The FFI cells that controlled the power grid in the city turned the electricity on for an hour to allow Resistance radio stations to spread the news of Dronne’s arrival, but they needn’t have bothered. As one Parisian noted, “This time, there was no need for radio or newspapers. This time one could sense it. One could feel it: They were here.” The radio broadcasters announced that the Hôtel de Ville was in French hands again and the Préfecture de Police was now safe. They told listeners that the first four French tanks to arrive at the prefecture were named Mort-Homme, Douaumont, Montfaucon, and Valmy. No Parisian needed to be reminded of the significance of those names. The first three honored battles from the last world war; Valmy honored one of the most famous battles in French history, fought in 1792 to safeguard the revolution against a combined Austro-Prussian army. Broadcasters also warned people to stay in their homes and shutter their windows as a defense against German snipers. The Germans, they announced, had not yet surrendered, and rumors abounded that large numbers of SS troops lurked in the city. The Germans, moreover, were still in control of the Jardin du Luxembourg, where numerous tanks were based, and they still had bombers at Le Bourget airfield. If they chose to use these forces to contest Dronne’s entrance into the city, the results could be catastrophic. The ordeal of Paris was not over just yet.38
The end of that ordeal was, however, clearly coming into view. The western column of French troops had fought its way to the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt by nightfall. The column, just two miles from the city line, was being showered with wine, food, flowers, and kisses by a delirious crowd. War artist Emlen Etting was with them. He later wrote: “Blue signs with bold white letters read: Paris 6 kilometers then 5, 4, 3. The mist evaporated and with it the doubts in the minds of the people along our path. Waving arms were accompanied by shouts of joy.” Only by demolishing the western bridges over the Seine could the Germans forestall this column’s arrival in Paris, but they had been unable to accomplish even that. Finding the Pont de Sèvres intact, the elated French troops knew they would undoubtedly enter the city in force the next morning.39
With the arrival of French troops and tanks, the uprising would stand a chance against any German counterattack. Philippe Barat, the FFI section chief in St. Michel, knew that the city was not yet out of danger, but he also knew what the arrival of regular forces meant: “Tomorrow, it is with them, under their orders, that we will fight. Tomorrow, the Krauts will be just a bad memory. Tomorrow is the dawn of liberty.” Simone de Beauvoir also began to think hopefully, although she, too, knew that the days to come would be hard and contentious. “This victory,” she wrote, “was to efface our old defeats, it was ours, and the future it opened up was ours, too.” Whether that future was to be one of unity or violence still remained very much in doubt.40
Just a mile and a half from the Hôtel de Ville up the elegant Rue de Rivoli, the mood was quite different. Choltitz was there, wearing his best uniform at a small formal dinner for his staff in his golden cage at the Hôtel Meurice. The diners heard church bells ringing and also heard the distant sounds of voices singing La Marseillaise. When one of his staff officers had the temerity to ask why bells would be ringing at this late hour, Choltitz exploded, saying, “What else do you expect? You’ve been sitting here in your own little dream world for four years. What do you know about this war? You’ve seen nothing but your own pleasant life in Paris. You haven’t seen what’s happened to Germany in Russia and Normandy. . . . Gentlemen, I can tell you something that escaped you here in your nice life in Paris. Germany has lost the war, and we have lost it with her.”41
Choltitz then placed a call to Army Group B headquarters in eastern France, holding the telephone out the window so the generals there could hear the sounds on the streets for themselves. They told Choltitz not to expect any help, not even in evacuating him or his staff from the city. They had no more resources to give him and no more orders to issue. Choltitz then asked an old friend, General Hans Speidel, to do what he could to look after Choltitz’s family back in Germany, then hung up. The battle for Paris, he knew, was over, and Germany had lost. All that was left to do now was to salvage the lives of the men who remained under his command from the vengeance of the Paris crowd, a task that he did not anticipate would be easy to accomplish. That night, one of the staff officers present at the dinner confided to his diary, “I have just heard the bells of my own funeral.”42
9
APOTHEOSIS, AUGUST 25–27
“I HAD THOUGHT THAT FOR ME THERE COULD NEVER AGAIN BE any elation in war. But I had reckoned without the liberation of Paris.” So wrote American journalist Ernie Pyle, a man who had seen more of the ugly side of World War II than almost any of his countrymen. The war had taken a severe psychological toll on Pyle and would continue to do so until he was killed in action on the island of Ie Shima, near Okinawa, in April 1945. Those who knew him watched as the horrors he saw, including a bloody friendly-fire incident and the deaths of dozens of men he had come to know, steadily wore at his nerves. Pyle was as much a victim of combat exhaustion as any soldier, and by late August 1944, he was close to the breaking point.
Nor had Paris been foremost in his mind. The city had hardly featured in his dispatches throughout the month of August. There were other stories to tell. Nevertheless, as the situation in Paris developed, he began to pay more and more attention to the city, which he feared might be destroyed in the act of its liberation. As that liberation approached and as the stories of heroism from the city reached Allied lines, Pyle, like most of his fellow war correspondents, knew that Paris was rapidly becoming one of the most important stories of the century. He did not know if he would find the city in ruins or in ecstasy, but he knew that he had to be there to see it for himself.1
What he saw in Paris astonished and even rejuvenated him. Pyle came into the city on August 25, the day after Dronne and his small advance unit had entered the city from the south. That morning, three more French columns had entered: Colonel Paul Girot de Langlade’s through the west via the Pont de Sèvres; Colonel Pierre Billotte’s through the southern Porte de Gentilly; and Colonel Louis Dio’s through the adjacent Porte d’Orléans. The U.S. Fourth Infantry Division also entered the city, through the same Porte d’Italie that Dronne had used the day before, turning east at the Bastille and heading for Vincennes and the eastern suburbs in the hopes of rapidly continuing the pursuit of the Germans. Leclerc himself had entered Paris at 7:45 that morning to the choruses of World War I veterans singing the victory songs of 1918. Four years before to the day, Leclerc had set off from Cameroon to join the Free French forces of Charles de Gaulle. Now he was leading an army of liberation into Paris.2
Forty-five minutes later, Billotte’s men were on the Île de la Cité shaking hands with the policemen still defending the prefecture. Rumors soon spread that de Gaulle would be in the city by midday to assume control of the French government. Parisians were wild and delirious with happiness. Even a man as grizzled and as scarred by war as Pyle could happily write that it had been “a pandemonium of surely the greatest mass joy that had ever happened.” August 25, he believed, would go down as “one of the great days of all time.”3
It was indeed to be a day that no one who saw it would ever forget. The rain of the day before had cleared and taken with it the heat of August, leaving a dry, breezy, and sunny day that was ideal for celebration. For decades afterward Parisians recalled with immense pride the French flag that flew over the Eiffel Tower at 12:30 that afternoon, placed there by the same man whom the Germans had ordered to take it down four years earlier. An hour and a half later, Parisian firefighters hung a massive tricolor flag from the top of the Arc de Triomphe. The flag was there to welcome the men of Langlade’s column when they appeared at the Place de l’Étoile (today also called the Place Charles de Gaulle) at 2:25 p.m.4
Parisians came out into the streets proudly displaying the national blue, white, and red. Men wore the colors in their clothes, women wore them in ribbons
in their hair, and everyone waved them on flags. Parisian Pascale Moisson even saw a man walking his dog with a homemade tricolor collar and leash. Individual recollections of this day would fill volumes, as seemingly everyone who was there remembered particularly poignant memories. A disabled World War I veteran standing on the Avenue Henri Martin, for instance, gave his Legion of Honor medal to the first French officer he saw. The American journalist Irwin Shaw met a Jewish refugee who had hidden in the city for four years and who begged him to send a letter to his sister in New York City. When Shaw asked what he wanted to say, the man looked stunned, merely said, “Tell her I am alive,” then wandered off into the crowd. More comically, Shaw also recorded the scene of a “very handsome twenty-year-old boy with a deep South Carolina accent” proudly showing off the list of “three or four dozen” addresses of Parisian girls that he had collected as his jeep drove through the streets of the city.5
The entrance into the city was the culmination of what one American soldier called “fifteen solid miles of cheering, deliriously happy people waiting to shake your hand, to kiss you, to shower you with food and wine.” American historian S.L.A. Marshall later counted sixty-seven bottles of champagne given to him by Parisians on that day. Jeeps and tanks were soon covered in flowers. They were also covered with what Thomas Wolf called “the most beautiful girls I had ever seen.” Wolf was far from alone in that judgment, although more than a few observers also noted how thin the women of Paris appeared. Charles Codman, an American who had lived in Paris before the war, wrote that the young women of Paris were “much prettier than I remember them,” but he was also reflective enough to note, “I suppose they don’t eat so much.” BBC correspondent Robert Reid, who was equally astounded by the sights of the city on that historic day, wrote, “It was one of those emotional experiences which rarely come to any man. . . . No human being could have remained unmoved and I saw many fighting men weep unashamedly that memorable afternoon.”6
The celebrations were personal as well as patriotic. Jacques Bardoux watched as a mother and grandmother recognized their son/grandson in Langlade’s column. They embraced and exchanged kisses, and for the first time in almost five years the women knew that he was alive. Now this son of Paris had come back to his tortured home as a savior to his family and his native city. The scene rendered Bardoux speechless and filled his eyes with tears. “I have seen my own people again,” he wrote in his diary. “I now recognize them. I feel that they will rise again, with freedom leading them back to their grandeur. I can now die. I have seen, after five years of war and occupation, the City of Cities free itself.”7
Soldiers rushed to telephones hoping to make contact with mothers, fathers, wives, and siblings living in the city. When that didn’t work, they often passed pieces of paper into the crowd with the name and address of the person they were seeking and a note saying that they were alive and well, trusting the crowd to ensure that the notes got to their intended recipients. Not all the celebrations were joyous, as soldiers sometimes learned of relatives who had been killed or deported. Parisians equally learned from soldiers of loved ones who had died in battle. In one case, a soldier found his parents, but noted that his mother had lost fifty pounds and his father had lost thirty-five pounds since he had last seen them. The misery and hunger of Paris were evident to all even as the Parisians willingly shared with soldiers the best of what little they had.8
Although few people knew it, Paris was then on its last day of food reserves. Newsweek’s correspondent Kenneth Crawford watched as soldiers handed food back to the crowds, aware that Parisians could not afford to part with the precious apples, tomatoes, and other foods they had so ecstatically tossed to their liberators. Then he watched as the soldiers gave the crowd some of their own food, reversing the trend of the initial moments of euphoria. Crawford noted that even “dignified epicures gobbled up K rations,” because “food was Paris’s first need.” Time war correspondent Charles C. Wertenbaker had a similar experience. He recalled that the dominant cry from the joyous Paris crowds was “Merci!” followed closely by, “Are you bringing food to us?”9
Food was not the only problem. There still remained the matter of getting the Germans out of Paris. Even while Parisians gleefully mingled with the liberating troops, the shooting in the streets continued, forcing the liberators to continue their drive into the city. The professional soldiers of the Allied armies knew that, the delirious joy on the streets of Paris notwithstanding, the Germans still maintained significant combat power in the city. On some streets there was ecstatic celebration, on others active combat. Charles Codman wrote to his wife to describe the odd contrast of fighting and celebration: “Champagne on every street corner. Then put-put-put-put machine gun fire. Into a doorway with your drinking companion. Put-put stops. Out again. More clinking of glasses and onto another quarter.” Pierre Bourdan recalled “passing quickly from joy to anger,” and being successively “shot at, cheered, photographed, then shot at again.”10
Even as Parisians celebrated the end of the fighting, German soldiers shot into crowds from their strongpoints. Later in the day, Bourdan and his fellow officers were eating dinner in the home of a grateful Parisian family when sniper fire shattered their windows. Bourdan ran to the windows with a gun in one hand and an elegant linen napkin in the other. The odd juxtaposition of peace and war was commonplace. Pascale Moisson recalled simultaneously hearing church bells ringing in celebration and the reports of German 37 mm cannon. More romantically, the teenaged Gilles Perrault remembered seeing lipstick-streaked soldiers firing shots at Germans in between kisses from the local girls. “I suddenly felt a military vocation coming on,” he recollected. Parisians, he noted, were too choked up to talk, but the men of the Deuxième Division Blindée had come to fight first and celebrate later. As one of them told him, “my boy, no emotions, we have serious work to do.” Perrault knew then that “this was going to be a day worth living, even if it were the last.”11
Despite the joy, those soldiers who talked to Perrault knew that Paris wasn’t free just yet. Key remaining German strongpoints included the École Militaire opposite the Champ de Mars from the Eiffel Tower; the Quai d’Orsay; the Assemblée Nationale; the Kom-mandantur on the Place de l’Opéra; and the Hôtel Crillon and the Navy Ministry on the Place de la Concorde. The latter positions protected the Hôtel Meurice from any attack coming from the direction of the Champs Élysées. The two most important German positions remained the Palais du Luxembourg and the Prince Eugène barracks on the Place de la République. The prewar home to the French Senate, the Palais du Luxembourg was the Paris headquarters of the Luftwaffe during the war, and it was heavily guarded by hundreds of SS and regular German forces as well as by the tanks parked in the palace’s magnificent gardens. Rumors continued to spread throughout the city that the Germans had placed several tons of explosives in the palace’s underground passageways. Evacuations from the surrounding Odéon quarter continued in case the Germans decided to blow the palace up rather than surrender it.
The Prince Eugène barracks on the Place de la République, capable of housing more than three thousand men, presented a different kind of problem. Originally built by Napoleon III, the rectangular place had replaced a warren of narrow streets equally famous for its theaters and its antigovernment activity during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The placement of the barracks allowed the soldiers stationed there to use the wide avenues radiating from their quarters to deploy quickly to almost any spot in the working-class districts of northeastern Paris. A century later, those same districts, called the “red quarters,” formed the core of the Parisian opposition to the German occupation. The strategic importance of the Prince Eugène barracks had hardly diminished in eighty years. For that reason, the FFI had targeted the location with enough men and weapons to prevent the garrison from leaving. They did not, however, have enough firepower to force its surrender.12
Much of the fighting on August 25 was done with small arms, but it was inte
nse nevertheless. Jacques Massu, then a battalion commander under Langlade, estimated that his men, covered in lipstick though they were, killed forty to forty-five German soldiers between their entry into the city and their arrival at the Arc de Triomphe. Combat intensified as his men moved down the Champs Élysées toward the Place de la Concorde, the scene of some of the bitterest fighting of the liberation. It was here that Irwin Shaw saw a member of the FFI proudly show off the helmet of a German soldier he had just killed, which was “full of brains and blood.” It was also here that he saw the odd sight of an American soldier negotiating the surrender of a German detachment using the only language he knew that the Germans could understand—Yiddish.13
Also of great concern to the liberators was the guerre des toits, the war of the rooftops. Snipers fired repeatedly into the crowds that had gathered to welcome the Allies, often sending people scurrying for cover and causing hundreds of casualties. Exactly who did the shooting and why remains unclear, but most people at the time assumed it was the work of a few diehard members of the Vichy paramilitary force, the Milice. They may have been trying to kill leading FFI members to prevent them from assuming leadership roles in postwar France, or they may have just been trying to spoil the party. The staff of the U.S. First Army saw the sniping as evidence of an ongoing “war between French political parties, collaborationists and anti-collaborationists” that had to be stopped before it descended into outright civil war.14
The Blood of Free Men Page 27
