Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History)

by Alexander M. Grace

  0600 HOURS, 23 APRIL 1943

  MELUN, FRANCE

  By any reckoning, the advance of Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division over the past sixty hours had been historic. They had covered over ninety miles and fought a more or less constant running battle against the scattered but still undefeated Germans. They had killed hundreds of the enemy, destroyed dozens of vehicles, and taken nearly three thousand prisoners, usually pausing only long enough to disarm them and turn them over to whatever handful of local residents they could find willing to stand guard. They had been given virtually all of the fuel available to the entire French Army at the front, and more had been airdropped to them yesterday, and now they were running on fumes still a good ten miles from the center of Paris. It seemed that Patton, while lending some support to the French drive, had harbored a fierce desire of his own for there to be an American hand in the liberation of Paris, and the 1st Armored Division from his own Fifth Army was also driving on the city from the southwest. Needless to say, it did not appear that the Americans were suffering from as acute a shortage of supplies as the French.

  Leclerc was faced with the disagreeable possibility of having to leave part of his division behind in order to have enough fuel for the remainder to reach the city. The problem with that scenario was that even a single division might not be what the German von Stulpnagel considered “sufficient” force for him to be justified in evacuating Paris under force majeur. The arrival of a single tank regiment might merely provoke him into carrying out Hitler’s plans for the destruction of the city without Leclerc having enough strength on hand to stop him. Even the insertion of two commando brigades ahead of his column, an idea suggested by de Gaulle at the last minute which cut a few hours off the French arrival time and added some much-needed infantry support, was really a minimal force for a city the size of Paris.

  Leclerc was sitting on the hood of his jeep by the side of the road, pondering this dilemma when the captain of a recon company presented himself, saluted, and asked permission to consult with the general over a prisoner. Leclerc hardly had the time or patience now to discuss prisoners, an issue of no importance, but he raised his head and found an elderly German officer, a colonel by his insignia, under the guard of two troopers, standing at stiff attention. The German saluted and clicked his heels.

  “He insists on surrendering only to the senior officer present, sir,” the captain explained.

  “Well, now he’s done so,” Leclerc growled. “Toss him in the schoolyard with the others. I’ve got other things on my mind.”

  “But he insists on your signature, sir,” the captain persisted.

  “My signature on what?” Leclerc snapped, losing patience.

  “He seems to be custodian for a supply dump of 120,000 gallons of fuel, and he wants to make certain that he’s not accused later of having sold it on the black market.” The captain smiled.

  0900 HOURS, 25 APRIL 1943

  PARIS, FRANCE

  By late morning on the 23rd the truce was breaking down fast. The Communist FTP units had only observed it grudgingly in any event. There was no central command for all the forces of the resistance for Paris, even though Jean Moulin had arrived in the city several days before to attempt to coordinate the negotiations with Nordling and von Stulpnagel on de Gaulle’s behalf. There was also a lack of command and control on the German side, with rabid SS units aggressively attacking positions held by the French and the even more rabid pro-Axis milice, knowing what their fate would be if and when the Germans departed, conducting a brutal extermination campaign while they still had the support of the Wehrmacht.

  The Germans held most of the heart of the city, centered on the Place de la Concorde where Stulpnagel’s headquarters were located, as well as the Palais de Luxembourg on the left bank and the large train stations, the Gare du Nord, Orlean, and Lyon. The French held most of the industrial suburbs, and the area immediately around the Ile de la Cité in the center of the city. The flow of retreating German troops had turned into a trickle now, and those few who remained west of the city were primarily being routed northward along the coast. But von Stulpnagel still had about 20,000 men under his command between two understrength infantry divisions, some Luftwaffe troops manning anti-aircraft defenses, SS police units, and headquarters troops. There were also upwards of 15,000 German wounded in Paris area hospitals that had yet to be evacuated to the Reich. The French had dismantled the demolitions equipment on many of the bridges, public buildings, and monuments throughout the city, but if the Germans were to detonate the devices they still controlled, the devastation would be tremendous.

  Nordling, a comfortable, bourgeois sort of man, not fitted by physique or temperament for the frantic shuttling about an embattled city between resistance leaders, the Germans, and now the advance command posts of the Allies, was finally able to work out a simple, yet machiavellian formula for the surrender of the city. The German forces in von Stulpnagel’s command were divided into three categories: the defenseless or harmless, such as the wounded or unarmed headquarters troops; the fanatics, like the SS; and the professionally competent regular troops. The first and second categories would be immediately evacuated from the city by all means available, along certain designated routes, and these evacuations would not be interfered with by the French. The final category, troops who still maintained their organizational discipline and could be relied upon to follow orders, of which there were relatively few left, would continue to fight for a few key points in the city, both to provide time for the evacuation and to give the illusion of greater resistance for the distant observers in OKH.

  Against all hope, this arrangement worked reasonably well. With the assistance of French railwaymen, all of the German wounded who could be moved were entrained and sent off to the east, while the posting of the most zealous units to supposedly higher priority assignments closer to the German frontier avoided the creation of any diehard pockets that might have resisted to the last and destroyed part of the city along with themselves. All of this was accomplished by dawn on the 24th, with the equivalent of one German division making a series of timed withdrawals northward through the city as Leclerc’s troops arrived, almost without bloodshed. The Germans, it turned out, had little problem with leaving Laval’s collaborationist followers to their fate. There were some summary executions around the city, and the symbolic shaving of the heads of some women accused of “fraternization” with the occupying forces, but Leclerc’s soldiers and the French commandos were able to avoid most excesses and establish order quickly. In fact, the only party wholly dissatisfied with the solution was Patton, whose vanguard only reached the neighborhood of Versailles, still some miles from the city, when the last of the German forces withdrew and the city was declared liberated.

  A series of messages flew back and forth between Washington, London, and Lyon, where Marshall had established his new headquarters, about timing for the “formal” liberation of Paris and provisions for the new French government. However, these messages ended up having no basis in reality as the French occupation of the city had taken authority out of the hands of the other Allies. De Gaulle disembarked from a C-47 at Le Bourget airfield on the morning of the 25th, and, in a motorcade accompanied by Juin, Koenig, Leclerc, Moulin, and a host of pre-war French political leaders improvised a parade of victory. The column was obliged to circle the city from the north in order to enter from the west and have the procession advance along the length of the Champs Elysees, past the Hotel de Ville, to where a te deum would be sung at Notre Dame cathedral.

  The parade formed up on the avenue just west of the Arc de Triomphe, and, along with some of Leclerc’s tanks, companies of commandos, and small detachments of colorful Foreign Legionnaires and North African spahis, the French were gracious enough to invite Patton to participate along with a contingent of American troops. Virtually the entire population of the city turned out to line the avenue and crowd the place in front of the cathedral. Some of de Gaulle’s advisors counsel
ed against the ceremony, since collaborationist forces were still loose within the city, and snipers could be lurking anywhere along the miles-long parade route, but de Gaulle ignored them. In fact, small arms fire could occasionally be heard near at hand over the cheering of the crowd, but no overt acts of violence occurred to mar the day. De Gaulle had seen his visibly taking possession of the city, on his own, without the support of—even in defiance of—the other Allies as an important step in the reestablishment of the French state. In addition, the drama of his gesture virtually ensured his own dominance of the French political scene, although, by this time there were few serious competitors left in the field.

  CHAPTER 9

  COUP

  1200 HOURS, 24 JUNE 1943

  TEHERAN, IRAN

  IN THE MONTH or so following the liberation of Paris, something like a lull occurred on the Western Front. Allied armies continued to advance at a prodigious rate for some time in the north, up to the prepared German defenses of the Siegfried Line along the old Franco-German border and to a new line established by the Germans running from Antwerp southeast along the Belgian-Dutch border to join that line near the Ardennes. The meticulous sabotage of all French ports on the Atlantic and Channel coasts continued to hinder Allied logistical efforts, and bitter German resistance at Antwerp kept the largest port in northern Europe out of Allied hands, making it necessary for the Allies to pause for the reorganization, reinforcement, and resupply of their armies before plunging on into the Reich. In Italy, British troops had captured Turin, and a combined Anglo Italian army battered at Kesselring’s line in the Appennines, but everything south of Florence was now in Allied hands. On the air front, no corner of the shrinking German empire was now out of range of Allied bombers with fighter escorts, and the Luftwaffe had been virtually swept from the sky. What air forces remained to the Germans were limited to defensive fighters, hopelessly outnumbered, and only marginally effective in blunting the hammer blows of the bomber fleets on German cities.

  The fast pace of the war made it clear to all parties that another major political military conference was called for, and, with Allied armies now on the borders of the Reich in the west, it was increasingly evident that Stalin would need to be included in any such talks. It was obvious that a new summit meeting would not have as its primary agenda the strictly military issue of how to defeat the Germans, since their ultimate defeat was now virtually a foregone conclusion, but of the shape of the new Europe that would emerge from the ashes of the war. Although there was a certain desire among the Western Allies, notably Churchill, to exclude the Russians from such planning, especially since the Red Army was still well within its own borders, Roosevelt and de Gaulle convinced him that any agreement reached without Soviet participation would be moot when the Russians did come boiling into Eastern Europe, and the mere fact that talks had been held without them might sour East-West relations for years.

  The Soviet leader’s paranoid fear of travelling outside his own empire, however, complicated matters, while the alternative of travel to Moscow was still dangerous and time-consuming, to say nothing of uncomfortable, for a man in Roosevelt’s condition. It was finally agreed that Teheran would be the meeting place since Iran had been jointly occupied by the British and Russians the previous year, giving Persia something of the air of neutral ground. It would still be an arduous journey for Roosevelt but would eliminate several days of travel from a Washington-to-Moscow trip. Facilities for meetings at this level were not exactly abundant in Teheran during this period, and the security officers of all of the delegations must have aged visibly as they attempted to ensure the safety of the participants in what was essentially a Wild West town, capital of a country that had been conquered by armed force only months before. With Axis agents known to be swarming throughout the region, the potential for a major disaster was always present.

  The conference had originally been planned for late May, but a major German offensive on the Eastern Front, an attempt to destroy the Russian salient at Kursk through a pincer movement by Army Groups Center and South, had caused a postponement. This had been the largest German offensive in the East since Stalingrad, and Stalin had been leery of going into a conference when word of a significant defeat for his armies might arrive. The Red Army had had little trouble dealing a crushing blow to the Germans, however, since much of the German armor had been siphoned off for Rommel’s ill-fated assault in France, and the concentration of Luftwaffe resources on protecting the Reich had given the Red Air Force superiority for the first time in the war. The German armies were now reeling back toward the 1939 borders, and Stalin felt he could deal from a position of strength.

  Allied victories in the European Theatre had also benefited their efforts in the war against Japan. All of the Commonwealth’s Australian and New Zealand troops had been shifted from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, and a substantial portion of the Indian Army as well. The addition of the French, and more recently the Italian, fleets to the Allied armory, along with their merchant marines, had freed more shipping for the Allied forces in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific as well. General MacArthur’s campaign in New Guinea had been thoroughly successful, driving the Japanese back and eliminating the last serious threat to current Allied territory. Japan would remain on the strategic defensive for the remainder of the war, merely awaiting Allied pleasure to divert sufficient strength from the battle against Germany to crush the island empire once and for all.

  Despite the Allies’ favorable strategic position, or perhaps precisely because of it, the conference promised to present a political minefield for all parties. The preceding April the Germans had sprung a surprise on the West by inviting teams of the International Red Cross to investigate mass graves discovered near the town of Katyn in eastern Poland. While mass graves were hardly a novelty in either Germany or the Soviet Union in these days, the Germans called attention to these because the interred happened to be several thousand, possibly as many as ten thousand, Polish Army officers, most with their hands tied behind their backs and a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. The number roughly corresponded to the number of Polish officers captured by the Red Army during its seizure of eastern Poland in 1939.

  At first the West gave this report no more credence than some of the other “big lies” generated by Goebbels’ propaganda machine, but evidence from unimpeachable sources soon accumulated. It should be remembered that, at this time, names like Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau had no meaning in the West, and even the extent of Stalin’s own purges of the 1930s and his willful starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants remained in the realm of vague and hardly creditable rumor. News of such a slaughter, therefore, landed like a bombshell in the West, particularly in London. Britain had entered the war originally in defense of Poland, and the Polish government-in-exile was housed there. A full corps of Polish troops, grown to three infantry divisions, an armored division, and a parachute brigade, were now in strategic reserve, having participated in clearing the Germans out of the western half of France. With Soviet armies now poised to invade the former territory of Poland, this evidence of Stalin’s treatment of the Poles was highly significant.

  Without getting into details of the Teheran Conference that would better be left for a history of the diplomatic aspects of the war, the discussions laid the groundwork for the subsequent military campaigns. Stalin was eager to create a sphere of influence for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, and there was little doubt that, under Soviet tutelage, only Communist-dominated governments would be allowed to survive there, providing Russia with a buffer of friendly states for protection against a West that Stalin had little cause to trust after Munich. However, despite the recent victories of the Red Army, the battle line was still well within Russia’s 1939 boundaries, while those of the Western Allies were poised to carry the war into German territory. Roosevelt and Churchill were thus in a position to deny Stalin a specified “occupation zone” in Germany.

  In fact, Stal
in felt his political position deteriorating hourly as he attempted to take a hard stance against the West. Officials of both the Romanian and Hungarian governments had been known to have sent peace feelers, not to Moscow, but to the West. Even Tito, the diehard Communist partisan in Yugoslavia, was now receiving the bulk of his military support in arms shipments across the Adriatic from British-occupied Italy and even direct air support from British and American bombers, whereas Stalin could only offer political commissars skilled in purging Tito’s own military of anyone suspected of harboring anti Russian sentiments. Tito, more a pragmatist than a Communist after all, was visibly drifting into the Western orbit.

  Churchill thus discounted Stalin’s unilateral offer to carve up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence on a kind of percentage basis. As much as the concept appealed to Churchill with his penchant for balance of power politics, the odds were simply too good that all of the minor Axis powers would desert the Reich en masse for the West as soon as any chance presented itself for slipping the German yoke.

  Only on the subject of territorial aggrandizement did Stalin achieve any of his goals. Although the Atlantic Charter had specifically rejected the idea of territorial gain from the war, the Allies finally accepted the 1939 borders of the Soviet Union as valid. Previously they had consistently opposed Stalin’s seizure of Finnish territory in 1940, the occupation of the Baltic States and Moldavia, and of the conquest of the eastern third of Poland in connivance with Germany in 1939. On a philosophical level, the Allies could not deny that much of this territory had formerly been Russian and had been lost to the victorious Germans in the First World War. On a more pragmatic level, Russian troops were either already in possession of all of this territory, or soon would be, and it seemed better to marshal the West’s resources to fight battles with more of a chance of success. However, Churchill stood fast, with Roosevelt’s lukewarm support, on the issue of Polish independence, and Stalin quietly shelved plans to attempt to form a rival, Communist government-in-exile made up of the handful of Poles resident in the Soviet Union who had not already fallen in Stalin’s relentless purges. The Poles, meanwhile, would be compensated with German territory to the west, and the rump state of East Prussia would disappear from the map, eliminating an anomaly that had been one of the prime causes of German revanchism after the last war. Hundreds of thousands of people would undoubtedly be displaced, but the Allies considered this a small price to pay for stability. Also, Stalin pointed out that the new borders would give the Soviet Union a common frontier with Czechoslovakia and Hungary as well, noting that, if the Soviets had had a means of putting troops into Czechoslovakia without crossing a third country’s territory in 1938, there might never have been a Munich “sell out,” and the war might never have taken place. Churchill took the slap at British policy in good part, mainly because he tended to agree.