Eleven Days in August

by Matthew Cobb

  The situation in the suburbs was just as tense as in the capital. In Montreuil, to the east, the Germans put up posters warning that for every German soldier who was killed, fifty French hostages would be shot in front of the Mairie.61 Given that the Mairie was by now firmly in the hands of the Resistance, it was not clear how this threat would be carried out, and indeed it never was. At Neuilly on the western side of the city, Resistance fighters seized the Mairie but were soon under fire from a determined German counter-attack commanded by Colonel Jay. After a firefight that led to around a dozen deaths on each side, the Germans smashed their way into the building and seventy résistants were taken prisoner. A period of negotiation between Jay and the deposed collaborationist Mayor of Neuilly followed, and all but twenty-one of the prisoners were released, on the spurious basis that they were not fighters but air-raid wardens or members of the Red Cross. Turning a blind eye to the subterfuge, Jay said that the released men should return the next day with their papers to prove their non-combatant status. Two days later, the remaining French prisoners were exchanged for German soldiers held by the Resistance.62 Despite the ferocity of the counter-attack against the Mairie, Jay had not displayed anything like the savage ruthlessness that von Choltitz had ordered his men to show.

  There was another sign of the changing balance of power in front of the Hôtel de Ville, where a German soldier threatened the crowd with his gun, and people dived for cover. Yves Cazaux was watching from his office window in the Hôtel de Ville; to his amazement he saw a young woman on a bicycle, her skirt blowing halfway up her thighs, riding by without a thought of the danger inherent in the situation. The German did nothing. ‘She knew what was happening,’ wrote Cazaux, who felt the young woman’s confident, devil-may-care attitude symbolised a fundamental shift in the attitude of the population, ‘Right now it is impossible not to feel the weight of the storm that is about to break.’63

  At the end of the day, the Resistance controlled forty-three out of the eighty neighbourhoods in the city and had clearly gained the initiative.64 In some neighbourhoods, such as Batignolles, the fighting had begun early in the morning, at the same time as the Préfecture was being occupied, and had carried on throughout the day.65 The scale of the insurrection understandably alarmed the German troops. Inside the Senate building Quartermaster Wallraf began to feel uncomfortable; shooting had been going on all day, and the common view among the German soldiers there was that they were poorly defended and that a sustained attack by the Resistance would be successful. The commanding officer attempted to rally his troops: ‘Believe me – our General, the new Wehrmacht commander, doesn’t mess around. When the moment is right, he will use drastic measures. You can count on it, gentlemen!’66

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  For those not involved in the fighting, everyday life presented its own challenges. Georges Benoît-Guyod queued at four different bakers before he was finally able to buy a small loaf of ash-coloured bread that looked, smelt and tasted unpleasant and was not even properly cooked.67 At 06:00, journalist Edmond Dubois went out to buy some ice for his cousin’s wedding reception – power cuts meant his refrigerator did not work, and the champagne was disappointingly warm. The city was still calm, but when the small wedding party arrived at the Mairie of the 12th arrondissement at 10:15, the flag was flying. The mayor married the couple in double-quick time and they rode back across the city to Dubois’ flat, dodging bullets at the Palais Royal and at place de l’Opéra. The wedding lunch was a frugal affair: tinned vegetables, pâté sandwiches and jam and bread. At least the champagne was cold.68

  Not all Parisians were happy about what was happening. Daniel Boisdon feared that the communists were behind the seizure of the Préfecture, and that the uprising might lead to the destruction of Notre Dame or the Sainte-Chapelle – the two Gothic marvels situated on either side of the Préfecture. He could not see the military sense in the events, and – in his diary at least – he was scornful about the antics of some of the résistants. He got talking to a man who had stopped fighting because he had run out of ammunition: ‘His sole weapon was a 6.5 mm Browning pistol, with one charger! In his big hand it looked like a piece of jewellery. And he had used it to fire point blank at a tank. Idiot! Still, I gave him a warm handshake.’69

  Some Parisians had other preoccupations. Odette Lainville had intended to take Adèle and Suzanne, the two Jewish girls who were hiding in her apartment, back to their mother on the other side of the river. But as Odette and the girls approached the place Saint-Michel they heard the sound of machine-gun fire and saw the crowd scattering to safety, people running half-crouched. A couple of German motorcyclists with sidecars roared by and Odette and the girls dived for cover in a doorway. It was impossible to get through. Returning home, they had to take several long diversions to avoid German patrols or roadblocks. The girls would have to stay with the Lainvilles for at least another day.70

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  Because the Paris Resistance did not have sufficient weapons to liberate the city, the success or failure of the insurrection would ultimately be determined by the situation on the Western Front. Things were bleak for the Germans: conditions within the Falaise pocket grew increasingly difficult as Allied troops began to close the opening around Trun; the Third US Army was moving north from Argentan, while the Canadians were moving south from Falaise. Lieutenant-General Elfeldt, commander of the 84th Army Corps which was in the midst of the fighting, later described their situation: ‘Concentrated artillery fire and heavy attacks produced more and more casualties. The situation with regard to ammunition, rations and fuel became critical.’71 Hans Höller of the 21st Panzer Division recalled: ‘Ambulances packed with wounded were carbonised. Ammunition exploded, Panzers blazed and horses lay on their backs kicking their legs in their death throes. The same chaos extended in the fields far and wide. Artillery and armour-piercing rounds came from either side into the milling crowd.’72 Eventually, orders were given to prepare a breakout to safety by attacking the Allies north of Trun that night; cover would be provided by the 2nd SS Panzer Corps, safe on the other side of the Dives river.73 However, the Panzer Corps had no fuel or ammunition, and Elfeldt discovered that the orders were suicidally impractical because of the density of Allied forces and the nature of the terrain. When he tried to explain this to the field commander, the man was nowhere to be found.74 Communications were breaking down, increasing the mood of fear and panic among the German troops.

  As to what would happen next, von Choltitz correctly expected the Allies to pursue the German Army around the city rather than making their way through it. As he said to a colleague at the end of August: ‘I never, never thought that the French or English armies would enter Paris in order to destroy the city. That was the only way I could be able to carry out my task [of defending the city]. I told myself: “If Paris is here, our fellows will go round on the outskirts, close the rear – in this way you may be able to carry out the job.”’75 In the morning, the Allies liberated Mantes, sixty-five kilometres north-west of the capital, and crossed the Seine, creating a bridgehead on the eastern bank; they had made a decisive breakthrough. From the cliffs above the river, General Patton could see the German command post at La Roche-Guyon, which Field Marshal Model had evacuated a few hours earlier. Model’s headquarters were now in Margival, ninety kilometres to the north-east of Paris, a site far from the fighting for the time being.76

  During the day the Allies attacked at Neauphle, eighteen kilometres west of Versailles, and broke through. The Germans fell back and a new defensive line was established under General von Aulock. His orders were to enable the 5th Panzer Army and the 7th Army, both currently caught up in the hell of the Falaise pocket, to retreat to safety over the Seine. Although this line was armed with a large number of anti-aircraft guns, these were all immobile, dug in to defend the region against air attack. Even worse, most of their crew were young, inexperienced men who had not been trained in ground battle.77 Von Aulock and von Choltitz sought to integrate this lin
e into the communications network that ran between the various German strong-points within the city, but they failed. There was now little prospect of a coordinated defence of the city. The main Luftwaffe air base to the north of the city – Le Bourget – was evacuated, leaving the Germans without any air bases in the region.78 The German defensive line would not hold for long against the armoured might of the Allied Army that was about to come crashing out of the west, and without air cover the Germans would be picked off.

  The chaotic and inadequate nature of the German defences led the Allied High Command to wonder if things could possibly go any better. In a caustic note, an intelligence operative at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces pondered the impact of the attempt on Hitler’s life and asked a surprising question: ‘Two things are certain. The enemy has lost the war and the defeat of Seventh Army and Panzer Gruppe West will hasten the end. One thing is uncertain. Would it have been more profitable for the Allies if Hitler’s bomb had been a better and bigger one? Or ought the Allies to feel grateful that he has lived to continue his strategic blunders?’79

  One man with a personal reason to wonder what might have happened if Hitler had been killed was Field Marshal von Kluge, who had been replaced by Model and had been recalled to Berlin. Early in the morning, von Kluge left La Roche-Guyon for Germany and almost certain disgrace and death. In the early afternoon, his chauffeur stopped by a field near Compiègne, eighty kilometres north-east of Paris; von Kluge spread a rug on the ground and took cyanide. His suicide was kept quiet for some time; with his usual warped misperception, Hitler was convinced that von Kluge had been on his way to a rendezvous with Allied troops.80 In his suicide letter von Kluge stated that Hitler was responsible for the collapse in the west, and pleaded with his Führer to consider surrender: ‘If your new weapons have no effect, particularly in the air, you must end the war . . . The German people have suffered so unspeakably that it is high time to make an end to this horror.’81 Von Kluge’s appeal went unheeded. The horror would not end for another nine months. Over this period, hundreds of thousands of people would die pointlessly.82

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  Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul in Paris, had saved the lives of hundreds of French prisoners through his negotiations with von Choltitz. On this morning he decided that he could play an even more important role. As Nordling explained to the Swiss diplomat René Naville, he intended to broker an agreement between von Choltitz and the Resistance to save lives and avoid unnecessary destruction. Naville agreed to support him in this so long as it was clear that they were acting purely for humanitarian ends.83 Shortly after taking this momentous decision, Nordling found himself in the middle of the excitement and chaos of the Préfecture occupation. Unaware that the Resistance had seized the building, Nordling had turned up at the Préfecture hoping to see the Vichy Prefect, Bussière; instead, he had been taken to see Bussière’s Free French replacement, Charles Luizet, who was meeting with other Resistance leaders, including Rol.84 Nordling told the résistants that he was willing to play the role of intermediary between the Germans and the Resistance. Luizet ignored the offer and coldly replied that if the Germans massacred defenceless civilians the Resistance would carry out reprisals against German prisoners – including hospitalised men.85

  If the Resistance was unimpressed by Nordling’s proposal, von Choltitz was even less receptive. When Nordling and Naville went to see von Choltitz in the afternoon, the German commander was in a foul mood, shouting that the Resistance were ‘scoundrels’ and threatening the city with destruction: ‘If this goes on, I’ll have to use stronger methods. I have orders to destroy the city before we leave.’86

  Although Nordling was not getting anywhere with either side, other forces were undermining the confidence of the Free French leadership in Paris. In the morning, Parodi endorsed the call for insurrection, and at lunchtime, during a meeting in a safe house near the Eiffel Tower, he agreed that Rol should have complete control over all Resistance forces in the Paris region including the police and the gendarmerie.87 However, no sooner had Rol left the apartment than a man who described himself as ‘the head of the Intelligence Service in Paris’ knocked on the door. This was Colonel Ollivier of the MI6 JADE-AMICOL circuit, and he had no compunction in scolding Parodi for his behaviour, even though it was the first time the two men had met: ‘You have launched the insurrection far too soon. You are at the mercy of the Germans. Several German divisions are retreating and will have to cross the Seine in or around Paris. You will be unable to resist them. The Americans will not arrive before Wednesday, and by then you may have been crushed.’88

  The vigour of Ollivier’s criticism shook the younger man’s confidence, and when the spy offered to ask the Allied High Command to come to Paris as soon as possible, Parodi naturally accepted in a flash. Shortly afterwards, Parodi met with Chaban and Pré, and the military delegates both made it clear that they thought the decision to start fighting was pure folly. Repeating Ollivier’s critique, Chaban attacked Parodi’s decision to back the insurrection that morning – it was premature, he said, as the Americans would not be in Paris for at least another four days, and the Resistance would be crushed by the Germans. Furthermore, Parodi had disobeyed the orders that Chaban had brought back from London, which were – as they always had been – to restrain the insurrection until the Free French arrived. Chaban said brutally to his comrade: ‘When you’ve done something stupid, you shouldn’t be surprised at the consequences.’89

  Clearly shaken, Parodi tried to put an end to the debate by saying that if he had made a mistake, he would regret it for the rest of his life, but for now the key question was how to regain the initiative in a city that was buzzing with revolution. He sent an urgent message to General Koenig, describing the situation in the capital, urging the Allies to move on Paris as soon as possible, justifying his decision to support the insurrection on political grounds: ‘Have asked Colonel IS [Ollivier] to cable Allied Command requesting immediate Allied occupation Paris. Same urgent request sent by messenger. I request it again directly from you now to avoid possible reprisals. Believe mood of population did not allow delay of insurrection order. Would have caused split between population and Delegation. Present situation dangerous.’90

  The question of whether it had been the right time to launch the insurrection could be left until later; the Delegation was now faced with the far more pressing problem of what to do about the Préfecture. Hamon arrived at the safe house, bringing a desperate appeal for more weapons and ammunition. The Delegation had neither. When the situation was explained to General Dassault, the head of the Front National armed groups, he quickly came to the conclusion that the Préfecture would have to be evacuated.91 After a brief discussion, Parodi drew up an order along these lines, and Hamon left with the fateful message.

  In itself, proposing the evacuation of the Préfecture was not a betrayal. Rol’s General Order to the FFI, issued that morning, did not make the seizure of public buildings a matter of principle, but rather an objective to be attained ‘wherever possible’.92 Furthermore, despite Hamon’s account, the situation inside the Préfecture was unclear. It was later said that policemen brought five tons of weapons and ammunition into the Préfecture during the night of 19–20 August.93 While this seems unlikely, on 22 August there was an audit of all the weapons inside the Préfecture and the adjoining barracks. The figures reveal a complete hotchpotch – there were 92 automatic weapons (some with little or no ammunition), 111 rifles of varying kinds and nearly 400 handguns. There were no heavy weapons, with the sole exception of a captured German light anti-aircraft gun that had a mere 130 shells – enough for few minutes of combat.94 FFI leaders Dufresne and Rol subsequently claimed these figures ‘spoke for themselves’ and indicated the existence of ‘important stocks’ of weapons and ammunition.95 However, even if these figures reflected the true state of the Préfecture on the evening of 19 August, the weaponry they represented would not have enabled the men in the bu
ilding to respond to a sustained attack by the Germans.

  Because of the intensity of the fighting, Hamon was unable to get through to the Préfecture, so he telephoned police Resistance leader Fournet and told him that the building must be evacuated to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. Over the previous four days, ingrained respect for authority had enabled the police to obey without question some very unusual orders, such as going on strike or fighting the Germans while wearing civilian clothes. But this was one instruction they would not obey. Fournet replied for all the men present: ‘Tell those gentlemen that we will not leave, even if we die here!’96

  Shortly afterwards, a crucial event changed the course of the insurrection. At around 19:00, Raoul Nordling received a telephone call from someone inside the building, saying that the Germans were preparing a massive attack and that the résistants lacked both weapons and ammunition. Nearly seventy years later, it is still unclear who made the call, but its consequences were substantial.97 Nordling took it as ‘a call for help’ and decided to activate his plan for a deal between the Resistance and the Germans.98 The spy Bender was sent to talk with the German command at the Hôtel Meurice, while Nordling telephoned the Préfecture and asked if they would accept a cease-fire if the Germans also agreed. The FFI were not informed about what was going on (Rol learnt of the negotiations only the next morning).99 Unsurprisingly, the Free French Delegation was heavily involved and even informed Algiers, although the message was not received for another eight days.100