertheless told Eisenhower before the landings that no one could reasonably ask any more of him if the Allies managed to liberate Paris before Christmas. Even Charles de Gaulle put thoughts of Paris to one side while he focused on establishing political control of Normandy once the Allied armies moved through.2
After the landings, when the Allies found themselves stuck near the beaches, the problem of Paris receded ever farther from the planners’ minds. To Eisenhower and the staff officers of his headquarters, Paris must have seemed a million miles away from Normandy. The immediate goal for the Allies remained the capture of ports like Cherbourg and Le Havre in order to supply Allied soldiers in France with the enormous quantities of arms, fuel, and other supplies that they needed. The fighting in the rough hedgerow country known as the bocage also occupied planners as they struggled to devise new ways to fight in unfamiliar terrain. The bocage featured sunken roads, thick earthen embankments, and dense hedges that surrounded the farms of Normandy. The hedges turned each bucolic corner of the French countryside into a small
fortress with excellent defensive cover. The nature of the fighting in the area caught Allied commanders badly by surprise. American and British officers, new to combat in northern France, had little experience fighting in anything like it. Remarkably, none of the one hundred junior officers involved in the Overlord operation and interviewed by a board of inquiry afterward had received any training at all for dealing with these challenges.3
Although the Allies were primarily concerned with the stalled offensive in Normandy, they had other strategic issues to consider as well. They were still fighting a frustrating and inconclusive war in Italy that devoured resources at an alarming rate. Eisenhower had to think not just about France, but about how to divide Allied resources across all of Europe. Allied headquarters were also in the process of planning an invasion of southern France (code-named Operation Anvil or Operation Dragoon), in part to gain control of the large Mediterranean ports of Toulon and Marseilles. Although southern France was far from Normandy and Paris, an invasion there, some of the planners hoped, would create a second French front for the Germans and open up badly needed alternative supply routes for a drive into Germany before winter complicated military operations.
Moreover, the south of France, especially the areas controlled by the rural maquis, offered much greater opportunity for coordination with the French Resistance than operations toward Paris did. Thanks to the efforts of Allied special operations personnel who spent time in the relatively safe countryside, the Allies had much better contacts with the maquis than they did with résistants in Paris. Thus, to the extent that planners were thinking about the French Resistance, they were thinking about building working relationships with groups in the south, such as those in Vercors that could contribute directly to the success of the landings in that area.
Given all of the demands on the time and energy of Allied planners, it is perhaps not surprising that they hardly thought about Paris at all. But while this lack of attention may be understandable, it later had dramatic consequences. The FFI lost confidence in the Allies and pledged to liberate the city themselves, if necessary without regard to the plans of Eisenhower, Bradley, Montgomery, or de Gaulle. American pilot Thomas Childers, hiding in the city until the Resistance could smuggle him to safety in Spain, saw firsthand how discouraging the slow Allied progress was to the FFI. Every night FFI agents listened to the BBC hoping to hear news of Allied progress, and every night “they muttered and swore as the program came to an end” with little good news to report. The communists both honored the Soviet Union and took a slap at the western Allies at the end of July in a poster that read, “We gratefully and enthusiastically salute the glorious Red Army and its chief, Marshal Stalin. The people of Paris will never forget that the Red Army crushed the German Army thanks to the heroic resistance of the people of Moscow in the dark days of 1941.” The Comité Parisien de Libération, calling itself the legal authority in the city, urged Parisians to be ready to fight and sacrifice as Moscow had. “The simple and sacred duty of all Parisians is to fight,” read one of its posters. “Paris liberated by Parisians will welcome the Allies.”4
Still, the Allies were in no hurry to be welcomed, especially not by the communists. Occupied by the landings and subsequent operations in Normandy, they preferred to postpone any discussion about the future of Paris and France until the military situation improved. Not without reason, moreover, they wanted to delay planning for military operations near Paris until they had a clearer picture of how the fighting in Normandy evolved. Even as that picture developed, however, Eisenhower and his staff stubbornly refused to think seriously about military operations in and around the city. When the need to do so suddenly arrived, Eisenhower, the consummate military planner, had to improvise a solution to the problem of liberating Paris.
Nor were the Americans and British ready to think seriously about the postwar political status of France, beyond the vague notion that the nation needed to be returned to the folds of democracy. De Gaulle wrote to a colleague in Algiers in mid-July that he was impressed by the American desire to win a total military victory over Germany, but that he also saw in the American political and military leaders “a great uncertainty in regards to finding a solution to postwar problems.” This uncertainty led the Allies to begin planning for the possible implementation of a postwar American military government. That such a government would only have stayed in place until the political situation within France stabilized itself did not, of course, make it any more popular with its intended subjects. The furious opposition to it by virtually all French political groups made it unlikely that the plan could succeed, a reality to which the Americans themselves gradually awakened. Without an alternative, the Allies had no real plan for governing France, and thus gave no political guidance to the Resistance. This lack of attention gave the various political interests in France room to maneuver—not least among them de Gaulle, who planned for his provisional government to become the legitimate authority in France the instant the Germans left. For his plan to work, however, he needed to be able to demonstrate to both the Allies and the French themselves that he had the support of his countrymen. He also needed to control Paris, his country’s capital and its clear center of power.5
De Gaulle’s relationship with the Americans remained as tense and unsettled as ever in the wake of the Normandy landings. President Roosevelt invited de Gaulle to come to the United States in early July, but de Gaulle initially refused because Roosevelt did not invite him in his capacity as the head of the French state. Nor did Roosevelt agree to reopen the French embassy under de Gaulle’s aegis. Only after the Americans agreed to recognize de Gaulle as the provisional head of civil authority in France did de Gaulle make the trip, spending July 6 to 10 in Washington and New York City. In his meetings with Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and other high-ranking American officials, de Gaulle stressed that Paris “was the center point of strategy and the heart of politics in France.” He also warned that “insurrection in the capital would surely tend towards setting up a power dominated by the Third International,” the international revolutionary movement begun by the Soviet Union to propagate communism.6
For their part, the Germans were not worried about a threat to Paris from communists, Americans, or the Resistance. If anything, the German high command in the west devoted even less serious strategic thinking to Paris than the Allies did. Before the landings, strategic debates inside the German high command had centered on the best way to defeat an Allied invasion of the European continent, albeit one whose exact place and time were necessarily unknown. Some German officers argued that given the strength of Allied air power, the only way to defeat the Allies was by throwing the invasion back into the sea. Once the Allies were ashore, their air and sea supremacy would ensure that the Germans stood no chance of winning. The Allied landings at Anzio earlier in the year seemed to prove the point. There the Germans proved temporarily capable of containing the Allied troops coming ashore but had no long-term answer for the awesome firepower of Allied battleships and airplanes. Thus, although the Germans had been able at first to contain the Allies to a large beachhead, eventually they broke through. The Germans used this line of thinking to justify building the Atlantic Wall across northern France, a complex network of coastal bunkers, gun emplacements, and other obstacles. A massive effort to stop the Allied landings on the beaches, its construction relied upon the forced labor of thousands of Frenchmen.
Other German commanders argued that because the Germans did not know when or where the Allies would land, the best strategy was to create a powerful mobile reserve that could react to a variety of contingencies. German intelligence officials thought that the Allies were most likely to target the Pas de Calais region because it offered good ports and the most direct route into Germany, but they could not be certain that Calais was where Eisenhower would aim his Schwerpunkt, or decisive blow. The Allies did their best to confuse the Germans with an elaborate series of deceptions and ruses. Those operations
may have helped to distract and mislead the Germans, but German commanders were still confident that they could defeat the Allies long before they threatened Paris. Given the poor performance of Allied amphibious operations in Italy, the Germans expected to have time to design counterattacks. The Germans therefore wanted their forces to be in a position to take advantage of the operational mistakes they expected the Allies to make. If the Americans and British advanced off the beaches too quickly, the Germans wanted to have infantry and armor ready to strike with enough combat power to deal the Allies a decisive defeat.
The Germans never did fully reconcile the differences in these two visions of how to defeat an Allied landing in France. To the extent that Paris was involved at all in their thinking, the Germans saw it as a critical supply and transportation node. Simply put, the Germans could not move sufficient numbers of men and supplies anywhere in northern France without control of Paris. The Île de France region contained more than one hundred bridges over the Seine and its tributaries as well as most of the main highways and railways in the region. The Germans needed Paris to remain as calm as it had been throughout most of the war in order to guarantee smooth logistical and transportation routes through the region. Consequently, they did not want to change the security situation in the city if they did not need to do so.
The Blood of Free Men Page 9
