by Alex Kershaw
The news was ever more unsettling: Sumner and his colleagues learned that some of the hospital’s female ambulance drivers had been reported missing. Hopes of stalling the German advance began to fade. Patients like Richey were advised not to wear insignia on their uniforms in case the Germans captured the hospital. Then, on June 1, 1940, the hospital’s board of governors agreed that new leadership was required if the hospital was to be safeguarded in such trying times, and so they appointed Sumner “resident physician in charge.” He was proud to accept the role, but it came with a high price. Even if he wanted to, Sumner felt that he could not now leave Paris, however much he still toyed with the idea of taking Toquette and Phillip back to Maine, or the hospital might collapse without him. It was his duty to stay on in Paris, but he was also more and more convinced that his wife and child must leave even if he no longer could.
Two days later, on June 3, came the first great intimation of what lay in store for the city. It was a hot and humid day, unusually so for early June in Paris. Shortly before lunch, Sumner heard air raid sirens begin to wail. He went to the terrace adjoining his office with several colleagues to watch the raid. There was the repeated crump of exploding shells, piercing whistles, and the clatter of shrapnel as it fell on the hospital roof. Huge clouds of black smoke billowed across the city, obscuring the famous landmarks. “I’m glad we painted out our red crosses!” said one of Jackson’s colleagues. The Germans were targeting hospitals and ambulances. Would they destroy Paris just as they had leveled central Warsaw the previous September and, more recently, the heart of Rotterdam on May 14, when hundreds of innocent civilians had been killed and 30,000 people left homeless?
After dark, the bombers returned. On Avenue Foch, it was fifty-two-year-old Toquette Jackson’s turn to hear the sirens and try to stay calm. As with so many mothers in Paris, she worried about what would happen to her family. Twelve-year-old Phillip, her only child, slept each night in a room on the ground floor. She was prepared to do anything to keep him safe. All along the avenue, the streetlights were out. In some of the neighborhood’s newer buildings with large windows, there were odd flashes of light as servants on the top floors descended by torchlight to the basement shelters. Parisians were supposed to observe a strict blackout, but no one wanted to trip and fall six flights. People spoke in whispers as if the Germans had already set up camp on the Champs-Élysées. There was no unseemly rush for the metro. Avenue Foch residents preferred to sit huddling close to their concierges in the basements of their mansions.
That day, 257 Parisians were killed and aerodromes around the city destroyed. At the American Hospital, patient Paul Richey believed the targeting of civilians for the first time was “a well-calculated psychological stroke.” The hospital’s windows were all taped, sandbags piled high. “More and more French wounded were flooding in,” recalled Richey. “Several women ambulance drivers were shot up by Hun aircraft, and one drove back pluckily with a bullet in her buttock. Ambulances disappeared without a trace and were presumed casualties. The Huns seemed to be deliberately strafing vehicles marked with red crosses, and the hospital authorities ordered them to be erased.”
A couple of days later, a young soldier—a badly wounded twenty-year-old Algerian—was brought to the hospital in an ambulance. He had been hit by shrapnel from a German artillery shell and thrown from his motorbike. The young man’s father, a much-respected French general, soon arrived at the hospital to check on his son. Sumner watched as the father pinned the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire onto his son’s chest.
Among those gathered in the hospital to witness the medal ceremony was Toquette Jackson. She had spent all of the last war working in nursing whites and was helping out at the American Hospital, so acute was the medical crisis.
Sumner and Toquette watched as the French general, who had lost an eye at Verdun in 1916, comforted his wounded son.
“Tel père, tel fils [Like father, like son],” Sumner told Toquette and others after the award ceremony.
Throughout that frantic May of 1940, the Jacksons managed to take the odd break, retiring together to the veranda adjoining Sumner’s office on the fourth floor of the hospital. Sumner was so busy that he often slept in his office rather than return to 11, Avenue Foch, where, before the war, he had run a highly lucrative private practice specializing in urology, which often meant curing rich Americans with venereal disease. According to a middle-aged Frenchwoman, Clemence Bock, who had tutored Sumner in French and become a good friend: “Some of the most beautiful women in Paris came to his office at avenue Foch or to the hospital….Mademoiselle Diplarakos, the beauty queen of Greece, was in love with him.”
As the Jacksons looked out over Paris, smoking cigarettes, they would undoubtedly have discussed what they should do next. Toquette wanted to stay at her husband’s side, come what may, but Sumner was increasingly insistent that she should leave before the Germans arrived.
One day, Dr. Charles Bove, one of the hospital’s finest doctors, joined the Jacksons on the terrace. To their surprise, he announced that he was going back to the United States while there was still a chance of escaping the Germans. “It’s only a matter of a few weeks before Roosevelt brings America in and declares war on Germany,” added Bove. “But this time the Boche will have Paris, and if we stay they’ll lock us up.”
Others also gave up hope in the next few days. A depressed Thierry de Martel told Sumner that he could not bear the idea of German troops in his beloved Paris. His sadness cast a further shadow over the hospital and staff, who had only ever known him to be upbeat. “He was a debonair dresser with perpetually smiling eyes and a tongue that was always ready to burst into humorous sally,” recalled a colleague. “He was the eternal playboy who had refused to surrender to his years. But he had become a man transformed. For days he had scarcely spoken a word to us, and then only on business. It was terrible to see his laughter strangled.”
At some point early that June, Toquette agreed to leave Paris with Phillip until the battle for France had been decided. Sumner had learned from sources within the hospital that the Germans were indeed unstoppable and in a few days would be in the outskirts of Paris. There was no telling what would happen to the city and those who chose to stay if the French decided to defend it.
It was hard for Toquette to have to say good-bye to Sumner. She had never left his side during a crisis. Although he would have joined her if she had wanted him to, she had insisted that he stay on without her. There was no question of him abandoning his duties as other colleagues had. Given how many doctors were deserting the hospital, his departure would send the worst signal; others would follow his example and the superbly equipped hospital would end up in Nazi hands—exactly what the enemy would want.
Toquette told Sumner she was confident that the Allies could stop the German advance and hold them off north of Paris. The city could still be saved. They would be reunited soon. She was convinced of it. Any other outcome was too terrible to contemplate.
One morning early that June, twelve-year-old Phillip Jackson awoke in his family’s L-shaped “rez de chausée”—ground floor apartment—on the Avenue Foch. His spacious bedroom opened onto a wide hallway where there was a telephone. Across the hallway was Sumner’s office, part of which was a laboratory, which connected to an elegant living room that led to his parents’ bedroom and then a kitchen that looked out onto the Rue Traktir. The elegantly decorated apartment had two entrances and access to an inner courtyard where Sumner kept the family’s car.
A dark-haired and rather sensitive boy, Phillip could see through his window into a small garden and then through black iron railings to the broad avenue beyond. In recent days several of his neighbors had left for the country, and he was about to do the same. He got dressed and later that morning—along with his mother and his fifty-nine-year-old aunt Alice, nicknamed “Tat,” and Rosalee, the Swiss maid from the family’s country home in Enghien—climbed into the family’s jet-black Citroën 11, t
he first front-wheel-drive car to be built in France. There was little room for luggage, so he took only what he absolutely needed. He was happy that his summer vacation had started two months earlier than planned, and excited that he was headed to the country.
When the war had broken out the previous fall, life had been imbued with a brilliant intensity, as if Phillip were living in one of the adventure stories Toquette read him every night, never neglecting to close the book at a well-marked cliffhanger. The previous winter at the family country home in Enghien, just outside Paris, he had stood in his thick winter coat, all smiles, at the opposite end of a draw saw, helping his father prepare firewood for what were bound to be hard times ahead. To Phillip it seemed that his father, usually so busy at the American Hospital, was always at his happiest when he was working outside with his hands, be it cutting firewood or carving small boats from pieces of flotsam that father and son collected from the beaches in Normandy on summer vacations.
For Phillip, a great adventure was beginning as Toquette drove along the Avenue Foch with her sister, Tat, who had the same thin face, bright eyes, and prominent brow as his mother, seated beside her on the bench seat. The Citroën carried them across the gray Seine and headed south, along the straight and flat roads that crossed the broad plain below Paris, through the endless wheat fields, toward the Massif Central, the region in central France famous for its volcanic ranges and wild river gorges. There was plenty of time for Toquette to worry about her husband as she followed the route of the Loire River toward the mountains. What would happen to Paris? There was no knowing what the Germans might do. Would they sack the city? Would it become a beautiful battleground before being reduced to ruins?
The roads were clogged but Toquette made steady progress, passing through the towns of Nemours, Nevers, and Moulins, with its four-spired cathedral. Phillip stared out of the car window at the neat vineyards of the upper Loire Valley near the town of Sancerre, famous for its fruity wine, and Pouilly, equally celebrated for its fine whites. Finally, Toquette pulled up outside a small hotel on the banks of the Allier River in the village of Villeneuve d’Allier, a few miles from the spa town of Vichy. Her eldest brother, sixty-one-year-old Hermann, a keen fisherman, had recommended the hotel. The owner’s daughter, Paulette, around Phillip’s age, would be only too happy to teach Phillip how best to hook brook eel and whitefish.
Toquette and Phillip had left Paris just in time. By June 9, it seemed, the whole city was on the move. All roads south were jammed with a pitiful exodus. More than a quarter of those fleeing were children. No one wanted to be caught “like a rat in occupied Paris,” in the words of the writer Simone de Beauvoir. A quarter of France’s population was fleeing the German advance, headed anywhere so long as it was south. The French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew above the exodus and recalled: “Roads completely blocked, fires everywhere, supplies scattered helter-skelter, villages devastated, everything a shambles—a total shambles.” France looked “as though a gigantic ant hill in the north had been kicked open and all the ants were running away.” Most had believed the Germans would be repulsed. As recently as May 24, French prime minister Paul Reynaud had broadcast: “France has been invaded a hundred times and never beaten…our belief in victory is intact.”
Meanwhile, back in Paris, Sumner prepared for the worst, sleeping in his office on the hospital’s fourth floor and continuing to work all hours, even donating his own blood. On June 10 the French government left Paris for Tours, prompting a wholesale desertion. The next day Sumner awoke to find the city he loved more than any other desolate, as if in early mourning. From his terrace he could see the broad streets around Neuilly. They were unusually dark. Rolling clouds of soot were blocking the sun. There had been no dawn chorus. The birds had fled.
Street sellers’ wagons lay abandoned, fresh flowers strewn across the pavements. Dead dogs littered the city; their owners had killed them before leaving. Abandoned farm animals grazed in the Tuileries Garden. Along the Avenue Foch, as in so many upscale areas of the city, most homes were empty, their windows shuttered. Since moving to the avenue in 1925, Sumner had come to know many of his neighbors, several of whom had wisely fled Paris well ahead of the Nazis. They included Pierre Wertheimer, a partner in the House of Chanel perfume business, who had left number 55 and decamped to New York. So, too, had Mr. Alfred Lindon at number 75, leaving sixty-three precious paintings under lock and key at the Chase Bank. At number 58, there was also no sign of banker Nelson Dean Jay, president of the American Hospital’s board of governors.
Others in the city’s wealthy 16th Arrondissement had packed up and left in a hurry too: The Duke of Windsor, although a keen admirer of Hitler, had not stayed to welcome his storm troopers, absconding at dawn without even telling his aide-de-camp. Also absent were the Astors, the Guggenheims, the Vanderbilts, and the Rubinsteins—the international set who had before the war been patients of Sumner Jackson. The few families left on Avenue Foch wondered what might happen when the Germans arrived, given that their homes would be much prized. They became even more anxious when they heard shellfire so close to Paris that with every sudden explosion small clouds of birds rose from the top of the Arc de Triomphe, at the far eastern end of the avenue.
Sumner had read about the Germans’ actions in Poland the previous fall, the indiscriminate targeting of civilians—indeed, the thousands of innocents killed in terror bombings—and the destruction of Warsaw and Rotterdam that May. Hitler’s armies and his Luftwaffe clearly had little regard for human life and scant mercy wherever they chose to attack. The American embassy had assured Sumner and his fellow American citizens, around five thousand of them still in Paris, that the Nazis would respect their neutral status and their property. Over a thousand so-called red certificates had been issued, meaning properties could not be commandeered by the Germans when they arrived. But would the Germans really honor such paperwork? Sumner knew that his home at 11, Avenue Foch would make some senior Nazi official a superb pied-à-terre. There was no telling what might happen. Certainly, after his time treating the victims of German aggression in the First World War, Sumner was far from inclined to trust the “damned Boche,” as he often called the Germans, when it came to any assurance that they would respect the law.
By June 13, 1940, preparations throughout the city were being made for what seemed to be inevitable conquest. In Neuilly, Sumner and his colleagues decided to evacuate French soldiers from the American Hospital in case the Germans decided to send them to POW camps. The Germans were fast closing on the capital, skirting the Seine as they stormed south from the ancient city of Rouen. The Gare d’Austerlitz had been closed after the last train headed south had pulled out of the station. Four million people from the city and its neighboring towns had also departed, leaving just a fifth of the original population. Those staying mostly could not afford to leave, or were infirm, or, like Sumner, were needed in essential jobs. Most of the city that evening was deathly quiet. In a few quarters the only people on the streets were deserters from the French army, still in their khaki uniforms, staggering around drunk outside looted bars and cafés. From the terrace of Sumner’s office in Neuilly, it was possible to see flashes of light from bursting artillery shells splashing across the horizon. Hitler’s storm troopers were less than twenty miles away.
THREE
THE FOURTEENTH
A LONE GERMAN on a motorbike crossed the deserted Place Voltaire in eastern Paris, his headlight stabbing a cruel shaft of light into the pitch darkness. It was 3:40 a.m. on Friday, June 14, as the first of Hitler’s men arrived in the City of Light, headed toward the Bastille, passing boarded-up homes and walls where propaganda posters had been hastily pasted earlier that spring: Nous vaincrons parce que nous sommes les plus forts. (We will win because we are strongest.)
Other men with weather-beaten faces from the Eighteenth Army followed, marching through the Porte de la Villette unopposed. Paris had been declared an open city, abandoned to the Boc
he without a fight. As dawn broke above Haussmann’s hushed boulevards, two German units headed for the most symbolic landmarks: the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. By 8:00 a.m. the Germans had set up a headquarters at the Hôtel de Crillon, a stone palace dating from 1758 that overlooked the Place de la Concorde at the foot of the Champs-Élysées, in the very heart of the city.
A hundred yards from the Jacksons’ home, the Arc de Triomphe was crowded with smiling German soldiers. At 9:45 a massive swastika was raised and was soon fluttering above the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A military band began to play. Nearby, German soldiers set up their MG42 machine guns, aiming them along each of the twelve avenues that converged at the Place de l’Étoile. Then they set up four cannons and pointed them down the four main arteries leading from the Place de l’Étoile: the Champs-Élysées and the Avenues Foch, Victor Hugo, and Marceau. General Kurt von Briesen, commanding the 30th Infantry Division, took his men’s salute around midday as they marched down the Champs-Élysées. He was on horseback but stood up in his stirrups every few minutes out of sheer delight.
That lunchtime, the new Nazi ambassador to Paris, thirty-seven-year-old Otto Abetz, who had arrived that very morning, sat down to eat at the Ritz. An ardent Francophile married to a Frenchwoman, the handsome former art teacher at a girls’ school in Karlsruhe was in his pomp, talking with General Otto von Stülpnagel, the new military commandant of Paris. The Ritz’s head chef had noted the likely nationality of that day’s guests and had obsequiously included an entrée choice of filet de sole au vin du Rhin (sole cooked in a dry German wine from the Rhine), or poularde rôtie with sumptuous rissole potatoes and asparagus with hollandaise sauce.
