The Allied landings in Normandy posed no immediate threat to German control of the Île de France. The commander of the Greater Paris Military District, Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Boineburg, had even excluded the capital region from the original alert order on June 6. He had seen no reason to risk a panic among either the city’s residents or its German garrisons. The Paris district had approximately 30,000 German soldiers divided into three sectors: the northwest sector, with 10,000 men; the southeastern sector, with 8,000 men; and the St. Cloud sector, with 12,000 men, located just west of the city. The most powerful German unit in the area was the 325th Security Division, composed of four regiments and belonging to the St. Cloud sector. Boineburg dedicated one of those regiments to patrolling the ceinture, the beltway that rings Paris, and the Paris district lost another regiment to security duty in Normandy in June, leaving just half of the 325th dedicated to the security of Paris itself.
Because most of the German combat power was needed in Normandy, arms and equipment were also in short supply for the troops in the Île de France. The troops in the Paris district were armed mostly with light weapons such as rifles and pistols. Heavy armament was almost completely lacking: Greater Paris had just 14 tanks, mostly former French tanks and obsolete Panther 1s. The demands of the Normandy effort put other strains on the city’s defenders as well. Troops rotated in and out of Paris frequently, making training and unit cooperation almost impossible to develop. Perhaps most alarmingly, a disproportionate number of men in the Paris garrison were non-Germans, including large numbers of Alsatians and Poles, whose reliability and willingness to fight for the Nazis their German commanders had good reason to doubt.7
Given this disposition of forces, Boineburg knew that he could not hold Paris against a determined attack from the outside. Nor was he expected to do so. Rather, he understood his mission to be the “maintenance of peace, security, and order” in Paris so that the Germans could continue to use the roads, bridges, rail lines, and canals that Allied aircraft had not destroyed.8
Given the massive problems he faced, Boineburg knew that he lacked the resources to defend the city against a determined attack should the Allies attempt one. The German defensive lines, as Wehrmacht officer Kurt Hold knew, “could not possibly suffice for a successful defense of Paris.” Their units were too small and too widely dispersed to offer mutual assistance and protection. Nor did the Germans have any answer to the increasing power of Allied air forces. For more than four years the Germans had had no reason to think about the defense of Paris from an outside attack. In the circumstances of June 1944, there was precious little time and too few resources to develop a new strategy. If the Allies got close to Paris, Boineburg believed, they would have little trouble taking it.9
But if the Germans lacked the confidence to hold Paris from the outside, they still expected to be able to maintain its internal security. Kurt Hesse, a senior officer in the German First Army, was dismayed by the resources available for the security of Paris. He thought that the units assigned to defend German positions inside Paris were weak, “significantly smaller than . . . an active division,” and filled with second- and third-rate soldiers who were “only conditionally suitable for fighting purposes.” Hesse judged that the only serious internal threat came from the French Resistance, but he counted on their lack of weapons and severe internal divisions to keep them from becoming too big a threat. Like many German officers, he had greatly underestimated the military potential of the Resistance and had grown complacent in a city where active opposition to German authority had been a rare phenomenon.
The German authorities in Paris also knew that they could depend on the notorious brutality of the paramilitary forces in the city to maintain order. Even if the Paris police were proving to be less and less reliable, and even if more and more of the German Army’s regular units were being transferred to the fighting fronts, especially as the demands of combat in Normandy increased, the Germans could still use the SS, the Gestapo, and the paramilitary Vichy Milice to keep order in the city. As the internal security of Paris increasingly became the responsibility of the paramilitary units, their brutality increased as well. By July there were 10,000 political prisoners in Parisian jails, more and more of whom the Germans were deporting or executing without even the formality of pressing charges. German officials remained confident that these methods could ensure internal security against the Resistance, which they presumed was poorly armed and poorly organized. Still believing that their main job was to keep the Parisian lines of communication open for German activity, they downplayed the need for a large regular army presence in the city itself.10
Hesse and others within the German military establishment had also begun to deduce that Paris was not a part of the long-term plans of the Allies. If the Allies had wanted to make Paris an offensive base of operations, German strategists reasoned, they would not have targeted its bridges and rail lines so ferociously. The more damage the Allies did to Paris and its surrounding region, the more costly and time-consuming its reconstruction would be. Nor did German strategists think that the Allies had the stomach for a bitter fight inside the city, when so much good tank country existed to the north and south of Paris. Rather than sending troops into the city, surely the Allies would try to bypass it, thus cutting off the German garrison in the Île de France and isolating it from outside help.11
Some German generals, including Erwin Rommel, thought Paris could best serve their interests as a hostage. Holding Paris would give the Germans an important bargaining chip should their positions in Normandy collapse. They could blackmail the Allies by threatening to destroy Paris, or they could promise to surrender it intact as a bargaining chip. Such plans betrayed a growing desperation within the German military. Many German generals had already come to the conclusion that the war had turned irrevocably against them. This belief led some to support an assassination attempt by disillusioned German generals against Hitler in late July; others continued to hold out hope that the German Army could delay the Allies in the west long enough to give diplomats time to cut a deal that might allow Germany to keep some of its gains. The most delusional of them envisioned the British and Americans joining the German Army in a new anti-Soviet alliance.12
In public at least, German generals displayed an air of calm, confidence, and loyalty, but as German misgivings increased, so too did their estimation of Paris’s importance. On July 1, Hitler sent them a reminder of the need for loyalty, firing Army Group West commander General Gerd von Rundstedt for merely suggesting that the Germans seek a negotiated peace with the American and British. In private, though, some generals (including Rundstedt’s replacement, Guenther von Kluge) had concluded that once they lost Paris they would also lose any remaining bargaining strength they had. The Germans therefore had to hold Paris as long as they could, and they had to be able to threaten to do serious damage to it in order to force the Allies into negotiations.
The Germans had gauged Allied intentions for Paris accurately. In mid-July, about the time the Germans were making their estimates of Allied strategy toward the city, Eisenhower’s planners concluded that “Paris will be a tempting bait, and for political and morale reasons strong pressure will doubtless be exerted to capture it easily.” But they had already determined that they would resist those pressures and bypass the city instead. In part, this decision came from the American presumption that taking Paris would entail unacceptable losses. The Germans would have no choice but to fight for the city. Paris, they feared, might become the site of Germany’s last stand in the west, for both political and military reasons. The prospect of losing Paris would be embarrassing enough to the Germans to compel them to try to hold the city for as long as possible.13
A battle in the streets of Paris was a nightmarish scenario for Allied commanders. Their forces were no more trained for urban fighting than the Germans. A battle inside the city would neutralize two of the most important tactical advantages the Allies possessed, their air
planes and their tanks. Moreover, the Germans could use the streets and alleys of Paris to draw Allied forces in and pin them down, incurring disproportionate casualties while also causing widespread damage to the city, its infrastructure, its people, and its irreplaceable artistic and architectural treasures. One study done at Eisenhower’s headquarters foresaw “prolonged and heavy street fighting similar to that in Stalingrad” that would inevitably lead to the “destruction of the French capital,” an eventuality that everyone hoped to avoid at all costs. Although Paris featured lightly in the Allies’ strategic thinking, the city’s precious cultural and historical landmarks did not—nor did the dangers that Allied troops would encounter if they attempted to take the city by force.14
Furthermore, if the Allies did get drawn into an urban battle and the Germans fought a successful delaying action inside Paris, the Germans could use the time they were buying to establish a strong defensive position on the Rhine River, or, in the worst-case scenario, along the ridges, fortresses, and forests of the western front from the last war. For a generation of leaders, especially British leaders, who had been enlisted men and junior officers in that war, a repetition of static war on the 1914–1918 battlefields was too horrifying a possibility to consider. The Germans also had at their disposal the prepared defensive positions of the Maginot Line (which, using forced labor, they had already begun to reorient to face west) and their own Siegfried Line. If they were given the fall and winter to improve those defensive lines, the Germans could turn them into formidable positions along the model of the imposing Hindenburg Line that had inflicted thousands of Allied casualties in 1917 and 1918.15
These military reasons were sound, but Allied planners had other reasons for not wanting to drive on Paris. Foremost among them were the liability and potential supply problems that Allied logisticians saw in a liberated Paris. They estimated that feeding and supplying the city would require the enormous figure of 4,000 tons of goods a day (as it turned out, this number proved to be far too small). Allied logistics were already operating on a shoestring that went all the way back to a badly damaged Cherbourg; the port required six weeks of intensive work by engineers and construction crews to make it usable after the widespread damage the Germans did before surrendering. Even if the Allies could push those badly needed supplies forward to Paris, they would have to come out of the needs of the army units actively engaged in fighting the Germans. Supplying Paris would also mean an enormous diversion of the precious gasoline upon which Allied divisions depended for mobility and supply.16
Better, the Allies thought, to force the problem of feeding the city onto the Germans for as long as possible before having to assume that burden themselves. Callous though this line of thinking may have been, the Allies were reluctant to assume the responsibility of feeding a city of 2.5 million people if they did not have the supplies needed to do so. Nor, it should be noted, did the Allies have a clear picture of just how bad the food problem in Paris really was until late August. Thus did Eisenhower take a larger risk than he knew by deferring “actual capture of the city” unless he “received evidence of starvation or distress among its citizens.” That evidence was clear to those inside the city, but much harder to discern for Allied planners outside the city, who still tried not to think about Paris if they did not have to do so.17
The example of Rome exemplified many of the Allies’ fears about launching a direct assault on Paris. Eisenhower, Bradley, and their staffs were acutely aware of the controversy then raging over Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s handling of the liberation of Rome. As commander of the U.S. Fifth Army, Clark had been in charge of the slow, bloody march of Allied troops through central Italy. Along the mountains and narrow roads of that country, the fighting—complete with infantry attacks on trenches and a supply system that relied on mules as often as it did on trucks—had often resembled the operational environment of 1914 more than 1944. In early May 1944, Clark’s forces, with the French Expeditionary Corps in the lead, broke through the stubborn German defense position known as the Gustav Line, leaving Rome open. Clark was mesmerized by the possibility of being its liberator.
Clark had received clear guidance (although, he later pointed out, no direct orders) to cut off the elements of the German Tenth Army that were retreating north, but on May 25 he dropped a “bombshell” of an order on Major General Lucian Truscott to move instead on Rome. Truscott was stunned by the order, which he knew would force his men to disengage from the fleeing Germans and make a hasty advance toward Rome. Even so great a prize as the Italian capital, Truscott thought, “was poor compensation for [the] lost opportunity” of destroying the retreating German units. French Expeditionary Corps commander Lieutenant General Alphonse Juin agreed, writing that “questions of prestige are shaping events.” He warned that “history will not fail to pass severe sentence” on the decision to make a hasty march on Rome.18
Juin had judged correctly. As a result of Clark’s decision, tens of thousands of German soldiers escaped what should have been an Allied noose and established a new defensive line, the Gothic Line, which was fifteen miles deep and ran from Massa on the Ligurian Sea to Pesaro on the Adriatic. The Germans held the Allies on that line for months, and most of northern Italy remained in German hands until the end of the war in May 1945. Equally as tragically, more than four thousand Allied soldiers died making the ill-planned and ill-supported move on Rome. Even Clark’s close friends, including Eisenhower, saw that he had made a critical mistake. By going for the glory of capturing the Eternal City and the first Axis capital of the war, he had allowed an entire German army to live to fight another day.
Clark has come in for widespread criticism, both then and now, for the decision to focus on Rome, which was by then a lightly defended city. He could have taken Rome with far fewer casualties after completing the encirclement of the retreating Germans. His toughest critics have accused him of wanting to get his name and picture in the newspaper to feed his own ample ego. That his well-photographed entry into Rome happened just hours before Overlord began has only served to fuel criticism. His detractors saw him as vain and hungry for the publicity that he feared others would soon get. Both Eisenhower and Bradley were well aware of the aspersion being heaped on their friend and fellow commander. Neither wanted to make the same strategic mistake Clark had made, and neither wanted to face accusations of having liberated Paris to feed their egos while the Germans escaped to better defensive ground, thus prolonging the war.
Another omen from the Italian campaign also haunted Allied planners. The Allies, especially the Americans, had come in for criticism in Italy for bombing the sixth-century Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. The abbey, an architectural, religious, and historical jewel, sat atop a mountain along the Gustav Line. Its defenders had been bitterly resisting Allied troops well before Clark broke through in May 1944. After a series of hard-fought battles, the Allies decided to bomb the abbey despite the protests of the Vatican and the outspoken opposition of many American Catholics. On February 15, 1944, more than 200 bombers dropped 1,500 tons of explosives on the abbey, reducing it to ruins, only to find that the rubble afforded the German defenders (who had had no troops in the abbey and therefore suffered no casualties) excellent cover to continue repelling Allied attacks. The attack on Monte Cassino was an operational and public relations disaster, with even many Allied governments voicing their displeasure.
Paris, of course, was home to any number of treasures as valuable as Monte Cassino. Although the air attacks on the city had already caused widespread damage, the focus of Allied operations was still on the factories and rail yards. Planners hoped to spare the city’s other districts. A full-scale offensive on Paris could require the mass targeting of the city itself. As a result, the city’s monuments, churches, and cathedrals were sure to suffer as Monte Cassino had. For all these reasons, Eisenhower had already decided “to avoid making Paris a battleground” unless it became absolutely unavoidable.19
With all of t
hese considerations in mind, Bradley responded to a reporter’s question about the safety of the city by announcing that the U.S. Army “would not damage so much as a cobblestone in its streets.” The fact that American and British bombers had already done significant damage to much more than Paris’s cobblestones seems to have escaped Bradley’s attention. The reporter, moreover, could be forgiven for thinking that Bradley was talking about a quick liberation of Paris, not about bypassing the city altogether, in part out of an aversion for assuming the burden of feeding its residents. Bradley and his staff were so focused on the German Army that they had all but put aside the welfare of the people they were supposed to be rescuing.20
The Allies had concluded, to use Bradley’s words, that Paris “represented nothing more than an ink spot on our maps to be by-passed as we headed toward the Rhine.” To those few Parisians who either knew of or guessed at Allied plans, the decision came as something akin to a death sentence. One Parisian who was in the know was Colonel Claude Ollivier, code-named “Jade Amicol,” an intelligence officer working with the British who was hiding in southern Paris. On August 2, a British agent snuck into the city and told Ollivier not to expect outside help because the Allied armies were planning to bypass the city. “My God,” he said upon hearing the news, “this is a catastrophe!” FFI leader Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont also knew that Churchill was willing to wait until Christmas to liberate Paris; such a delay, Kriegel-Valrimont concluded, would result in mass starvation.21
Unaware of these discussions at the highest levels of Allied and German strategy, Parisians themselves had continued their clandestine activities and their planning for the future. Despite Rol’s refusal to endorse an uprising until the Allies were in a position to provide direct help, plans for massive workers’ strikes on July 14, Bastille Day, continued. In the eyes of the FFI, by denying Germany a workforce, the strikes had far more potential to disrupt German industry than the Allied bombings did. Throughout June and July strikes had become more commonplace, as had industrial sabotage and work slowdowns. L’Humanité, one of the most important clandestine communist newspapers, urged Parisians to see the strikes as the start of a full insurrection. But the FFI was still too weak for such an uprising to succeed, and the Allies were too far away to come to the city’s rescue. Nevertheless, strikes on July 10 in the Paris suburbs of St. Denis provided a positive omen for the larger strikes planned for July 14.
The Blood of Free Men Page 10
