Eleven Days in August
Page 57
48 Anonymous (2004), p. 71. A total of seven people are commemorated on the plaque at the site; the names of five of the dead remain unknown.
49 A photograph of men on the barricade, and of the plaque that was subsequently erected on the railings of the square René Viviani, can be seen in Anonymous (1945), no page number, caption: ‘De ces FFI qui montent la garde, sept d’entre eux trouveront la mort quelques instants plus tard’. According to the plaque erected at the time there were only two civilians killed; the current plaque identifies three dead.
50 Bood (1974), pp. 323–4.
51 All details from BAM VV, 21.8. Bood (1974) pp. 325–6 also describes the events. Micheline and her friend Nicole went outside, promising Micheline’s mother they would go no further than the entrance to their building. But as soon as they were downstairs, they hurried over to where they heard firing from the boulevard Haussmann. To Micheline’s disappointment, the armoured vehicle had left, but she did see the lorry go careering past. Marc Boegner and journalist Edmond Dubois heard of the incident, too (Boegner, 1992, p. 286; Dubois, 1944, p. 68).
52 AN 72AJ/62/III/3, p. 3; Bood (1974), p. 324. There are many photographs of the dramatic damage to the building; see for example Rocheteau (2004), p. 14, which also includes a contemporary photograph of the site, for comparison.
53 NA GRGG 181(C), p. 4.
54 According to Dansette (1946), p. 241, the meeting took place at 18:00; Jacques Debû-Bridel, who was a participant, recalled it taking place at 14:00 (Debû-Bridel, 1978, p. 160). The minutes of the meeting state that it began at 17:00 (Dansette, 1946, p. 499) – I have assumed this timing to be correct. The building was at 8 avenue du Parc Montsouris (now avenue René Coty) (Kriegel-Valrimont, 1964, p. 205). It has since been demolished.
55 Debû-Bridel (1978), pp. 160–4, provides an eye-witness account.
56 Debû-Bridel (1978), p. 161.
57 The text of this poster is reproduced in Dansette (1946), p. 499.
58 Debû-Bridel (1978), p. 162. The minutes say flatly: ‘The General Delegate observed that in that case, there would be a split.’ (Dansette, 1946, p. 501.)
59 See the summary of Chaban’s contribution in the minutes of the meeting; Dansette (1946), pp. 501–503, and Dansette’s account (Dansette, 1946, pp. 243–5). ‘Gentleman’s agreement’ was the term used, in English (Dansette, 1946, p. 244). Nearly thirty years later, Chaban was still arguing that the cease-fire was justified in part because the Germans had ‘110 or 120 bombers at Le Bourget aerodrome, their bomb-bays full, with massive reserves in the hangars’ (Crémieux, 1971, p. 99). Le Bourget had in fact been evacuated by the Luftwaffe two days earlier and had been bombarded by the Allies. For a measured analysis of Chaban’s various inexactitudes, see Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), p. 247.
60 This is de Vogüé’s summary of his intervention, written immediately afterwards. AN 72AJ/45/I/6N, p. 2 (see also Kriegel-Valrimont, 1964, pp. 205–7). De Vogüé reiterated these attacks on Chaban – and worse – in a memorandum for the CNR written the next day (AN 72AJ/45/I/6M).
61 Dansette (1946), p. 246.
62 Debû-Bridel (1978), p. 164.
63 This detail is recalled by de Vogüé in his document written that evening (AN 72AJ/45/I/6N, p. 1) and by Kriegel-Valrimont (1964), p. 207. There is no mention of it in Debû-Bridel (1978) or Dansette (1946).
64 Dansette (1946), pp. 503–504.
65 Dansette (1946), p. 249.
66 Dansette (1946), pp. 250 and 504.
67 Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), pp. 235–6.
68 Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), p. 246.
69 Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), p. 236.
70 Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), p. 237; Audiat (1946), p. 315. A photograph of a man at a barricade together with a series of these paper-wrapped Molotov cocktails can be seen in Anonymous (1944), p. 51.
71 Campaux (1945), p. 104.
72 Massiet (1945), p. 161.
73 René Courtin spent the night in the luxury of the Ministry of the Economy, but slept badly as a result of the heat and the sound of explosions (Courtin, 1994, p. 33). The day before, Parodi had written a note to all the secretary-generals of the various ministries, upbraiding them for showing themselves too early. ‘I have it from a reliable source that the Allied troops could be delayed for longer than we expected. I am trying to speed things up, but I cannot be sure I will obtain the desired result. In these conditions, if you have already occupied your ministry, please do not show your presence, and immediately put yourself in a safe place.’ (BAM VV, 20.8.) Among the secretary-generals was ‘Morland’, who took control of the Ministry for Prisoners of War – ‘Morland’ was the code name of the young François Mitterrand (Péan, 1994, pp. 437–40). Footitt & Simmonds (1988) suggest that an SOE agent was parachuted in to seize the Ministry of the Interior on place Beauvau (pp. 128 and 135). This is based on a misreading of M.R.D Foot’s 1966 work SOE in France – see Foot (2004), p. 502, n. 80, which states that Racheline (his name should apparently be spelt ‘Rachline’ – Piketty, 2009, pp. 1095–7; Albertelli, 2010b), an ‘old friend’ of SOE, took over the Ministry of the Interior for the Free French. As a Free French agent, Lazare Rachline had worked with the ‘RF’ section of SOE which was devoted to work with the Free French, but his arrival in France was entirely part of the Gaullist strategy – he was acting as a secretary-general when he took over the ministry. He was not parachuted into Paris, as might be implied, but into the Ain maquis (Piketty, 2009, p. 1097; Albertelli, 2010b). His SOE personnel file (which also gives his name as ‘Racheline’) is at NA HS 9/1223/5, but contains little of interest, and nothing on the liberation of Paris – one of the War Office’s main preoccupations with Rachline after the war was whether he was of sufficient social standing and wealth to be worthy of an OBE. Although Rachline left some documentary traces of his Resistance activity, they do not cover the liberation of Paris (Piketty, 2009).
74 Crénesse (1944), p. 16.
75 von Choltitz (1969), p. 238. For more extensive versions of the same story, recalled earlier, see NA GRGG 184, pp. 3–4 (conversations recorded on 30 August 1944) and von Choltitz (1949), 12 October 1949. Also leaving Paris – for the second time – was the German ambassador, Otto Abetz. His convoy, which had left the capital the day before, had been blocked by Resistance activity around Meaux. He returned to the capital and finally left on the evening of 21 August. During his trial for war crimes in 1949, Abetz implied that during this period he had persuaded von Choltitz not to destroy the city. There is no evidence for this (Lambauer, 2001, pp. 639–40).
76 Delarue (1964), p. 355. The convoy included a radio car; the personnel was composed of five Germans and five collaborators.
77 AN 72AJ/62/I/8, pp. 2–3. The scene on 22 August was also reported by Dubois (1944), p. 73.
78 AN 72AJ/45/I/6M.
79 Lankford (1991), pp. 163–4.
80 Blumenson (1996), p. 523.
81 Blumenson (1996), p. 523.
82 Cumberlege (1946), pp. 181–2. Downs’ report continues: ‘But there are mines, hundreds of them . . . And there are plenty of the S mines – the nasty anti-personnel type that jumps into the air before it explodes and then hurls bits of steel and ball bearings to kill or wound anything living within a hundred feet radius.’
83 After Action Report, p. 40.
84 Fournier & Eymard (2009), p. 30.
85 Blumenson (1961), p. 601. For Leclerc’s letter, see de Gaulle (1956), p. 704.
86 Fournier & Eymard (2009), p. 30.
87 All details in the above paragraphs are taken from Gallois’ detailed account of his trip, written ‘a few days after the Liberation of Paris’ (AN 72AJ/61/I/17, pp. 19–27). There is no reason to doubt Gallois’ account of his meeting with Patton, but it is striking that Patton makes no mention of this encounter in his diaries or letters (Blumenson, 1996, pp. 523–5 covers this period). For the first part of this day, see also Monod (1947), pp. 59–62. Neither Gallois nor Monod explained what happene
d to their translator, ‘Dominique’. I have assumed he returned to Paris with Monod.
88 AN 72AJ/62/III/4, p. 29.
89 Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), p. 240.
90 Model & Bradley (1991), p. 252.
91 Hinsley (1988), p. 370.
92 NA GRGG 182, p. 2.
93 Model & Bradley (1991), p. 254.
94 Model & Bradley (1991), pp. 256–7.
95 There is a photograph of this order in Renoult & West (2009), p. 32.
96 Model & Bradley (1991), pp. 254–5.
97 Blumenson (1961), p. 597.
98 Guéhenno (2002), p. 435.
CHAPTER 11
1 Crémieux-Brilhac (1976), p. 198. This story was filed on 19 August.
2 Some of this information came from Rol. The weight given by the Free French to this is explained by Parodi in Crémieux (1971), p. 102.
3 Kriegel-Valrimont (1964), pp. 208–209.
4 These documents can be found in Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), pp. 249–53. It is not clear if the refuse lorry tactic was ever used.
5 This slogan had first been used five days earlier in an FFI declaration that was not written by Rol (see chapter 6). Not only did Rol not write this poster either, it was not even signed by him, but rather by the non-existent ‘Commandant du Grand Paris des FFI’. As with the 17 August declaration, this was presumably the work of some of Rol’s more enthusiastic Communist Party comrades (Bourderon, 2004, p. 730, n. 176).
6 Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), p. 250.
7 See for example the newsreel film La Liberation de Paris (2004), or the many photographs of the barricades, such as those in Gratias (1945).
8 Pierquin (1983), p. 131.
9 Galtier-Boissière (1944), pp. 267–8.
10 Villate (1958), p. 73, n. 1.
11 Galtier-Boissière (1944), pp. 267–8.
12 Levisse-Touzé (1994b), p. 215. German ambassador Otto Abetz later claimed that many of the barricades were built in the same places as those that were set up in the great revolutionary moments of Paris’s past – 1830, 1848 and 1871 (Abetz, 1953, p. 327). There is an element of truth in this, but only an element. Despite the massive redevelopment of Paris with broad boulevards after the 1848 revolution – designed precisely to limit the efficacy of barricades in case of street fighting – the fundamental geography of Paris remained, so in 1944 there were barricades along the main boulevards and at the main points entering the city (see Map 3). But the geography of the insurrection, as defined by its sociology and its objectives, had changed. For example, in both 1830 and 1848 the streets of the quartier Saint-Merri, near where the Pompidou Centre now sits, were covered in scores of barricades, often in the same place in the two revolutions (Corbin & Mayeur, 1997, plate 1). Many of these barricades had little apparent strategic value – for example, in both 1840 and 1848 there were four barricades in a short fifty-metre stretch of the narrow rue Quincampoix, where I once lived. However, in 1944, there were no barricades on this street, and few in the surrounding area (Map 3; Dansette, 1946; Barozzi, 1980, pp. 44–5).
13 As Rol put it many years later:
. . . the barricades appeared in the collective imagination and conscience for the first time since the Commune. The ideological reference to popular revolts of the distant past functioned because the barricades corresponded to current pressing preoccupations. Paris never lifts up its paving stones without an overwhelming reason. Whatever the case, our approach paid off, at least in the poorer neighbourhoods, where there were far more barricades than in the richer neighbourhoods in the west of Paris. And that relates both to the historic weight of the barricades and to the immediate political fears felt by sections of the population. (Bourderon, 2004, p. 437.)
A different view was given by Polish exile Andrzej Bobkowski, who was viciously cynical in the pages of his diary. He sneered at the fact that in many parts of Paris there were no barricades and, not inaccurately, predicted how Gallic pride would be boosted by an insurrection which he saw as a fraud, punctuating his entry with cock-crows to mock the French before concluding in amazement: ‘And the whole world wets itself with admiration for eternally heroic and rebellious France!’ (Bobkowski, 1991, pp. 601–611.) For a brilliant discussion of the role of barricades in 1944 and in previous Paris insurrections, see Tombs (1995).
14 AN 72AJ/62/III/3, p. 2. Footage of Dukson and his comrades atop the captured SOMUA tank can be seen at 14:15 in La Libération de Paris (1944), followed shortly by film of the tank manoeuvring. For a more dramatic – and almost certainly fictitious – version of Dukson’s involvement, including a drawing of him leaping onto the tank to capture it, see Dunan (1945), pp. 260–1. It seems probable that the relatively simple removal of the SOMUA tank from the factory has been mixed up with the dramatic mass seizure of the R35 tank destroyer, which took place in Batignolles the previous day (see chapter 10). For a faintly racist description of ‘the Jaguar’ (presumably Dukson) by one of the film-makers involved in the insurrection, see Maudru (1944), pp. 167–9 (the fact that jaguars are not found in Africa is not lost on Maudru). For more on Dukson see chapter 10 and Cobb (2009b); he can be seen with a group of captured German soldiers at 06:35 in La Libération de Paris (1944). SOMUA stood for Société d’Outillage Mécanique et d’Usinage Artillerie; the company made machine tools, artillery, tanks, agricultural equipment and buses.
15 His name was Georges Méjat; see Roy (1944), pp. 29–31. For a discussion of the role of the film-makers, see Langlois (1998). See also chapter 19. The Parisian professional photographers were also organised in a collective and allocated different zones of the city to photograph in order to cover as many neighbourhoods as possible. This, together with the many amateur photographers who recorded events, accounts for the phenomenal photographic coverage of the liberaqtion (Le Mée, 2004).
16 This scene can be seen at 15:18 in La Libération de Paris (1944).
17 Roy (1944), pp. 29–31.
18 All details from Riffaud (1994), pp. 134–8 and Calvès (1984), p. 102.
19 AN 72AJ/62/III/4, pp. 16–17.
20 von Choltitz (1949), 11 October 1949.
21 Walter Dreizner wrote that the mood of the garrison was marked by ‘the utmost nervousness’ – Martens & Nagel (2006), p. 522.
22 de Saint-Pierre (1945), p. 64.
23 Campaux (1945), pp. 76–7.
24 Bourget (1984), p. 347.
25 AN 72/AJ/61/I/10, p. 2.
26 Shulman (1986), p. 191.
27 B-728, p. 3; B-741, p. 11.
28 B-308, p. 158.
29 B-308, p. 158.
30 See the facsimile in Model & Bradley (1991), p. 258. Müller (1994) p. 107, citing the same source, claims the order was dictated on the evening of 21 August; however, the facsimile shows that the date was 22 August 1944. The order also instructed Army Group G – which was withdrawing from southern France – to link up with the 19th Army and form a line through Dijon and Dole, defending the Germans’ southern flank. The 15th Panzer Division was to move eastwards to the region of Troyes, while General Bayerlein was put in command of the Panzer Lehr Division.
31 Model & Bradley (1991), pp. 259–60. The tanks had been taken under von Choltitz’s command a few days earlier when they had passed through Paris, heading for the front. Walter Dreizner noted the telephone call from Model (Martens & Nagel, 2006, p. 523); von Choltitz (1969), p. 212 describes the event but does not give a precise date. According to Dreizner, the tanks ran out of fuel at Saint-Germain and had to be destroyed.
32 B-611, pp. 17–18; the author of this document, Professor Kurt Hesse, said that von Aulock had ‘tactically little training but was energetic and filled with ambition’ (p. 14).
33 A-956, p. 13.
34 Renoult & West (2009), pp. 90–2; After Action Report, p. 40.
35 Renoult & West (2009), pp. 82–4; Zaloga (2008), p. 46.
36 After Action Report, p. 40. For a map of the US advance to the Seine south of Paris, see Zaloga (2008), pp. 52–3.
37 A-956, p. 12.
38 All quotes in this and previous paragraph from Bourget (1984), p. 348. A slightly different French translation of von Choltitz’s General Order No. 3 can be found in Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), p. 268. There is no archival source for this document.
39 All details in Rol-Tanguy & Bourderon (1994), pp. 256 and 263–4.
40 AN 72AJ/61/II/3. Morandat and his secretary (she was also his fiancée), Claire, had simply walked into Matignon and taken over; the staff welcomed him and carried on as though this was a normal change of minister. There is a flowery account of this in Collins & Lapierre (1965), pp. 156–62.
41 Courtin (1994), p. 35.
42 Roy (1944), p. 28.
43 The text of Parodi’s circular detailing his instructions was copied by Professor Veau, to whom it was provided by Pasteur Vallery-Radot who was Secretary-General for Health. See BAM VV, 22.8; the document is also reproduced in Bourget (1984), p. 346.
44 Courtin (1994), p. 37.
45 Courtin (1994), p. 38.
46 Guéhenno (2002), p. 436.
47 Dunan (1945) describes the difficulties experienced by journalists in trying to get their newspapers published.
48 See the facsimile in Conte (1984).
49 Courtin (1994), p. 37.
50 L’Humanité 21 August 1944. The article read:
Through the intermediary of a ‘neutral’ consular agent who made himself the instrument of the enemy, the Germans proposed an armistice to the FFI. The German commander made this proposal to allow the passage through Paris of three German divisions that were retreating faced with the Allied troops. Some people, who were ready to sell French dignity cheaply, accepted this discussion . . . We must not allow ourselves to be taken in by manoeuvres by the Germans or by certain enemies of the people.
51 Granet (1961), p. 270. For a facsimile of p. 1 of this issue, see Conte (1984).