Their meeting, on August 14, did not go as Leclerc had hoped. Patton refused to change his orders. Leclerc threatened to resign if American forces were positioned closer to Paris than French forces. “I told him in my best French that he was a baby,” Patton noted in his diary, “and said I had left him in the most dangerous place on the front. We parted friends.” Patton’s eyes remained fixed not on the Seine but the Rhine, which he saw as the last major barrier into Germany itself. Patton still hoped to cross it before the Germans did, if only he could get enough gasoline to drive his tanks there.21
Patton and Leclerc may have remained friends, but Leclerc’s corps commander, Lieutenant General Leonard Gerow, an American, soon grew tired of “that miserable man” and his insubordination. More than personalities and national differences were at stake, however. As late as mid-August, the American and French leadership still had radically different views of the importance of Paris. To the American military leadership, Paris remained strategically insignificant. Nothing that happened around Falaise had changed the attitudes of senior American leaders toward the city and its liberation. The Americans therefore refused pleas from de Gaulle and Leclerc to allow elements of the Deuxième Division Blindée to leave its designated position and move toward Paris. Nor did they believe that the FFI inside Paris was in a position to make a significant contribution to its liberation, in part because the Allies still refused to air-drop supplies into the city out of fear of giving the communists weapons. A furious Leclerc, and only slightly less furious de Gaulle, could do little to change the situation, given that the Americans controlled access to gasoline, the most vital of all resources for a mechanized military. Reports (which were correct) that Leclerc had ordered his commanders to begin hoarding gasoline without telling the Americans only increased the mistrust that was beginning to build inside the alliance over the subject of Paris.22
Inside the city, there were some signs that the German hold was at long last starting to crack. The Germans began to withdraw thousands of noncombat personnel from Paris in mid-August. Francophile staff officers such as Gerhard Heller and Ernst Jünger left along with men like Luftwaffe officer Karl Kitzinger, who had good relationships with many of the city’s most important leaders. Such cultural liaisons had helped to provide a crucial buffer between Parisians and some of the most vicious elements of the German and Vichy system. Now they were gone, leaving mostly combat officers with no ties to the city and few sympathies for its residents. Some Germans who had signed leases through the end of the year told their landlords to keep the apartments unoccupied, as they would soon return, once Germany’s fortunes turned around. Whether such talk amounted to optimism or bravado, Parisians watched with glee as their occupiers started to depart, even if they took with them everything they could carry. Artworks, furniture, and, most importantly, food, left with the Germans on any vehicle they could find.23
Among those Germans leaving the city were the especially despised Wehrmacht female auxiliaries, known around Paris as the Little Gray Mice because of the color of their uniforms and their constant smiles. Well fed, well paid, and doted upon by German officers, they were the very symbols of German extravagance at France’s expense. Parisian men may have also despised them because they were sexually inaccessible, whereas German men had wide access to French women. Many of the Little Gray Mice left Paris, where they had lived well, in tears. They were headed back, one Parisian noted, “to ruin, defeat, and death. I imagine that there has never been so awful a fate as to leave the beauty of France for the harshness of Germany.” Beautiful France may still have been, but Paris was in a dire condition. Food remained more scarce than ever, the Métro had stopped working almost entirely, and some parts of the city received less than an hour of electricity a day. Terrible rumors, based upon German behavior at Oradur, Tulle, and elsewhere, were also flying around the city that the Germans were planning to use poison gas or special SS units to kill as many people as possible before they left.24
Anxiety led to action. On August 10, three days after the beginning of the Germans’ Mortain counteroffensive, a new wave of strikes began that were aimed at disrupting German industrial production in Paris factories. Posters of de Gaulle and small tricolor flags also began to appear in the city as residents began to feel more comfortable expressing their hopes for liberation publicly. One Parisian took heart from the sight of a World War I veteran teaching a group of neighborhood kids to sing “(It’s a Long Way to) Tipperary,” a popular British soldier’s song from that war, so they could properly welcome their liberators. From BBC Radio, meanwhile, Parisians learned that Leclerc’s Deuxième Division Blindée was less than 150 miles away in Alençon. Perhaps most importantly, by August 14 the Paris police had all but disappeared from the city’s streets. Charles Braibant wondered if the Germans had arrested the entire police force. “This is serious,” he wrote. “No more screen between the brutes in the German military police and the population of Paris.” In fact, thousands of policemen had decided not to work for the Germans any longer—a decision that would soon have crucial repercussions for the fate of the city, though not the ones that Braibant feared.25
Still unsure of when, if ever, the Allies would move toward Paris, Rol decided to take action. Knowing that the Germans were less in evidence on the streets of Paris, and that the police force was unlikely to stop FFI agents from carrying out attacks, Rol decided to become more aggressive. He was also aware of the massive German defeat at Falaise. He therefore issued new instructions to the FFI that began with the sentence, “The German debacle has begun.” First, he ordered attacks on the “gangsters who abused their situations to serve themselves” at the expense of the people of Paris, a clear mandate to target collaborators and black marketeers. He also began planning for FFI takeovers of public buildings. He hoped to launch a general insurrection in Paris no later than August 18. Finally, he increased his contacts with the police, working to unite the four separate Resistance groups inside the force. He distributed an appeal from the FFI to the Paris police that read: “The hour of liberation has sounded. Many among you have already participated in the struggle against the invader. You should no longer participate in any activity that helps the enemy maintain order. Refuse to participate in the arrest of patriots, the searches of houses, the creation of checkpoints, identity checks, or prison guarding.”26
Rol’s message to the police was intended to limit their effectiveness as agents of the regime, but he also knew that the leaders of the Paris police Resistance groups were meeting to discuss a general strike in response to rumors that the Germans would react to their inactivity by ordering them to turn in their weapons. One way or another, he hoped, the police would tacitly, if not actively, aid the résistants.
But despite Rol’s efforts to unite Parisians, the battle lines inside the Paris Resistance groups remained the same. Rol and the FFI leadership urged that an uprising was the only possible response to recent events, even if they had to act without help from the Allies. The possibility that the FFI might suffer terrible reprisals did not deter them. An uprising, Rol argued, would force the issue in the city and give Paris an opportunity to fight against its oppressors. The strikes and demonstrations of the past month had proven to Rol that the mass of the population would rally to the cause once an insurrection began. The approach of Allied armies and the obvious disorganization of German forces in the city made Rol think that the time had come. On August 14, he issued instructions to his men on the best ways to disable German tanks; his prewar training as an antitank gunner came in handy, if four years later than intended. His General Order #8 said: “The Paris region, a concentration point for enemy transportation, must multiply and intensify its efforts to render these assets unusable. Our operations must not only be considered as harassing or delaying actions destined to help the Allies to the west; they must equally be the first phase of the conquest of French territory by the FFI. . . . In this case, operations directed against the enemy’s movements, transpor
ts, and communications must lead to his complete paralysis.”27 Rol thus showed that he intended the liberation of the city to be a means, not an end. French control of the capital was designed not just to evict the occupiers, but to deal them a military blow in the west from which they could not recover.
De Gaulle’s representatives in Paris disagreed with Rol’s calls for an uprising and sought to delay an insurrection until the Allies could arrive in force. Both Chaban, de Gaulle’s military representative, and Alexandre Parodi, his political representative, argued with Rol that an insurrection was premature. If he waited, Allied forces could offer the FFI some protection against possible German retribution. Chaban had, in fact, just returned from a dangerous trip to London where he had urged de Gaulle to convince the Americans to drive on Paris. Failure to do so, he feared, would lead to a premature uprising in Paris that the Germans could easily destroy, with thousands of Parisians, both FFI members and innocent bystanders, at risk of being killed. De Gaulle, in no position to change the strategic thinking at Allied headquarters, urged Chaban to return to Paris and delay the insurrection as long as he could. The British also remained disinclined to support an uprising, ordering their few agents in the city not to assist any French Resistance attempts to rise against the Germans.28
De Gaulle, Chaban, and Parodi were afraid of what the Germans might do to Parisians who took up arms in an insurrection, but they were equally afraid of what might happen if the FFI members actually gained control of the city. If they did, they would undermine de Gaulle’s claims to speak for France and possibly even resist the efforts of the provisional government to assume power once the Germans left. As one of de Gaulle’s advisers warned him, “at the very minute the Germans leave, the communists will go back to their old tricks; they will try to take the levers of power for themselves.” De Gaulle wrote: “[If the communists] establish a base of power in Paris, they will have an easy time establishing a government. . . . They can present themselves as the leaders of an insurrection and [form] a kind of commune. That such an insurrection in the capital would, for certain, lead to a power dominated by the Third International I have known for a long time.”29 Once again, the deadly specter of a civil war—like the one in 1871—raised its ugly head. The only way to prevent it, de Gaulle believed, was to get regular military forces into the city as quickly as possible.
The thought of the communists taking over as the Germans left terrified not just de Gaulle but many of the city’s residents as well, especially those in the middle class and those who had collaborated with the German occupiers. As late as August 15, Parisian Jean Galtier-Boissière noted a desire among some middle-class residents for a return of Pétain to the city to keep power out of the hands of the FFI. Pétain, they hoped, might ensure a legal transfer of power from Vichy to the government that would follow, thus preventing the FFI from installing a commune by force of arms. A British war correspondent captured the same sentiment and later wrote that most Parisians whom she met “would have preferred to see the Germans marching out by an eastern gate while the Allies marched in through the Bois de Boulogne, without any interlude in which disheveled youths from the [working-class] St. Antoine quarter roamed the placid streets of [middle-class] Passy, with FFI brassards on their arms and no safety catches on their rifles.”30
The collaborationist and anti-Semitic writer Paul Léautaud called the FFI “a gang of Apaches,” a reference to the groups of loosely organized street criminals that had plagued Paris in the prewar years. These new Apaches, he feared, were not interested in selling drugs or petty larceny, but in leading a “bloody hunting party” for collaborationists like him. He was right to worry, as his name was indeed on an FFI list of people to be arrested.31
Fear of open hostilities with the Germans thus competed in Paris in the middle of August with fears of an imminent civil war. The collaborationist Clara Longworth de Chambrun thought (incorrectly) that the Paris police were intimidated by the FFI into staying off the streets in order to pave the way for what she called “mob rule” once the Germans had left. An FFI takeover would then lead, she feared, to circumstances that would make the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution look like “an inconsiderable disturbance.” Like many collaborationists, she was still willing to support Vichy out of her fear that the FFI was planning “a veritable orgy of violence, disorder, and rapine” against collaborators and members of the middle class like herself. Only the intervention of Pétain or the arrival of an Allied army into the city, she thought, could prevent the calamity of a communist takeover.32
The end, however, was clearly coming for Pétain and his collaborationist regime. Starting on August 6, the collaborationist and anti-Semitic writer Marcel Jouhandeau began receiving threatening phone calls daily. They were all from the same man, who said, “The day of your execution is close.” The calls continued for two weeks until finally the man told him, “The day of your execution is here.” Jouhandeau then hid at a friend’s house rather than risk leaving the city. Three days later, the phone rang at the friend’s house and the same voice said, “We know exactly where you are hiding.” Another friend of Jouhandeau’s, a collaborationist factory owner, gave his chauffeur a pistol with orders to shoot him rather than let him fall into the hands of the FFI.33
Anxious and even terrified though many people were behind closed doors, on the streets the atmosphere of the city remained surprisingly tranquil. The famous French writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who had links to the Resistance, had been hiding outside the city. On August 11 they decided to sneak back into Paris in order not to miss the momentous events they expected to unfold in the coming days. They had heard that advance elements of the Allied armies were less than seventy miles away at Chartres, and thus they expected to find a markedly different Paris from the one they had left a few weeks earlier. Yet despite the “discreet departures of some German officers,” they found the city calm and little changed almost everywhere they went.34
Part of that calm might have been due to fear. Most residents assumed that the Resistance could do little to liberate the city until the Allies made a show of force near Paris. The question “Où sont-ils?” (“Where are they?”) was on everyone’s lips. Unlike Beauvoir and Sartre, Parisian resident Louis Chavet had no idea where those Allied armies were. He did know that even commodities that were once common, such as candles, were getting hard to find on the black market. On August 14, the Germans cut the bread ration again, from 300 grams to just 100 grams. They also closed the Métro altogether. Alexandre Arnoux, another Parisian with no knowledge of the location of the Allies, was thrilled to see a poster in the city carrying de Gaulle’s signature and bearing the “uplifting and surprising” words, “Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française.” Still, he recorded in his journal that night: “Where are the Allies? Are they going to move around Paris? Will they leave us here to die?”35
Food and the potential of famine haunted the residents. If the Allies decided to encircle and besiege the city, thousands would die of starvation. The Germans were already taking as much food out of the city as they could, and supplies from the countryside had all but stopped. A prolonged battle or siege would create a humanitarian crisis on a massive scale. Once again, memories of 1871, when the city’s residents had sometimes been reduced to eating rats, came back to haunt Parisians.
Contributing even more to the fear of Parisians was their knowledge of the awful fate of Warsaw, another European capital that had tried to liberate itself around the same time. The journals and diaries of Parisians show that they were fully aware of what was happening in Warsaw, and the events in Poland terrified them. Parisians first learned of the uprising in Warsaw in August, as Russian troops approached the Polish capital. Rather than enter the city, the Russians had halted, leaving the residents of Warsaw dangerously exposed to savage German reprisals from both the regular army and the SS. The battle for Warsaw lasted for sixty-three days. By the time it was over, one-quarter of Warsa
w’s buildings had been destroyed, and as many as 200,000 civilians had been killed, most by German execution. The Soviets, reluctant to help the anticommunist leadership of the Polish Home Army, had been willing to see the Poles massacred.
The omens for Paris, which also had an Allied army just outside city lines, were chilling. In this case, the political situation was reversed, with the Resistance inside the city being led largely by communists and the outside army being noncommunist, but the danger was largely the same. If the FFI ordered an uprising and the Allies refused to help Paris, just as the Russians had refused to help Warsaw, the results would be calamitous, especially given what Parisians knew about German reprisals in Oradur, Tulle, Vercors, and elsewhere. Throughout June and July, Parisians had held out the hope that they might share the fate of Rome, which had been evacuated by the Germans and taken by the Allies with little bloodshed. The charnel house that Warsaw had become, however, presented another, far more horrifying, possible future for Paris.
Warsaw’s fate was an especially terrible omen to Andrzej Bobkowski, a native Pole who had been in Paris since 1939, when the outbreak of war had interrupted his plans to work and study in South America. Thereafter he and his wife had been cut off from his homeland in a Paris dominated by two ideologies that he detested, Vichy France’s fascism and the communism prevalent in elements of the French working class. Observing events in Poland through the BBC and clandestine newspapers, he perceptively saw that the Warsaw Rising had been a strategically meaningless event. It had done little except kill the future leaders of Poland, paving the way for the Soviets to run his homeland after the war. “Warsaw is a hell,” he recorded in his journal on August 7. “Everyone is fighting and the Russians are just watching it all happen. After the Germans have massacred the entire Polish population, the Russians can occupy the city.” Warsaw, he noted with sadness, was a victim of “too much heroism.”36
The Blood of Free Men Page 14
