“Go fast,” he told Nordling. “Twenty-four, forty-eight hours are all you have. After that, I cannot promise you what will happen here.”39
I. General von Boineburg-Lengsfeld was a highly decorated war hero who had been badly injured when accidentally run over by a German tank during the Battle of Stalingrad in December 1942. After many months in the hospital he returned to active duty in July 1943 as commandant of Paris. His involvement in the July 20 plot came only after Hitler was reported dead, when, pursuant to General von Stülpnagel’s orders, he supervised the arrest of the one thousand two hundred SS and Gestapo members in Paris. He was never prosecuted and finished the war as the commander of Maneuver Area Bergen.
II. British Intelligence secretly recorded the conversations of captured German generals while they were incarcerated at a prison camp in Great Britain. On August 29, 1944, von Choltitz was recorded saying the following to General Wilhelm von Thoma: “The worst job I ever carried out—which however I carried out with great consistency—was the liquidation of the Jews. I carried out this order down to the very last detail.” Taping Hitler’s Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942–45, Sönke Neitzel, ed. (St. Paul, MN: Frontline Books, 2007), 192.
V
The Resistance Rises
“From a military point of view, I was not too concerned about the Resistance. But psychologically it was a highly dangerous situation.”
—GENERAL DIETRICH VON CHOLTITZ
The Paris Resistance began slowly. And like all resistance movements, it brought together a motley collection of patriots. The Allies assisted it only sparingly, and de Gaulle did his best to control it, but that was always a challenge. The leader of the Paris Resistance was Henri Tanguy, better known as Colonel Rol. The thirty-eight-year-old Rol was by trade a sheet metal worker, labor organizer, and dedicated Communist. He was a veteran of the International Brigade, which had fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and afterward served as an antitank gunner in the French Army in 1940, earning the Croix de Guerre for his service.
In October 1940, Rol began to organize small resistance cells in French labor unions, and in 1942 was one of the founding members of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans—an anti-German resistance group taking the name of fighters against the Prussians in 1870–71. The Francs-Tireurs became one of the most active resistance groups in Paris, concentrating on preventing the arrests and deportation of political prisoners. In September 1943, the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) selected Rol to command operations in Paris, and on June 5, 1944—the day before the landing of Allied troops in Normandy—he was given command of all FFI forces in the Île-de-France, an area encompassing not only Paris and its suburbs, but the four surrounding departments as well. Technically Rol was under General Koenig and de Gaulle. But as a practical matter he was his own boss.
Colonel Rol
One of the major problems confronting the FFI was a shortage of combatants and weapons. Rol could initially count on only 155 men in Paris who were trained and fully armed.1 Most others were untrained civilians armed with obsolete weapons, and there was precious little ammunition. Rol repeatedly asked the Allies to supply weapons, but found little interest among Allied leaders. He responded by attempting to seize German weapons, but again with little success. In mid-July, the seven hundred FFI members in Paris’s 7th Arrondissement had just three submachine guns, twenty rifles, and a few pistols.2
From D-Day on, Rol was determined to launch an insurrection in Paris. He reacted negatively to General Koenig’s order of June 10 to stop guerrilla activity because of the slow progress of Allied forces in Normandy, and was convinced that once the insurrection started it would be impossible to put down. Both de Gaulle and Koenig considered the FFI as part of the Free French army and looked on an uprising in Paris as a military issue. Rol by contrast saw it as a political and moral issue. He firmly believed that it was important for Parisians to liberate their city, thereby earning the right to govern themselves. Rol was a Communist politically, but partisan ideology was not his principal motivation. He wanted Paris to be able to stand on its own feet and avoid Allied control.
De Gaulle sought to manage Rol and the FFI by dispatching Jacques Delmas (codename Chaban) to Paris as his military representative. A handsome and charismatic former rugby player, Chaban—at the age of twenty-nine—was the youngest general in the French army and a devoted admirer of de Gaulle. His mission was to sneak into Paris and bring order and discipline to the FFI. Above all, he was to delay an FFI insurrection until the Allies approached. He was partially successful. Rol reluctantly agreed to obey Koenig’s order of June 10 to delay guerrilla actions, but held to his view that a revolt should begin before an Allied move on Paris, in order to demonstrate the power of the French people to liberate themselves. He also believed the FFI should rise up on its own to show that it was independent of the Allied armies.
Chaban-Delmas
Alexandre Parodi was de Gaulle’s political representative in Paris. Parodi held the position of délégué generale (delegate general) for the Provisional Government of the French Republic. His assignment was to bring the authority of the Provisional Government to Paris. Like Chaban-Delmas, Parodi was directed to prevent a premature insurrection in Paris, and above all to ensure that a liberated Paris was ruled by the Provisional Government, not the Communists or the supporters of Marshal Pétain. Memories of past revolutions—above all, the Paris Commune of 1871—hung over the city, and Parodi was to ensure that such a tragedy did not happen again. As de Gaulle instructed him, “Always speak out loudly and clearly in the name of the State.”3
With the Allies bogged down in Normandy, Rol found himself with little alternative but to order the FFI to stand down and wait. He urged Chaban-Delmas to try to arrange more arms drops, but understood when Chaban-Delmas said it was de Gaulle he worked for. And the military situation did not look good in June. Not only were Allied troops still in their original beachheads, but the Germans had begun their V-1 rocket attacks against targets in Great Britain. In June 1944, the Germans launched 2,452 V-1 rockets, approximately 800 of which fell on London. German propaganda boasted that the rockets would end the war and bring Britain to its knees. They also promised even greater destruction when the technically more sophisticated V-2 and V-3 rockets were launched. Not so curiously, Parisians seemed to ignore the German rocket attacks. Many if not most Parisians disliked the British, and were little concerned about the damage inflicted.
Alexandre Parodi
The stalemate in Normandy led many Parisians to turn to the Russian front, where the Red Army was moving ahead quickly. This was particularly true of the Communist Party (PCF), which delighted in reminding Parisians of the Franco-Russian alliance before World War I. As Bastille Day (July 14) approached, the leaders of the Communist Party decided to break with the underground French leadership and urge a major uprising. Celebrations of Bastille Day had been banned by the Vichy government, and this would be the first since 1939. Chaban and Parodi were against the idea, pointing out that an insurrection in Paris was premature and would undoubtedly fail. Rol too was against it, noting that the Allies were still bogged down. Accordingly, he told the FFI to remain underground. Rol was not against a Paris uprising, but July 14 was too early.
The Communists went ahead with the labor strikes they had planned for Bastille Day. The strikes took place in the working-class districts of eastern Paris, and involved at least 100,000 workers. But most of Paris was not affected. A more significant development was that the Paris police were conspicuous by their inactivity. Demonstrations throughout the city on Bastille Day were not interrupted, and the police watched with tacit support. For Rol and other leaders of the FFI the message was clear. The tide in the city was clearly turning in favor of the Resistance. The police were on their side.
After the demonstrations of July 14, Rol had begun to develop new plans for a revolt whenever an opportunity presented itself. The main problem was the continuing lac
k of arms. Rol stepped up his pleas to London for more weapons, but with no success. The Paris Resistance leadership began to suspect that the refusal of the Allies to provide weapons was part of a larger plan to impose American military government on France. In reality, the Allies did not see how they could air-drop weapons into Paris without their falling into the hands of the Germans. Another fear was that to arm the Paris Resistance would be to arm the Communists, who might use the weapons to seize control. But the message was clear. If the FFI was going to take on the Germans in Paris, they would have to do so without Allied help.4
The attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, followed by the breakthrough in Normandy by General J. Lawton Collins’s VII Corps on July 26, added to the change of mood in Paris. As Patton’s Third Army raced eastward, the FFI stepped up its planning for action. The downside was that the FFI was led by Communists, and the possibility that the Communists might seize control of Paris became a major concern. As de Gaulle wrote, “If the Communists establish a base of power in Paris, they will have an easy time establishing a government…. They can present themselves as the leaders of an insurrection and a kind of commune. That such an insurrection in the capital would, for certain, lead to a power dominated by the Third International I have known for a long time.”5 The specter of the Paris Commune of 1871 continued to haunt de Gaulle’s Provisional Government. Chaban-Delmas and Parodi did their utmost to contain that possibility, but it lurked in the background. The best way to prevent it would be for the Allied armies to arrive as soon as possible.
Then suddenly Warsaw erupted. On August 1, as the Red Army approached the city, the Home Army made up of Polish resisters led an uprising against the German occupiers. The Home Army believed that with the Soviets approaching, the Germans would leave quickly. But the Red Army, reluctant to help the anti-Communist leadership of the Home Army, halted outside Warsaw. And the Germans, led by the SS, wreaked vengeance on the city. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler gave orders to destroy the city and kill the inhabitants. In the end, one-quarter of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed and an estimated 200,000 Poles were killed. The Red Army stood by and allowed the Germans to slaughter the USSR’s political opponents.6
The fear of another self-destructive Warsaw Uprising helped keep Paris quiet as the Allies advanced. Schools remained open, many Parisians sunbathed along the Seine, and the racing season continued at Longchamps and Auteuil. Cinemas showed films with projectors using electricity generated by teams of bicycles, Edith Piaf and Yves Montand sang at the Moulin Rouge, and more than twenty theaters produced plays for packed houses. Unlike Warsaw, or London or Berlin for that matter, Paris remained intact. And de Gaulle’s representatives, Chaban-Delmas and Parodi, were determined to keep it so.
To forestall a premature insurrection, in early August Chaban-Delmas was able surreptitiously to fly to London, where he urged Allied officials to come quickly. But the effort was useless. Everyone who saw Chaban-Delmas, including General Sir Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s military aide, said the same: there would be no change in Allied plans simply to remedy Paris’s political problems. But Chaban-Delmas had at least made the Allies aware of the problem, and that was important. In the days ahead, Allied awareness, particularly among the Free French leadership, would be important in providing Eisenhower with a reason to change plans.
And the Allies continued to refuse to supply the Paris Resistance with weapons. When General Koenig asked the Allies to drop forty thousand Sten guns to assist the Resistance in the Paris region, the British objected. “There will always be the temptation to put them to mischievous uses should political passions be inflamed when the war is over,” said the Foreign Office.7
As August wore on, the mood in Paris became more militant. Parodi increasingly came to believe that Rol and the Comité Parisien de la Libération (CPL) were fully qualified to lead the Resistance and should be accepted. “You must give us your confidence and your support in this affair so we can come to an agreement and the Government’s authority maintained,” he told the Provisional Government in Algiers. Receiving no reply, two days later Parodi met with the CPL and came to an agreement recognizing that the CPL “alone has the authority to lead the national insurrection in the region and receive the Allies in Paris.” Again, no reply from Algiers.
Rol followed through on August 7, issuing an alert to all FFI forces in the Paris region:
The main characteristic of the Allied offensive is that the Wehrmacht is completely unable to resist in the current theatre of operations. In the Paris region, there is nothing to indicate that the enemy has decided to carry out a determined resistance…. The Allied offensive, the precarious situation of the Wehrmacht and the recent events of 14 July 1944 all indicate that we are on the eve of an insurrection in our region.8
At the same time, conditions in Paris were rapidly eroding. Food was now in short supply. Dr. Jean-Marie Musy, the senior Red Cross representative in Paris, published a report at the beginning of August describing the problem. Bread supplies were 60 percent of what they had been five years earlier; milk was down to 12 percent, meat was at 20 percent, and vegetable supplies had dropped to 10 percent. “The capital is threatened with famine,” said Dr. Musy.9
On August 12, Paris railway workers went on strike. This action was not coordinated with the Resistance, but called by the French railway workers’ union (CGT), which had been banned under Vichy. The strike was not totally effective, some workers refusing to walk out, and the German military did what it could to keep trains moving. But the strike had an effect. It was the beginning of the revolt.
The next action came two days later when Resistance groups in the Paris police met to devise strategy. The police enjoyed a mixed reputation. In 1940 they had done nothing to challenge the German occupation, and in the following three years had performed some of the most despicable tasks of the Vichy government, including the roundup and deportation of Paris’s Jewish population. But gradually, as Allied victory became evident, many of the police inwardly changed sides. By 1944 there were three Resistance groups in the police department, comprising about 10 percent of the total force. The first group formed was the Honneur de la Police, a Gaullist organization that included some of the highest-ranking police officers. It contained about 400 members. The second was the Police et Patrie, a socialist organization containing some 250 officers and 400 non-uniformed police employees. This group was active in supplying identity cards to resisters and escaped prisoners. The largest group was the Front National de la Police, a Communist group, containing some 800 members and many more sympathizers in the police force. Directed by the French Communist Party (PCF), it was distrusted by the other two groups, who feared it might be the vanguard of a Communist coup. Thus far the three groups had worked independently, but as the crisis of liberation approached, it seemed time to bring them together.
On August 14, Rol and Parodi convened a meeting of all three groups. The Germans had begun to disarm the police in the Paris suburbs of St. Denis and Asnières, and it seemed a prelude to what might happen in Paris. Rol and the Front National argued that the Paris police should immediately go on strike to prevent themselves from being disarmed. It would also show the population of Paris that the police were on their side. The faults of the past three years would be forgiven, and the police might regain the respect they had lost. The Front National leaders argued that any policeman who did not go on strike should be considered a traitor.
The Gaullist Honneur de la Police argued against going on strike and suggested it would split the force at a time when unity was required. The socialist Police et Patrie also thought a strike was not only premature, but might lead Paris into becoming another Warsaw. Rol carried the day when he pointed out that if the Front National went on strike, it and the Communist Party would get the credit for the liberation while the other groups, and the police more generally, would be condemned for their continued association with the occupiers. After much discussion, the three groups agreed t
o strike and to distribute leaflets printed on both sides. On one side would be an appeal by the FFI for the Paris police to go on strike. On the other, a statement by the three Resistance groups to go on strike as well: “For the final combat, everyone must go forward with the people of Paris.”10 Their message was quickly distributed throughout the city:
The hour of liberation has arrived. Today it is the duty of the police to join the FFI. You will do nothing further to help the enemy maintain order. You will refuse to arrest patriots, to check identities, to guard prisons, and so forth. You will aid the FFI in putting down anyone who continues to serve the enemy. Police who do not obey these orders will be considered traitors and collaborators…. On no pretext allow yourself to be disarmed…. March with the people of Paris to the final battle.11
The strike began the next morning, August 15. The streets of Paris were empty of police. Almost all members of the force obeyed the call to strike. Of the fifteen thousand police officers in Paris, not more than a hundred showed up for work. And the strikers kept their weapons. The FFI took advantage of the strike and began to move around the city wearing the armband of liberation—the Cross of Lorraine. As Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul general, said, “The situation inside Paris was entirely transformed in the space of a few hours. We knew that somewhere in the shadows great events were transpiring that could perhaps unleash rivers of blood.”12
August 15 also saw Allied forces land on France’s Mediterranean coast (Operation Dragoon). With an invasion fleet of six hundred vessels, including six battleships and four aircraft carriers, American and Free French forces came ashore on a thirty-five-mile front just east of Toulon. By evening the beachhead was secure and the Allied troops were moving inland. The American Seventh Army, under Lieutenant General Alexander Patch, and the First French Army, under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, were heading north. In Paris, news of the landings spread quickly. The BBC announced the news shortly after the troops went ashore, and the cafés were buzzing. Celebrations were widespread. The port of Marseilles would soon be captured by the First French Army in undamaged condition, and Patch’s Seventh Army was advancing up the Route Napoléon and would reach Grenoble on August 20. Even more important, Patton’s Third Army was in Chartres, just ninety-five kilometers to the southwest of Paris. Liberation seemed imminent.
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