Eleven Days in August

by Matthew Cobb

  While this was going on, de Guillebon’s column was continuing its illicit operation in the east. They had been helped earlier in the day by Colonel Bruce of OSS, who had been hanging about in Rambouillet waiting for something to happen. For some time, the precise location of the Leclerc Division had been a mystery. As Bruce wrote in his diary: ‘Nobody had been able to tell us exactly where General Leclerc’s Second Armoured French Division is located. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, it is said to have been seen here, there and everywhere.’65 When Bruce eventually tracked down de Guillebon’s group ‘in a wheat field beyond Nogent-le-Roi’, he gave the Frenchman information about the situation around Rambouillet.66 Confident that there would be few problems, at around lunchtime de Guillebon sent small armoured groups westwards, towards Rambouillet and Arpajon. For Bruce, this boldness was in stark contrast to the apparent conservatism of the Allied Supreme Command, as he explained in his diary: ‘Nobody can understand the present Allied strategy. General Patton’s Third American Army has been in a position for several days to take Paris. Two of his Divisions are across the Seine and have moved North. There are no German forces of consequence between us and the capital.’67

  De Guillebon’s men found the population of Rambouillet in the streets, celebrating their liberation, while at Arpajon, only thirty kilometres from Paris, the locals told the Free French soldiers that there was only one anti-aircraft battery and a single German strong-point between them and the capital. In the evening, resting at Arpajon, de Guillebon radioed this information back to the 2e DB headquarters and explained that the next day he would enter Paris from the south. However, he was ordered instead to clear the road to Paris via Versailles, which he knew was heavily defended, and which seemed to offer no advantages over the safer, southern approach to the city. Perplexed, and convinced that his message had not been understood, de Guillebon repeated his signal, but got no response. Frustrated but a man of discipline, de Guillebon decided to wait until 07:00 the next morning, hoping to receive approval from his superiors for what looked like a straightforward move on the capital.68

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  In Paris, the collapse of transportation and the disappearance of commerce in the region meant that wheelbarrows were being used to cart flour and wood to the bakers’ shops, while only a handful of grocers were open, selling a recently arrived sugar ration.69 Inevitably, there were long queues and the food that was available soon sold out. As Jean Galtier-Boissière walked up the rue Saint-Jacques shortly after 08:00, he heard the cry ‘No more bread!’ coming from the boulangeries.70

  Von Choltitz was well aware of the critical state of the food supply, and in the afternoon he received a visit from René Naville, the Swiss legate, and Dr de Morsier of the Red Cross, who that morning had organised a prisoner exchange – fifty wounded German prisoners were exchanged for fifty French prisoners.71 Now the issue was food. Flour supplies in the city would run out in two days’ time, and the two men wanted the German commander to allow 100 lorries to drive to the massive flour silos fifty kilometres to the east of Paris, where over 800 tons of flour was stored. Von Choltitz agreed, but as he then had to get the agreement of all the German authorities and broadcast a message to the Allies, it was more than thirty-six hours before the first vehicles left the capital, flying white flags and with their roofs painted red and blue, the colours of Paris.72 In the meantime, people continued to go hungry.

  Those who ventured out to find food discovered that the renewed fighting posed massive problems. Jean Guéhenno reported sporadic but lethal gunfire: ‘German tanks were patrolling. As I was about to cross the boulevard Sébastopol, one of the tanks fired 30 metres in front of me, decapitating a woman, ripping a man’s guts out. Strange as it may seem, 50 metres away, in the side-streets, people were sitting on their doorsteps, chatting.’73 This contrast between armed conflict and everyday affairs was lyrically described by Paul Tuffrau, after walking near the Jardin du Luxembourg: ‘This strange life continues: intermittent explosions, some chatter, the sound of a piano playing, windows opening, then children play at marbles or hopscotch, turning their heads or rushing to hide in a doorway for a minute only when firing breaks out.’74

  A short distance away, the Germans attacked the Mairie of the 5th arrondissement, by the Panthéon, killing several FFI fighters. The sound of the gunfire could be heard some distance away and alarmed Jean Galtier-Boissière.75 Odette Lainville’s husband, Robert, got caught up in a firefight at the Hôtel de Ville: ‘German tanks turned up . . . they were soon joined by two lorries and a motorcyclist wearing the field-grey uniform of the Wehrmacht. The hatch of one of the tanks opened and a soldier got out to talk to the motorcyclist; the moment was very tense. Suddenly a shot rang out from the ranks of the Resistance, and the motorcyclist fell to the ground. Then gunfire crackled from everywhere.’76

  This was only one of a series of confrontations around the Hôtel de Ville that day. In the morning, tanks had fired on the building and had been fruitlessly peppered with small-arms fire, the bullets pinging off the armour. Then, in the early afternoon, Léo Hamon was in his office when more firing broke out. He dived to the floor but carried on his telephone conversation. Shortly afterwards the FFI seized a lorry, killing the driver; according to one report, up to twenty Germans were dead.77 In the early evening there was yet another firefight and cases of ammunition were bravely – or foolhardily – dragged from a burning lorry by the FFI. When Hamon went to congratulate the people involved, he found they were part of the elite squad stationed in the Hôtel de Ville by Laval a few days earlier to ‘protect’ Herriot, and had simply switched sides.78

  The sight of so much apparent unity between the disparate forces of the Resistance led some Parisians to hope that this situation might continue after the war. Odette Lainville wrote in her diary: ‘I like to think of all these young people who are today fraternally united by the same love of France; and I dare to hope that (God willing) this magnificent seed of harmony, cast onto a field that has been so thoroughly tilled, will grow beautiful and strong and that no post-war weeds will be able to stifle it . . .’79 Micheline Bood, much younger, saw events through the prism of her own experience, but had a similar impression: ‘It seems that I have got so much older over the last three days. We have experienced so much. I can’t remember what happened on Saturday and if I didn’t write all the time, I’d be unable to find my way through all this stuff . . . There has never been a time when we have had such an intense life, there has never been a fire that has burnt so brightly. Catholics and Communists are united in the common cause.’80 However, Micheline’s interest in the young FFI fighters was also more worldly, as she explained: ‘They are sun-tanned and strong and they look so fierce and wild.’81 Flora Groult, who threw packets of cigarettes to the FFIers in the park below her apartment, saw the young men with a bit more distance: ‘They are all very young; on the borderline between little boys playing at war and heroes winning it.’82 For some of those young men, ‘playing at war’ also involved dying. André Dupont and André Faucher, two cousins aged twenty-two and twenty, were FFI fighters from the 14th arrondissement. Somehow they were both captured by the Germans near the Gare de l’Est, and were then lined up against a wall and shot dead.83

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  Youth was the theme of Picasso’s latest paintings. In his companion’s apartment at the eastern end of the Ile Saint-Louis, Picasso painted two portraits of a young girl, based on his daughter Maya. The watercolours are balanced mid-way between a rich realism and his more well-known, fractured cubist style – in one of the paintings, each side of the girl’s face is realistically portrayed, but the two sides do not fit together. The left side looks into the mid-distance, in a classic pose, while the right side stares madly at the viewer.84

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  In the early evening, Raoul Nordling and ‘Riki’ Posch-Pastor went to see von Choltitz, and the German commander impatiently demanded that the Resistance stop fighting. He even suggested that the cease-fire could be renewed, if th
e Resistance allowed the Germans safe routes out of the city. Nordling recognised that this would be unacceptable to the French – the only person who could convince the Free French to stop fighting was de Gaulle, he argued. When von Choltitz impatiently pointed out that the Free French leader was not in Paris, Nordling suggested that it might be possible to reach him by sending an envoy to the Allies. This gave the German commander an idea, and in a bizarre twist of events, von Choltitz took the unprecedented step of providing Nordling with papers enabling him to go through the German lines in his consular car, to contact de Gaulle and persuade the Resistance to stop the fighting.85

  But the Swedish consul had an attack of angina and spent the next few days in bed. So his brother Rolf, who did not have any consular responsibility, replaced him on the mission to de Gaulle and the Allies, which was headed by the banker and résistant Saint-Phalle.86 The mission may have been more multi-layered than it first appeared, for the two-car convoy also contained four spies. As well as the inevitable Posch-Pastor and Bender, there was Colonel Ollivier of JADE-AMICOL, masquerading as a doctor with his Red Cross pass, who had managed to inveigle himself onto the mission, while the final member was the banker Jean Laurent, who had been de Gaulle’s head of office at the Ministry of War in 1940, and who was now working with the ALLIANCE MI6 intelligence circuit and was in daily contact with Nordling.87

  The convoy’s passage through the southern suburbs did not go unnoticed. Shortly after 20:00, Yves Cazaux telephoned his colleague de Félix at the Préfecture in Versailles. Nothing much was happening, de Félix began telling Cazaux, and then he said: ‘Hang on . . . just now, in front of my window a car has gone by with a white flag on one side and a Swedish flag on the other, then another vehicle behind it. They are heading towards the American lines.’ Perplexed, Cazaux duly noted the conversation in his diary.88 The mini-convoy headed on into the dark, unaware that Rol had got to the Allies first.89

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  As night fell, the weather grew unbearably close. With no street lights and a new moon, the city was utterly dark, increasing the impression of isolation and suspense. Edmond Dubois wrote: ‘The atmosphere in the city is extremely unpleasant, the Allies are expected with such impatience that their late arrival is as inexplicable as it is incomprehensible.’90 On the other side of the Seine, Yves Cazaux felt more or less the same, writing in his diary to the sound of birds roosting on the Ile de la Cité: ‘It is so hot and close tonight! After several hours’ silence, guerrilla fighting has broken out again here. The FFI troops are much stronger. There are frequent outbreaks of gunfire. Then every now and again there is the loud sound of a tank gun that shakes the windows.’91 Meanwhile, Victor Veau was depressed again. Even an unexpected evening meal of tinned ham and processed peas had not cheered him up: ‘I didn’t eat anything. I am too stunned. And to think that this morning I was calm and collected! . . . The sound of firing is everywhere . . . 22:00 – The night is absolutely black – no moon. The streets are empty and quiet – far off there is the sound of cannon fire.’92 Edmond Dubois closed the night with some good news. At 21:00 the electricity came on, and he twiddled the dial of his radio. To his amazement, he stumbled across the Resistance radio station. After two days of waiting, the radio had finally been allowed to broadcast more than music.93 At 22:30 the radio called for the insurrection that had been agreed the previous day: ‘The moment has come to finally drive the enemy from the capital. The whole population must rise up, build barricades and boldly take action, to deal a final blow to the invader. The hour of liberation has sounded. French men and women, rise up and join the fight!’94 Then came the ‘Marseillaise’. The call was repeated every fifteen minutes throughout the night, interspersed with other news.95 Dubois expressed his enthusiasm in his diary: ‘Where are they coming from, these radio waves that are directing the liberation of Paris? Excited, breathless announcers sum up the actions of the FFI . . . “They need urgent reinforcements in the 11th arrondissement. Comrades, help the struggle . . .”’96 The scratchy voice of the Resistance radio and the intermittent crackle of gunfire became the sound of liberation.

  12

  Wednesday 23 August: Destruction

  Professor Paul Tuffrau writes in his diary: ‘These days are truly extraordinary: the city seems to have been liberated, Resistance newspapers are openly on sale, we can telephone without taking precautions, collaborators are being arrested, the new Prefect of Police and the Secretary-Generals in the various Ministries are giving orders through posters, FFI fighters are openly wearing armbands as they move about the city . . ., there is an electric atmosphere, a mixture of nervous waiting and restrained joy, which fills everyone and everything they do; and yet the Germans are still here, we can hear sudden gunfire and the sound of shooting nearby or further off, unexplained explosions, the noise of isolated bursts of firing.’1

  At around 03:00, the whole of Paris trembled with a massive explosion.2 Paul Tuffrau wrote: ‘In the middle of the night, the buildings of Paris were shaken by massive gusts of air. Doors and windows shook, tiles fell into courtyards . . . The gusts were accompanied by heavy detonations rather than distant rumbling, and by massive flashes to the south. Everyone was woken up.’ Camille Vilain went down into the pitch-dark street to see what was happening – ‘I have never experienced anything like it in all my career as a soldier and an artilleryman,’ he wrote. Micheline Bood’s building shook ‘like jelly’; everyone from her neighbourhood went onto their balconies in their nightclothes and wondered what had happened. Had the Senate been blown up? Was it an attack by V1 rockets? Eventually, Micheline returned to bed, only to be awoken again by massive gusts of air from the east, which in the dead of night felt eerie and full of foreboding. As she wrote in her diary: ‘It seemed that the dead body of Paris was swinging like a skeleton in the wind. And there was this vast red glow, growing ever larger on the horizon . . . It was a danse macabre, a world of cataclysm and nightmare.’3

  In the morning, Micheline’s apocalyptic vision was strengthened as the Germans attacked a major Paris landmark. Since the turn of the century, the Grand Palais exhibition hall by the Seine had been a striking feature of the Paris skyline, with its massive art deco vault made of glass and iron. For the last few weeks, the Grand Palais had been hosting the horses and clowns of the Houcke Circus, but now it was the centre of an intense firefight. French policemen stationed next to the Palais apparently fired on a passing German column; the Germans summoned reinforcements from the nearby place de la Concorde, including two Tiger tanks, an armoured car and two unmanned ‘Goliath’ tanks – squat tracked vehicles about 1.5 metres long and less than sixty centimetres tall, which could carry up to seventy-five kilograms of explosive.4 They were remote-controlled bombs.

  Journalist Claude Roy, who was in the area, had to dive for cover to avoid being hit by gunfire, and saw the two Goliath tanks being manoeuvred around on the lawn in front of the Grand Palais and then sent in. At least one Goliath was blown up, setting fire to the building. Smoke began to pour out of the doors and the roof. It billowed up into the sky and was soon visible from all over the city. From across the Seine, Madame Odette Dedron saw ‘an enormous column of thick grey smoke, with pink tinges, rising above the building’.5 German soldier Walter Dreizner was working on an electrical installation at the Hôtel Meurice; seeing ‘an enormous cloud of black smoke’, he clambered onto the hotel roof and took a series of photographs of the destruction. From his point of view, the explanation for the destruction was simple: ‘The Grand Palais has been occupied by terrorists.’6

  In the chaos, the circus horses, frightened by the flames and the noise and the overwhelming smell of smoke and gunpowder, were led out of the burning building. One horse – which may have been either from the circus or a passing carthorse – was hit by a stray bullet and collapsed, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.7 It lay dead on the avenue Montaigne, behind the Grand Palais, where hungry Parisians chopped it into pieces, and soon all that remained was what an eye-
witness described as ‘a pile of innards and a head with milky staring eyes’.8 Meanwhile, firemen arrived to try to control the blaze, but they were shot at by the Germans. Among those called to help was young Jean-Claude Touche, who described the scene: ‘Huge flames are swelling up inside the building, breaking through the glass vault at various points. The noises of the animals are mixed with the roaring of the flames. We are worried that some FFIers might be dead inside. Shortly afterwards, immense flames burst through the roof. What a blaze. We can hear the sound of explosions from inside.’9 Nearby, a group of Parisians watched the scene while seated on deckchairs on a grass-covered roundabout on the Champs-Elysées.

  Eventually, after some of the résistants surrendered, the Germans withdrew with their prisoners and by 13:30 the fire was under control. A few hours later, Edmond Dubois went inside to see the damage: ‘The interior is entirely destroyed, but the glass roof and the metal framework have survived. The firemen have carried out a minor miracle. They are in an awful state, tired and dirty. They are black from head to foot, to the extent that, from a distance, I thought they were Negroes.’10 Shocked at the sight of the smoke billowing up from the Grand Palais, Micheline Bood poured her hatred of the Germans onto the pages of her diary: ‘I hate them, I hate them. To think that I believed that they were men. We will never forget. I hope we will be avenged . . . Putting Paris to fire and blood! Let our blood pour onto them and their children. They wanted this war, they all wanted it. I swear I will hate them until the end of time.’11

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  As the Parisian firemen gained control of the fire, the High Command in Berlin transmitted an order from Hitler reiterating the strategic importance of Paris for his plans. Not only did the city have symbolic value (‘Throughout history, the loss of Paris has meant the loss of France’), the Paris region was also an important military location for waging the ‘long-distance war against Britain’ (the V1 and V2 rocket campaigns)12. At the first sign of rebellion, ‘the strongest possible measures’ were to be taken, including ‘blowing up whole city blocks, public executions of ringleaders, and complete evacuation of the affected district’. Finally, Hitler emphasised that he expected Paris to be sacrificed: ‘The Seine bridges are to be prepared for demolition. Paris is not to fall into enemy hands other than as a heap of rubble,’ he ordered.13