Leclerc tried once again to convince the Americans to let him drive on Paris. Scheduled to attend a Sunday lunch at First Army headquarters, he showed up at 10:30 a.m. to make his case to Lt. Gen. Hodges and his staff. William Sylvan, a member of Hodges’s staff who attended the meeting, later recorded his impressions for the First Army’s War Diary: “His arguments, which he presented incessantly, were to the effect that, roads and traffic and our plans notwithstanding, his division should run for Paris at once. He said he needed no maintenance, no more equipment, and that he was up to strength—and then, a few minutes later he admitted he needed all three. The General [Hodges] was not impressed with him or his arguments, and let him understand that he was to stay put until he gave orders otherwise.”40 This testy exchange showed both that Leclerc was determined to drive on the capital and that he lacked the ability to do so on his own. It also shows the high level of tension between Leclerc and his nominal superiors.
If the Americans were still unsure of the situation in Paris, the Germans were at long last awakening to the emergency. Kurt Hesse, the German general responsible for the defense of the Seine and the Oise region, and based in the Paris suburb of St. Cloud, noted that August 20 was the date of the first serious sense of crisis among the defenders. Outside Paris, six American divisions began a major advance out of the Loire Valley, with the exact destination unknown to German headquarters. From inside Paris, Hesse’s headquarters began to receive reports from units whose commanders believed themselves encircled by FFI units. At German Supreme Headquarters in France on the same day, officers determined for the first time that “in Paris itself the situation became increasingly critical.” Their war diary for that day expressed doubt that the Germans could hold the city, noting that “the initiative remained rather with the enemy.” In their eyes, the German defense should have focused on the bridges in the Seine region, not on the city itself. Hitler’s headquarters, however, had determined that holding Paris was of extreme importance, but refused to send new resources to the city.41
The fighting over the weekend had been some of the bloodiest in the long history of Paris. Saturday and Sunday had witnessed the deaths of 231 Frenchmen and the wounding of more than 800 more. The FFI moved through the city, setting up strongpoints on bridges and near intersections. This sort of warfare, where FFI fighters could go home for meals in shifts, provided the entire city with a kind of street theater that captivated Parisians. Nevertheless, this theater was violent and brutal, as the destruction and death throughout Paris clearly showed.42
Parisians continued to ask themselves where the Americans were and why they were not coming to their aid. “Où sont-ils?” were the words on everyone’s lips. Even without help from the outside, the people of Paris had taken great strides to liberate themselves and restore much of their wounded sense of self. By nightfall, the Préfecture de Police, the Hôtel de Ville, the Interior Ministry in the infamous building on the Rue des Saussaies, and the Health, Finance, Economy, Education, and War ministries were all under the control of either the FFI or the Gaullists. Parisians could justifiably take great pride in the actions they had taken to liberate themselves.43
Nevertheless, the Germans had not exhausted all of their options. They still had thousands of soldiers, including many SS troops, who were supported by dozens of tanks and airplanes in the Paris region. If they intended to fight a pitched battle for Paris, they could bring this lethal might to bear against the Resistance fighters. The FFI needed to find a way to deny the Germans mobility through the city, both to impede their movements and to isolate the German strongpoints from one another.
To accomplish these feats, Rol relied on a traditional Parisian tactic. He called for the people of Paris to spend the night building the barricades that had been such a visible part of past periods of revolution in Paris. Bulletins spread across Paris on the 20th and 21st carrying the electrifying message “Tous aux Barricades!” (“Everyone to the Barricades”). The communists sent out their own flyers noting that the barricades could ensure that “not one Boche leaves the Paris region alive.” An open battle for Paris had begun.44
7
THE DAYS OF THE BARRICADES, AUGUST 21–22
THE WEEKEND’S DRAMATIC EVENTS HAD TRANSFORMED THE situation in and around Paris. What had begun as a strike of the Paris police rapidly developed into a full-scale insurrection that not even the leaders of the Resistance could fully control. Perhaps most importantly, the people of Paris were beginning to realize not just that the day of their liberation was rapidly approaching, but that they themselves might have a chance to play the key role in their own redemption. For a city that had been humiliated, occupied, and brutalized for four agonizing years, it was an empowering—almost intoxicating—sensation. Although he was not blind to the difficult days that lay ahead, Jacques Bardoux, the former French senator, basked in the notion that “Paris can liberate itself—a magnificent gesture worthy of two thousand years of history.” FFI section leader Pierre Maudru also took pride in the courage of Parisians, noting, “Paris is not waiting for the arrival of the Allies. It will liberate itself. It will pay back the enemy for all he has done to this city for four years.”1
In the past two days the Germans had also woken up to the severity of the situation. On Monday, August 21, the German high command war diary finally acknowledged that Paris had become untenable. This conclusion had important implications. With the loss of the city, the Germans knew, “the entire coastal front north of the Seine would be ripped open and the bases for the long-range warfare [sic] would be lost.” The loss of the city, its bridges, and its transportation network would mean that the large German units west of Paris would not be able to retreat in good order to positions farther east. The Germans would need to defend Paris for as long as possible in order to allow for the escape of these westerly forces, but the high command acknowledged that “precautionary measures had heretofore not been authorized.” The promised infantry reinforcements had not arrived. The German Army had even abandoned the idea of retreating units through the city as a show of force, preferring instead that they establish new positions east of the city as quickly as possible. Top German commanders understood how hopeless the situation was in Paris, but they still refused to rethink some of their most basic strategic assumptions. German officers in the Paris region struggled in vain to convince higher military officials in Berlin that the Americans were in fact bypassing Paris, thus rendering all of their plans to base their defense on the city itself irrelevant.2
Still, the German Army had little choice. The Germans could not merely give up the city. Paris remained an important symbol, and its fall would have dramatic reverberations throughout Europe and the world. American and British reporters were already beginning to angle to be the first Allied journalists to enter the liberated city. Thomas Wolf, the Fourth Infantry Division’s war correspondent; A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker; and America’s most famous war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, were all positioning themselves to be ready to rush in to Paris and broadcast news of its freedom. “To appreciate the mystique of Paris,” Wolf later wrote, recalling the days before the liberation, “I think you had to have been born in the first quarter of the twentieth century.” To Wolf and his generation, Paris had been the very center of European civilization. Indeed, the name of the city had been shorthand for freedom and democracy. Long after Berlin, Rome, and Madrid had become hosts to fascist dictators, Paris had held against the tide, setting an example of resistance to tyranny to millions of people until its tragic fall in 1940. To many onlookers in Europe and across the world, there was no more important symbol of the impending end of the Nazis and the return of freedom to the western world than the Germans’ eviction from the majestic City of Light.3
But Paris wasn’t free yet. Nor could the German Army be expected to simply hand the French capital over to a band of guerrillas and irregulars whom they identified as terrorists. The German Army, with its intense professional self-identification, had a pa
rticular loathing for guerrillas and irregulars. For German higher headquarters to surrender the city to the FFI or even to representatives of Charles de Gaulle, whom they did not recognize in any official capacity, was simply unacceptable as either a matter of strategy or honor. Still, events in the city were moving rapidly, and German options were dwindling as quickly as their resources.
Choltitz knew that he was in an impossible situation. He had too few assets to hold the city against the uprising then spreading across the sprawling city, and he could not hope to combat the Allies if they ever decided to turn toward Paris. Only the indifference of the British and Americans to the French capital had left it in German hands this long. Yet at the same time, he knew that by offering the FFI a truce and opening even preliminary discussions with Resistance leaders in the city, he had put himself in a tenuous position. To go any further would be extremely dangerous. Raoul Nordling thought that the German commander was “visibly frightened by the fear that the SS or the Gestapo would denounce him as a soldier without courage.” In the paranoid atmosphere of the German Army after the bomb plot at the “Wolf’s Lair,” such an accusation could lead to his arrest, demotion, or even execution.4
Inside the city, the truce barely held. Choltitz made an effort to sell it as being in the best interests of the Parisians themselves, a point the Resistance vehemently rejected. The Germans hung posters urging Parisians to respect the truce. “We are thinking of you,” the posters read. “Think of the fate of Paris.” The FFI responded with posters of their own that read, “No truce has been concluded between the French and the enemy commands.” Noting that the Germans continued shooting in many parts of Paris despite the truce, the FFI warned that “the lives of German prisoners in jails and hospitals will answer for any violence committed against the people of Paris.” As tension continued to build, each side accused the other of repeated violations of the truce terms.5 No one expected it to last for much longer.
Members of the various factions of the Resistance itself, moreover, continued to hurl accusations at one another over the issue of the truce. At a Monday morning meeting of Resistance leaders, Chaban once again urged Rol to support the truce, claiming that he had information (which was either erroneous or contrived to sway Rol) indicating that 150 German tanks were on the way to Paris. Honoring the truce, he argued, was the only way to keep those tanks from killing thousands of innocent people. Rol angrily shot back with his oft-repeated statement that the liberation of Paris was worth 200,000 dead. The communist representative Pierre Villon was even more irate than Rol. Villon, an Alsatian Jew who had risen to become a leader of the military arm of the Resistance, had spent the war years in hiding and wanted to hide no longer. He glared at Chaban and told him, “This is the first time I have ever seen such cowardice from a French general,” a comment designed to insult the honor of the man de Gaulle had recently named the youngest general in the army. Villon also accused Chaban of having ulterior motives for pushing the truce, charging, “[The Gaullists] fear the people. They are stopping the battle in order to steal their victory. . . . [The truce] is in the spirit of Munich, the spirit of Vichy, not the spirit of the Resistance.” Villon ended by shouting, “Better Paris be destroyed like Warsaw than that she live through another 1940.” While impassioned, Villon’s challenge to Chaban was more emotional than strategic; it failed to move Chaban, who continued to urge his comrades to respect the truce. Most of the men at the meeting still disagreed with Chaban, however, noting that the SS was not respecting the truce. FFI reports from across Paris warned that the Germans were using the time the truce bought to reposition their forces for a vigorous counterattack.6
It was obvious to Chaban that he was on the losing side of the argument. Most of the Resistance rank and file had no intention of honoring a truce that they believed the Germans were not themselves respecting. Moreover, they found the very idea of talking to the Germans a treasonous act. Chaban had made his point and could tell de Gaulle that he had done everything in his power to try to slow down the uprising, even if it continued apace. Events were spiraling dizzyingly out of his, or anyone else’s, control. At the end of the meeting, the Resistance leaders decided to support the decisions made the day before to construct barricades throughout the city. Chaban noted that nothing in the truce forbade the construction of barricades, so he could still claim to be honoring the French side of the bargain, a point that won him little favor with the hard-liners like Villon.
All of the representatives at the meeting knew how powerful an emotional and political symbol barricades were to Paris. They had been a regular feature of Parisian revolutions and had figured famously and prominently in Victor Hugo’s epic novel of the failed 1832 revolution, Les Misérables. Five years after that dramatic event, the Paris police noted that any group wishing to control France could do so by assembling “at certain key parts in the city the following items: two carts, some tables, chairs, bed frames and doors, several mattresses and some well-chosen rubbish.” The need to reduce the potential power of barricades had helped to motivate the redesign of Paris by Baron Haussmann in the late nineteenth century. Haussmann razed entire neighborhoods, demolishing their narrow alleyways, and built in their place wide boulevards, in part to allow for the free flow of troops to put down rebellions. Despite the redesign, parts of Paris were still characterized by thin, narrow streets and alleyways. Many neighborhoods, such as St. Michel, the Latin Quarter, and the Marais, remained a warren of small, easily barricaded roads.7
Parisians had responded with enthusiasm to the call, erecting four hundred barricades in two days. By the end of the battle for Paris, the city had more than six hundred barricades in place. Most were built in the traditional Parisian style, using paving stones hacked out of the roads by the sweat and muscle of the neighborhood’s young men. Anything that might help support a barricade was soon added, including disabled vehicles, felled trees, and broken pieces of furniture. Some barricades were just a few large branches stretched across a road. Others were as deep as six feet and as high as four feet. In many cases, Parisians added portraits of Hitler or other symbols of the German occupation to the front, thus requiring any German troops to open fire on photographs of the führer or Nazi flags if they attacked. It may have been a small token of resistance, but it was symbolic nonetheless. Other barricades flew French tricolors or improvised Soviet, British, or American flags.
The barricades served both symbolic and strategic purposes. From a symbolic standpoint, they showed that the city belonged to the FFI and to the people of Paris. The formation of barricades recalled heroic periods in French history and connected the events of 1944 to those of the historic days of 1789, 1830, and 1848. They showed that a battle was well and truly underway, and they served as a rallying point for neighborhood action. The construction of the barricades involved thousands of people, young and old, rich and poor, male and female. Even children participated, bringing supplies to the barricades’ defenders and, like Victor Hugo’s young hero Gavroche, often exposing themselves to danger in the process.
Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate who owned the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, marveled at the sights of the barricades in her neighborhood, writing: “The children engaged in our defense piled up furniture, stoves, dustbins, and so on at the foot of the Rue de l’Odéon, and behind these barricades youths with FFI armbands and a strange assortment of old-fashioned weapons aimed at the Germans stationed on the steps of the theater at the top of the street.” The uprising that had begun as a movement of select, clandestine groups had now expanded to include a wide array of Parisians, all of whom fought for a common cause. The password of the St. Michel neighborhood’s barricades was “Vengeance.”8
The sight of entire communities openly working to defend themselves underscored the communal nature of the new struggle. Another famous Parisienne, Simone de Beauvoir, recalled children behind the barricades singing, “Nous ne les reverrons plus / C’est fini, ils sont foutus” (We will not see them
again / It’s all over, they are screwed). The barricades thus had an important symbolic purpose in a city desperate to recover some of its own self-respect. FFI member Jean Reybaz watched in wonder as children in his working-class neighborhood piled paving stones into the baskets of their bicycles and took them to barricades that needed reinforcement. Philippe Barat, an FFI commander who was in charge of the barricades in the critical St. Michel area, recalled that the neighborhood “was suddenly filled with a motley and strange crowd that formed a vast, marvelous fraternity. The rich and the poor, the aristocrat and the worker, came together so that the Germans would take from their capital the memory of a city that had a true soul.” Even allowing for some exaggeration in the heat of the moment, Barat had a point. For the first time in four years (at least), the people of Paris were standing together. As Gilles Perrault, a teenager at the time, thoughtfully noted, many of the barricades were not as much an action aimed at the Germans as “a matter between us and our long humiliation.”9
The Blood of Free Men Page 21
