Some could interpret it as a second history of what happened at the cathedral that day, but others, including Griffith’s family—and some of Griffith’s war colleagues, including William Dugan, Robert Cullen, Melville Stark, and even Colonel William Collier—would take umbrage. Some accused the author of deceit.
A more charitable view of Gaskill’s story could be that—assuming his could also be true—both events may have occurred hours apart, with Griff’s inspection (as told by Father Douin and reported by Dugan, Stark, and Cullen and confirmed by American and French military authorities soon after in official citations) having occurred before or around noon, whereas Gaskill’s tale occurred considerably later into the afternoon. Gaskill’s evoked a somewhat different scene at the cathedral that day, here paraphrased:
Gaskill and two companion war correspondents, Clark Lee and Bob Reuben, had trailed behind the Third US Army. The day before, fifty miles to the west at Third Army headquarters, an American colonel at a command tent had briefed the three about the cathedral, reminding them of the supreme commander’s standing order that American artillerymen were to avoid hitting historic monuments, including the cathedral, and were to aim at only observed point targets.
If the Germans don’t hurt the building, the colonel explained, “of course we won’t, either, unless absolutely necessary. In such matters, we’re following Eisenhower’s directive to the letter.”
The correspondents had arrived in Chartres on the sixteenth, following behind the lead American forces, and had just sat down to a surprising special lunch of eggs, sausage, and salad at a Chartres hotel when they were interrupted by a frantic Frenchman who ran into the dining room, crying out, “The Americans are going to shell the cathedral!”
They jumped out to the reporters’ jeep and sped up the hill to the large square a few hundred yards from the cathedral. The square was filled with Frenchmen who were scared almost silent by what they saw: three American tanklike vehicles, with snub-nosed guns for close-range shelling, had come to a halt facing the cathedral and were aiming their barrels upward at the cathedral’s towers.
The reporters pushed their way through the crowd to position themselves nose-to-nose with a young Seventh Armored Division lieutenant in charge of the guns who was facing down the shouts of an enraged Frenchman in a major’s uniform and failing to understand what the major was saying, so one correspondent asked what was up. The lieutenant pointed up to the cathedral and said, “The Jerries must have left some artillery spotters behind, up there. We’re going to knock them out.”
But just how, asked the reporter, did the lieutenant know that German spotters were up there?
“Bound to be,” the lieutenant said. “Can’t you hear those shells falling? That means they’ve got a spotter somewhere around, and those towers are the obvious place.”
The French major frantically spelled out to the reporter—who spoke some broken French—that of course the locals had been suspicious about the cathedral and had organized a guard that for the last several days had kept close watch on it. The major concluded, “I can assure you that there is not one single German in the cathedral, and thus there is no need to fire on it.”
The reporter translated these words to the lieutenant, who scoffed, “Ahhh, I don’t trust him.”
The French major pleaded, “Surely you can see this is not observed artillery fire!”
The lieutenant ignored both the major and the correspondents and ordered his men to load and aim. The crowd let out a murmur of fright, and with more pleading with the reporters, the major convinced them to employ their reporters’ savvy to convince the lieutenant to allow a group of civilians twenty minutes to search the cathedral inside.
The lieutenant narrowed his eyes and barked back, “What the hell are you guys butting in for? You’re civilians. It’s none of your damn business what I do!”
Yet the reporters were making it their business right then. One of them recounted to the lieutenant Eisenhower’s standing directive that in cases like this the lieutenant was not to fire on the cathedral unless he was sure the enemy was using it militarily—and to the harm of the Allies—and said, “Even if you don’t trust this Frenchman’s story, you ought to know that this is not observed fire. It’s falling at random. It has not hit a single American soldier or vehicle.” In fact, he noted, it was hitting and killing French, and yet it was the French who were insisting that there were no Germans up in the towers guiding the fire, and he implored the lieutenant again to let the Frenchmen take twenty minutes to check the church.
The lieutenant just ignored the reporters until one of them blurted out, “I’ll take your name personally to Eisenhower, and I can promise you that you’ll be the sorriest lieutenant in the American Army.”
The reporters had all just interviewed Eisenhower over several days. They thought they could—and would—get through to the general if they were forced by the lieutenant to do so, but the lieutenant—red in the face—answered through tight lips, “Okay. Twenty minutes, but that’s all. I’ll be watching and waiting, right here.”
The correspondents translated the lieutenant’s answer and heard the crowd’s sigh of relief. The French major and the reporter hopped into the jeep and rushed to the cathedral. The locals knew the layout of the cathedral and split into two groups, one for each tower. The Americans followed the major’s group all the way up the long climb through the spiral stairs and were panting for air by the time they reached the top. They found that the French major had been right: no one—German or other—was in either tower. One correspondent rang the heaviest of the imposing bells of the tower, with three shorts and a long—a Morse code V for victory—and the crowd below hooted its rapture. But by then, the lieutenant and his mobile guns had disappeared.
In 1965, Griffith’s brother Philip and other members of Griffith’s family would become disturbed on discovering the existence of Gas-kill’s Reader’s Digest story. Griffith’s family wrote to the magazine’s editors and asked for a retraction and also contacted Army headquarters in Washington requesting an investigation. The magazine’s editors stood by their story but pointed out that their Paris-based fact-checker had told them that she’d heard a half dozen stories from Americans and Frenchmen alike to the effect that they had saved the cathedral, and she thought they could all be true, but the important thing was that the cathedral had been saved.
Army headquarters, which shortly after the battle for Chartres had posthumously awarded Griffith the Distinguished Service Cross, replied by letter to the family that the Army’s award to Griffith was based on certified statements by four witnesses, which by 1965 were no longer available. Headquarters wrote that there was a possibility that both the story of Griffith’s inspection and the story of Gaskill’s adventure might be correct and that both “accounts described could have occurred during the heat and confusion of battle that day.”
Philip Griffith would also write to Kenneth Foree in October 1965—two decades after publication of Foree’s article based on his own investigation—and ask Foree what the editor thought of Gaskill’s account and of Gaskill’s claim that he and his companions saved the cathedral. Foree would write back:
Maybe Gordon Gaskill is right. Maybe it was saved twice. Maybe also the dust of twenty years accumulation lowers the visibility of a person and covers or softens the facts, or enlarges them, or distorts them.
But this I know damn well. That Walton Walker, a tough general if I ever met one, told me the story and if the tanks and infantry had already gone through I don’t know what the hell an artilleryman was preparing to shell the cathedral for. He was in no danger and it was always a favorite sport or tactics of the Krauts to shell the crossroads behind.
I’ll stick with General Walker who long since joined Colonel Griffith, and who told me that story only a year or so after the shooting was over.
It is understandable that recognition came to Griff. After all, he’d done a great deal more in addition to saving the cathedral
and—to boot—had died doing it. Besides, why hadn’t other Chartres locals from that crowd in the square stepped forward to honor Gaskill? Also, a search of the US Army’s institutional records revealed nothing to confirm that any demands to shoot at the cathedral ever rose to the level of an order. On the contrary, many after-action reports of the various units refer to one or more orders to limit all artillery fire to “observed” shelling—shelling controlled with on-the-ground direct spotting—which was to be directed upon only fixed targets away from the cathedral. Gaskill’s story seems simply outweighed by the documentary evidence and the fact that he didn’t come forward until twenty years after the events he purported to report.
Yet it also seems clear from the later reports that fighting continued in the center of Chartres and around the cathedral throughout August 16, and on the seventeenth and eighteenth, despite the fact that the Twenty-Third Infantry had moved in and taken positions and set up a headquarters in the northeast part of the city. This condition certainly affords a predicate for an event such as that which Gaskill reports to have indeed actually occurred as he described it in his Reader’s Digest piece.
At the cathedral, Griff’s actions may not have been the only ones that saved the cathedral—and likely were not—but that made them no less actions of valor and importance in the long life of the sacred building. And later, at the battalion assembly area, and later still in Lèves—though he made his decisions quickly—he did not make them in haste. They stemmed from the mind and force of character that made him a fine soldier and from his training and experience that had brought the opportunity to serve his country, his mission, and the people of France.
Allied demolitions experts who arrived at Chartres also found the cathedral at risk of being damaged and possibly destroyed by twenty-two sets of explosives placed on nearby bridges and other structures. Stewart Leonard, one of their team, helped defuse the bombs. Robert M. Edsel, in his book The Monuments Men, recounts a later conversation over drinks in a Berlin apartment between Leonard and Bernie Taper, who served as one of the Monuments Men. Taper would ask Leonard whether he thought risking his life to defuse bombs in order to save the cathedral was worth it. That is, “Was art worth a life, Taper wanted to know . . . it was a question that haunted him.” Leonard answered,
“I had that choice . . . I chose to remove the bombs. It was worth the reward.”
“What reward?”
“When I finished, I got to sit in Chartres Cathedral, the cathedral I had helped save, for almost an hour. Alone.”
Overall, it seems that circumstances requiring two life-defining decisions confronted Griffith in the last hours of his life, and both circumstances Griffith attacked with fast—almost spur-of-the-moment—decision making. One of those decisions—to risk his life by searching in the purported fire zone all around the outside of the cathedral and then inside the building when enemy soldiers had been seen inside and were suspected of still being hidden there, and to employ his position of authority to call off any artillery attack on the cathedral—would place Griff’s name permanently into the backstory of a great monument, on the long list of people whose valor, dedication, and willingness to take deadly risks created, maintained, or saved the cathedral. Griff’s subsequent decision, at the assembly area, to take over command of the armored infantry column and to go ahead of it in his jeep—and, critically, to jump onto that tank and to lead from its top—would cost him his life and would place his name in the long list of soldiers who died with valor while carrying out their mission. And because of Griff’s outsized energy and drive, his still-young age and tremendous promise, his principled life and the respect and admiration he’d earned from his superiors, peers, and subordinates, he would be remembered as a great soldier.
General Walker handwrote a letter to Griffith’s widow on August 18, expressing his condolences. He revealed to her that when Griffith died he was on a tank leading an infantry unit against a detachment of the enemy, which was holding up the American advance. He also told her that “Griff was my choice as Deputy Chief of Staff and Operations Officer. I leaned heavily upon his judgment. He was a wonderful soldier. His ideals were of the noblest. His record was always superior, and his loss is a severe blow to the XX Corps . . . he died as he would have wished—a soldier performing his duty in a heroic manner.” In November 1944, Griffith’s widow received the award to him posthumously of the Army Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism at Chartres and Lèves on August 16.
Twentieth Corps fought a successful five-day battle for Chartres from August 15 to August 19, 1944. General de Gaulle visited Chartres to celebrate its liberation on August 19 before taking Rambouillet in preparation for entering Paris. Among the notables to meet him in the square in front of the cathedral was Silvia Monfort.
Twentieth Corps went on to seize a bridgehead seventeen miles east, over the Aunay River, thirteen miles beyond Chartres, and reached the Seine at Melun. To the north, the Seventh Armored Division established various bridgeheads over the Seine, including at Mantes-Gassicourt.
On August 18, the Stars and Stripes daily US Armed Forces newspaper reported that General Patton’s Third Army troops had neared Paris the night before, after capturing Chartres, Orléans, and Dreux—three capital cities on the main road into the French capital. The German high command reported heavy fighting about twenty-five miles from Paris, on the main Chartres-to-Paris road. The American advance broke through on a sixty-mile front between Orléans and Dreux in what Berlin termed “and all-out drive for Paris” by strong tank and motorized-artillery formations.
A UPI report from Chartres said French Resistance forces fought the Germans in the streets before the American entry and deserved a “lion’s share” of the credit for capture of the city. Roger Joly, who had been in combat during the war himself, wrote in his book La libération de Chartres (The liberation of Chartres), based on archival research and witness interviews, that
[t]he liberation of Chartres was essentially the work of the people of Chartres themselves.
The Americans received the order to safeguard this symbolic city, with her cathedral, which Maurice Clavel, then head of the Resistance in Eure-et-Loir, and his partner, Sylvia Montfort, dreamed of liberating.
From 15 to 19 August, the Twentieth US Army Corps fought against German units in often extremely violent combat. Simultaneously, at the cost of severe losses, the local resistance and the Resistance fighters repelled the occupiers outside the city. . . .
The symbolic value remains intact: how and why men of all ages decided one day to risk their lives to liberate the city where, on 17 June 1940, Jean Moulin engaged, alone, in the first battle of the Resistance.
PART IV
POSTWAR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Light Returns to Its Shrine: Fongrenon and Chartres, Winter 1944–1945 to November 1950
EARLY ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING AT FONGRENON, NINE MONTHS after the liberation of Chartres, the light of dawn reached down the ventilation shaft and seeped through cracks in the wall of the tiny wooden shack in which that night’s security guard had been finishing his overnight shift. Soon after, the guard would learn from the arriving quarry workmen that the German generals in Berlin had finally surrendered and the war in Europe had ended. The guards would no longer need to worry that Nazi informers or Vichy collaborators might denounce them to the Germans or that Gestapo thugs or detectives might pound on or force open the door of the quarry and discover the anti-German cartoon and slogans Frenchmen had scribbled on the walls inside. All of that was over. But the guards continued to worry about other things. Mr. Block, the chief guard, would ask whether Historic Monuments or the National Museums would fund the guards’ pay of 1,683 francs per month for keeping watch over the crates and whether the payments would continue as long as security was needed—and indeed whether the government would have the cash to pay it.
They did not suspect that all over Europe, Nazi officers and sympathizers were still scrambling to
loot private and public art collections and hide them in salt mines or isolated castles in Austria, Italy, France, Switzerland, and elsewhere and that teams of Allied monuments officers were chasing those conspirators to recover the treasures before they could slip into the black markets’ oblivion. They also probably didn’t know that Nazi war criminals were fleeing under false identities through France on fishing and cargo vessels with murky itineraries to unknown ports, where they would assume new identities in South America and elsewhere.
Within weeks, citizens of Chartres and authorities in Paris clamored for Jean Trouvelot to mobilize his Historic Monuments staff to seal the cathedral from moisture by returning the windows and reinstalling them and thereby enabling both Chartres citizens and other French and foreign visitors to again experience their unique light. But before the windows could be moved, work was needed at Fongrenon and Chartres, and along the route between them.
During the war, only a couple of projectiles had hit the cathedral, but the violence of nearby explosions had damaged sections of the vitrex window coverings, particularly along the cathedral’s western facade, and had broken, bent, or ripped out iron window frameworks.
Monuments Service contractors had partially repaired the frameworks by makeshift means, and where they could gain access to frameworks as support, they had replaced the vitrex, but now missing and damaged iron armatures would have to be replaced for the windows to be reinstalled.
Restoration work on some of the windows stored in the cathedral’s inner crypt by two specialist glassworkers in the space in the basement of the old bishop’s palace had continued during the occupation. They had removed one crate at a time from the cathedral’s inner crypt across the courtyard, and in each case they had replaced it before taking out another, but not all of the crates concealed in the inner crypt had been accessible. In 1940, in the workers’ haste to return the crates from Berchères-les-Pierres to Chartres, they had been unable to pack them in with any logical order, and because the priests had disguised and fenced off the inner crypt “to avoid indiscretions”—as Trouvelot had described their motivations—the glassworkers during the war had finally reached a point at which they had to refrain from further work because they could no longer replace the crates even one at a time in such a manner without attracting attention.
Saving the Light at Chartres Page 31