The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

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  With his main thrust delayed by skirmishers, General Leclerc dispatched a force with three Shermans and sixteen half-tracks through the back streets of southern Paris at dusk on August 24. Up the Avenue d’Italie the detachment darted, through spattering picket fire near the Gare d’Austerlitz. Seeing the five-pointed white star on the Sherman hulls, Parisians shrieked, “Les Américains!” Soon the truth would out: these troops were France’s own. Citizens opened barricades along the Seine and a radio broadcast from the Hôtel de Ville announced, “Rejoice! The Leclerc Division has entered Paris!… Tell all the priests to ring their church bells.”

  From a balcony of the Hôtel Meurice, on the Rue de la Rivoli overlooking the Tuileries gardens, a chubby elf in a German general’s uniform stood listening to the consequent pealing, punctuated by a deep, fatidic toll from Notre Dame. Thick of body and short of leg, with a dimpled cowcatcher chin and hocks for cheeks, General Dietrich von Choltitz was considered a ganz Harter—a tough guy—for his role in obliterating Rotterdam in 1940 and Sevastopol two years later; for those actions he was nicknamed “the Smasher of Cities.” As a corps commander in Normandy, Choltitz had seen his force routed in COBRA before he was assigned to Paris under Hitler’s edict that the city “must not fall into the hands of the enemy except as a field of ruins.” A Saxon whose forebears had soldiered for eight centuries, he had told the Swede Nordling, “It has been my fate to cover the retreat of our armies and to destroy the cities behind them.” On Sunday he sent a note to his wife in Germany, along with coffee requisitioned from the Meurice kitchen: “Our task is hard and our days grow difficult.”

  With only twenty thousand men to hold a city of three million, Choltitz had no illusions about the outcome of the imminent battle. “The enemy has now recognized our weakness,” he told Model. But reducing the City of Light to Hitler’s field of ruins held little appeal even for the ganz Harter, and he had temporized with skill, guile, and perhaps conscience. “Ever since our enemies have refused to listen to and obey our Führer,” he told his staff with a sardonic glint, “the whole war has gone badly.” While encouraging Nordling and others to put spurs to the Allies, Choltitz played for time by concocting elaborate, largely imaginary plans to destroy bridges, utilities, and two hundred factories. He told superiors of placing explosives by the ton in Les Invalides, the Opéra, and other public buildings; demolitionists would level the Arc de Triomphe for enhanced fields of fire and dynamite the Eiffel Tower “as a wire entanglement to block the Seine.” All the while he urged “a prudent and intelligent attitude” from his troops while trying to play Resistance factions off against one another and hoping for reinforcements. Now, in a phone call to Army Group B headquarters, he held the receiver overhead. “Will you listen, please?” Choltitz said. “Do you hear that? It is bells.… What they are telling this city is that the Allies are here.”

  Just so. By ten on Friday morning, August 25, Leclerc managed to slide his entire division into town, tank tracks shedding sparks as they clipped across the cobbles. Two hours later, the 4th Division’s 12th Infantry reached Notre Dame, then clattered through the eastern precincts. Despite vicious firefights at the Quai d’Orsay and elsewhere, crowds lined the sidewalk twenty deep, baying “Vive la France” in a hallucinatory admixture of celebration and gunfire. Anticipating something wondrous, women curled their hair and pressed their finest dresses. At 12:30 the national colors flew from the Eiffel Tower for the first time since June 1940; ninety minutes later, firemen unfurled the tricolor from the Arc de Triomphe. Animals set loose from a local circus scampered down the Champs-Élysées. So many Parisians pulled uniforms from storage in a rush to join the FFI that they were dubbed Naphtalinés, for their strong scent of mothballs.

  “The rip tide of courage,” in one GI’s phrase, proved stirring and strong. Volunteer nurses in white smocks darted through bullet-swept streets to carry bloody litters to safety. At a traffic circle, where artillery fire splintered a chestnut tree and snipers took potshots, French half-tracks and tanks raced round and round, pumping “not less than five thousand bullets” into adjacent buildings. Resistance fighters in automobiles combed Parisian parks, firing at enemy bivouacs from the rumble seats. Police watched subway exits for fleeing Germans; “those who come out,” a U.S. Army report noted, “are massacred or made prisoners.” Five hundred Germans at the Chamber of Deputies surrendered to a Signal Corps photographer, and negotiations at some strongholds were conducted in Yiddish, the closest common language. Wehrmacht troops emerging with hands raised from the Hôtel Continental had the Iron Crosses ripped from their necks, while GIs ordered those captured in the Crillon to check their weapons in the cloakroom. On this feast day of St. Louis, who died in Tunis while crusading in 1270, most Parisians ate lunch at the usual hour.

  Choltitz dined too, on Sèvres china with silver candlesticks in the elegant Meurice dining room. “Germany’s lost the war,” he told his staff, “and we have lost it with her.” Upstairs his orderly packed a valise with three shirts, underwear, socks. At table, a lieutenant recalled, the general and his staff were “silent from the effort of showing no emotions.” When asked to move away from the window to avoid stray bullets fired from the Louvre across the street, Choltitz replied, “No, particularly not today.” But as the gunfire intensified he at last pushed away his plate. “Gentlemen, our last combat has begun.” He stood to go wash and don a fresh uniform.

  Just down the street, fighting swept through the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine had removed more than a thousand heads during the Revolution, including those of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and Robespierre. Five Sherman tanks sent to assault the Meurice were soon knocked out, but two hundred French infantrymen trotted under the arcade fronting the Rue de la Rivoli. Lieutenant Henri Karcher bolted into the Meurice lobby, flinging a smoke grenade from behind the reception desk, while a soldier scorched the elevator cage with a flamethrower. Upstairs an FFI fighter burst into an office and demanded of the portly figure sitting behind a table, “Sprechen deutsch?” “Yes,” Choltitz replied, “probably better than you do.” Karcher arrived to declare, “You are my prisoner.”

  A furious mob punched and spat at the Germans, snatching spectacles, watches, and shoulder boards as the erstwhile occupiers were herded through the street. At three P.M. Choltitz arrived at the Préfecture, where Leclerc also had been dining on china and a white tablecloth. They retired to the billiard room; Choltitz adjusted his monocle, then signed the formal surrender of Paris. Bundled into an armored car, he sat bowed and silent in the rear while a triumphant Leclerc stood in front like a centurion in his chariot. At the 2nd Armored command post, abutting platform No. 3 in the Gare Montparnasse, Choltitz signed another document ordering his remaining strongpoints to cease fire. He then requested a glass of water. Asked whether he intended to swallow poison, he replied, “Oh, no. We don’t do things like that.”

  Teams of French and German officers carried white flags and copies of the cease-fire through the city. In a final redoubt at the Palais du Luxembourg, 700 Wehrmacht soldiers each received a pint of cognac and a pack of cigarettes; then, at 7:35 P.M., the gates swung open and their commander marched out beneath a huge white flag, followed by his troops and ten panzers. All told, 15,000 German soldiers were bagged in Paris—many would be confined for days in the Louvre courtyard—with another 4,200 killed or wounded.

  “German spoken” signs vanished from shop fronts, sometimes replaced by Resistance placards that warned, “Supplier of the Boche.” Collaborators were pelted with eggs, tomatoes, and sacks of excrement; shorn women, stripped to the waist, had swastikas painted on their breasts and placards hung around their necks: “I whored with the Boches.” An American sergeant barked at a mob shearing yet another wretch, “Leave her alone, goddamn you. You’re all collaborationists.” Le Figaro resumed publication of a daily feature called “Arrests and Purges.” Rough justice flourished, the equivalent of that guillotine in the Place de la Concorde.
The historian Robert Aron later calculated that as many as forty thousand summary executions of collaborators and other miscreants took place across France, “a figure sufficiently high to create a psychosis that will remain forever in the memories of the survivors.” Some 900,000 French men and women would be arrested in the épuration—the purge—of whom 125,000 were forced to answer in court for their behavior during the occupation. Those guilty of indignité nationale served prison terms, while those convicted of dégradation nationale were banned from government jobs.

  At ten P.M., the first of an eventual eighteen hundred Allied counterintelligence agents set up a command post in the Petit Palais. “T Force,” mimicking a similar unit in Rome, had amassed the names of eighty thousand suspected spies, saboteurs, and villains in France, as well as thick dossiers on Gestapo and SS facilities. Eighty-four of those listed were collared that very day. Among the more wrenching discoveries would be three windowless torture cells in a German barracks, where condemned prisoners had scratched messages in charcoal or pencil. “Gaston Meaux, my time is up, leaves five children, may God have pity on them,” read one; another, simply: “Revenge me.” Alan Moorehead quoted a Parisian as saying, “I’ll tell you what liberation is. It’s hearing a knock on my door at six o’clock in the morning and knowing it’s the milkman.”

  Such sobriety could not suppress “a great city where everybody is happy,” in A. J. Liebling’s judgment. “I never in my life been kissed so much,” a sergeant wrote his parents in Minnesota. Another GI climbed three flights of stairs to visit a bedridden Frenchwoman who had pleaded to see an American before she died. “The cobblestones, the flapping signs in red and gold over the pavement cafés … three golden horse heads over the horse butcher, the flics with their flat blue kepis,” Moorehead wrote. “Had we ever been away?” Leclerc’s men seized a train before it departed for Germany with treasures from the Jeu de Paume in 148 packing cases: 64 Picassos, 29 Braques, 24 Dufys, 11 Vlamincks, 10 Utrillos, and works by Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Renoir. The Bank of France cellars were found to hold 400,000 bottles of cognac, 3 million cigars, and 235 tons of sugar.

  An American patrol arrived at the Claridge to be told by the manager, “This hotel is under lease to the officer corps of the German army.” A colonel drew his .45 and said, “You’ve got just thirty seconds to get it unleased. We’re moving in.” Hemingway, pulling up to the Ritz with two truckloads of his French irregulars, told the bartender, “How about seventy-three dry martinis?” Later, after he and several companions had dined on soup, creamed spinach, raspberries in liqueur, and Perrier-Jouët champagne, the waiter added the Vichy tax to the bill, explaining, “It’s the law.” No matter: “We drank. We ate. We glowed,” one of Hemingway’s comrades reported. Private Irwin Shaw of the 12th Infantry, who later won fame as a writer, believed that August 25 was “the day the war should have ended.”

  To Ernie Pyle, ensconced in a hotel room with a soft bed though no hot water or electricity, “Paris seems to have all the beautiful girls we have always heard it had.… They dress in riotous colors.” The liberation, he concluded, was “the loveliest, brightest story of our time.”

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  De Gaulle entered the city late Friday afternoon by car down the Avenue d’Orléans, “gripped by emotion and filled with serenity,” in his words. At five P.M. he made his way to the War Ministry in the Rue St.-Dominique, whence he had fled on June 10, 1940. All was unchanged—the heavy furniture, the ushers, the names on the phone extension buttons, even the blotting paper. “Nothing was missing except the state,” De Gaulle later wrote. From a balcony at the Hôtel de Ville he proclaimed, “Paris outraged, Paris broken, Paris martyred, but Paris liberated. Liberated by herself, liberated by her people, with the help of the whole of France.” He uttered hardly a word about the Americans, British, Canadians, or Poles, who together since June 6 had sacrificed more than fifty thousand lives for this moment. A U.S. Army captain assigned as De Gaulle’s aide spent the evening scrounging rations, Coleman lanterns, and Players cigarettes for him.

  “City is scarcely damaged. Great enthusiasm,” 12th Army Group reported to SHAEF. Sufficient coal remained to fire the waterworks and to provide electricity for two hours a day until mid-September. A few buses with charcoal burners still ran, but they were far outnumbered by horse carts, antique carriages, and bicycles. The Dôme, the Rotonde, and other cafés in Montparnasse did a lively business beneath striped awnings. About two thousand Resistance fighters and twenty-five hundred civilians had been killed or wounded in the battle of Paris, and Hitler continued to kill more. Upon learning in answer to his infamous question—“Brennt Paris?”—that, no, the city was not burning, he ordered V-1 and Luftwaffe onslaughts. Bombers would inflict twelve hundred casualties in the eastern suburbs within a day after Choltitz’s surrender. Parisians fired at the sky with every firearm at hand, including ancient pistols. “After a noisy hour,” a witness reported, “the wheezy ‘all clear’ sounded.” Eisenhower cabled Marshall, “We should not blame the French for growing a bit hysterical.”

  At three P.M. on Saturday, August 26, De Gaulle appeared at the Arc de Triomphe in an unadorned khaki uniform, as Moorehead reported, “stiff, ungainly, a heavy lugubrious face under his kepi … an imposing and unattractive figure.” A police band played as he laid a cross of Lorraine fashioned from pink gladioli and relit the memorial flame that had gone cold four years earlier. Much palaver had been devoted to whether le général should ride a white horse or a black one down the Champs-Élysées; he chose instead to walk, preceded by four Leclerc tanks. A loudspeaker truck blared, “General de Gaulle confides his safety to the people of Paris.” Behind him trailed an arm-in-arm, curb-to-curb phalanx of police, soldiers, and FFI fighters. They were followed by a procession of jeeps and armored vehicles teeming, it was said, “with girls whose destiny does not seem likely to be a nunnery.”

  A million people or more lined the boulevard, a prancing, dancing human herd, cheering to the echo the unsmiling man who strode a head taller than the rest. Across the Place de la Concorde, near the smoke-stained Hôtel Meurice, De Gaulle had just climbed into an open car when shots rang out. Thousands fell flat on the pavement. “It was like a field of wheat suddenly struck by a strong gust of wind,” Moorehead wrote. “Everyone who had a gun began blazing away at the housetops.” Armored cars rushed “up and down the streets at fifty miles an hour, firing wildly with machine guns at roofs and high windows,” David Bruce told his diary. Thirty GIs standing on supply trucks fired “to beat hell,” an officer reported. Nary a marksman seemed sure of his target.

  Undeterred, De Gaulle and his entourage crossed the Pont d’Arcole, FFI men with bandoliers strapped across their chests astride the running boards. At 4:15 P.M., as the convoy arrived at Notre Dame, the clap of a revolver and then automatic weapons fire seemed to come from overhead, perhaps from behind a gargoyle, sparking another wild spray of return fire that brought stone chips sprinkling down. As Leclerc barked for a cease-fire and whacked at soldiers’ rifles with his malacca, De Gaulle strolled through the Portal of the Last Judgment, head high and shoulders back. He marched down the aisle to the north transept, kepi in hand, when more shots reverberated through the nave. “The huge congregation, who had all been standing, suddenly fell flat on their faces,” a British intelligence officer reported. Worshippers crouched behind columns and beneath wooden stalls as policemen and FFI fighters fired at the organ pipes and clerestory. Ricochets pinged off the ceiling. Through it all De Gaulle stood unflinching, “the most extraordinary example of courage that I’ve ever seen,” a BBC reporter declared. Hymnal in hand, he honked through the Magnificat—a canticle to the Virgin—while an aide shouted at the cowering congregation, “Have you no pride? Stand up!”

  Praise to God Himself would have to wait for a more pacific moment. The “Te Deum” was omitted, the service curtailed, and the great cathedral evacuated posthaste. Precisely who had started the gunfight would never be known. No sniper was sho
t, captured, or even spotted. “The first shots started a wild fusillade,” De Gaulle would write a day later. “We shall fix this too.” He returned to his car and drove off to begin the hard work of rebuilding France.

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  So ended the great struggle for Normandy. For Germany the defeat was monumental, comparable to Stalingrad, Tunis, and the recent debacle in White Russia. Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division and Rommel’s erstwhile chief of staff, later concluded that among history’s memorable battlefield drubbings, including Cannae and Tannenberg, none “can approach the battle of annihilation in France in 1944 in the magnitude of planning, the logic of execution, the collaboration of sea, air, and ground forces, the bulk of the booty, or the hordes of prisoners.” The “greatest strategic effect,” Bayerlein added, was to lay “the foundation for the subsequent final and complete annihilation of the greatest military state on earth.” That was true, though it badly undersold Moscow’s role in destroying the Reich.

  German casualties in the west since June 6 exceeded 400,000, half of them now prisoners. More than four thousand panzers and assault guns were lost on all fronts during the summer, nearly half in Normandy. SHAEF would tell the Charlie-Charlies in Washington and London that the equivalent of eleven panzer or panzer grenadier divisions had been obliterated or “severely mauled,” although some still mustered ten thousand men, even if bereft of tanks. Thirty-six infantry divisions had been eliminated, “very badly cut up,” or isolated in coastal enclaves. Several thousand Luftwaffe planes were destroyed; as well, Berlin lost its early-warning network along the Atlantic and its access to French coal, bauxite, farm bounty, and horses. An OSS analysis concluded that Germany now averaged monthly casualties of a quarter million, while only 45,000 young men turned eighteen each month. A study of obituaries in seventy German newspapers over three years would find “a noticeable increase” in the proportion of war dead both eighteen or younger and thirty-eight or older. The Reich was bleeding to death.