No one followed the drama more closely than France’s one and a half million prisoners of war who had been languishing in POW camps for more than four years. One of them, Gaston Huet, heard about D-Day over a radio he and other prisoners had made and managed to conceal from their guards. “It was a moment of great joy for us,” Huet said. “We thought we would soon be going home, maybe even in time for the harvest.”
Their exhilaration was shared by winegrowers throughout France. News of the landings sent many straight to their vineyards to assess the conditions and speculate: “If it doesn’t rain too much, if there’s no mildew, if we get fertilizer, if, if, if . . .” And the biggest “if” of all, if we win and the war is over by fall, maybe we can make some good wine.
Their hopes were premature, for the Germans did not go quietly. Instead, they dug in their heels and retaliated more ferociously than ever against all who opposed them.
That is what happened in Comblanchien, a tiny village of winegrowers and quarry workers in the heart of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or. For a long time, the Germans had been convinced it was a Resistance stronghold. One train after another was blown up in the region, and there was so much sabotage that German units became skittish, refusing to allow trains to pass until the water tank of each station had been filled. The Maquis had often hidden in them to stage ambushes. Although many Maquisards drowned when the Nazis suddenly filled the tanks, the attacks and sabotage continued.
On August 21, about 9:30 P.M., eleven-year-old Jacky Cortot was finishing dinner when gunfire suddenly erupted. The electricity went out, then came back on. Jacky rushed to the window of the kitchen and, with his mother, peeked out through the closed shutters. Flames were shooting up from a house and barn just down the street. A minute later, they heard the sound of wine bottles being broken and cries of “Help, help!”
“The Germans are burning people alive in their homes,” Jacky’s mother screamed. She ran to another window. Several other houses were in flames too. “Run, hide in the vineyard,” she told Jacky. Pressing some money and important papers into his hand, she warned, “Stay there and don’t move until I come for you.”
Jacky slipped out of the house and into the nearby vines. He was not alone. A dozen other children, some with their mothers, were already there.
Crouching in the vines, the little group watched as one house after another was set on fire. Throughout the night, they heard the clock on the mairie sound the hour, “each hour increasing our fear and anxiety,” Jacky wrote in a memoir. “Would we still be alive at dawn?”
About five o’clock in the morning, Jacky saw his own house burned. Two hours after that, smoke began pouring out of the church. “The steeple itself burned away, leaving only the four beams supporting the bell,” Jacky recalled. “The bell was so hot, it turned red, until finally the whole structure fell. All that was left standing was the confessional.”
When it was finally over, eight people had been killed, fifty-two houses had been burned to the ground along with the church, and at least 175 villagers were left homeless. Among them was Comblanchien’s deputy mayor, Ernest Chopin, and his family, who had hidden in their wine cellar when their house above was set on fire.
Chopin emerged the next morning and learned that twenty-three of his neighbors had been arrested and taken to Dijon. Fearing they would be executed, he rushed there and arrived just as the Germans were lining them up against a wall. Chopin begged the Germans to spare them. Eleven were eventually freed, the young and the elderly. The rest were deported to work camps in Germany.
Pierre Taittinger knew what the Germans were capable of. He remembered how frightened he was when his son François was thrown into jail for sending weinführer Otto Klaebisch adulterated champagne. He also recalled how worried he and other champagne producers had been when they were threatened with imprisonment for protesting the arrest of Robert-Jean de Vogüé.
But now, Pierre Taittinger was truly terrified. He was afraid his beloved city of Paris was about to be destroyed, and no one seemed more certain to do it than General Dietrich von Choltitz.
Von Choltitz was an old-school Prussian officer who had supervised the destruction of Rotterdam in 1940 and Sebastopol in 1942. He arrived in Paris in August 1944 with Hitler’s orders ringing in his ears: “Turn Paris into a front-line city; destroy it rather than surrender it to the enemy!”
Taittinger, the Vichy-appointed mayor of Paris, knew he had to do something—anything—to save it. Police, postal, telephone and railway workers had gone on strike. Barricades appeared in the streets as the Resistance intensified calls for insurrection. Realizing that they could be facing a full-scale uprising, the Germans decided to leave the city to combat troops and began pulling out all other personnel.
It was a surreal sight as Parisians sitting at sidewalk cafés watched what one resident, Jean Galtier-Boissière, called la grande fuite des Fritz, or the big flight of the Fritz. As he wrote in his journal on August 18, “I saw dozens, hundreds of trucks, overcrowded cars and vehicles pulling cannons; there were ambulances full of wounded; they followed each other, crossed in front of each other and tried to pass each other. Monocled generals with blond elegantly dressed women on their arms poured out of sumptuous hotels near the Étoile and got into their sparkling open touring cars, looking for all the world as if they were off to a fashionable beach.”
But the most startling sight was the stream of loot flowing out with the departing occupiers. According to Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in Is Paris Burning?, “Paris was being emptied by the truckload. Bathtubs, bidets, rugs, furniture, radios, cases and cases of wine—all rode past the angry eyes of Paris that morning.”
A day later, sporadic street fighting broke out, orchestrated primarily by communists in the Resistance, whose slogan Chacun Son Boche (“To Each His Boche”) soon became a battle cry.
Heeding the cry was Frédéric Joliot-Curie. In 1939, he had headed a team of physicists who were partially successful in producing the first atomic chain reaction. Now, however, Joliot-Curie was concerned with a different kind of reaction, one produced by mixing sulfuric acid and potassium in bottles. He was making Molotov cocktails for the Resistance. There was only one problem: not enough bottles. Joliot-Curie had found a few in the laboratory where his mother-in-law, Marie Curie, had discovered radium, but he needed more. With the help of friends, he found them in the cellar of the Préfecture de Police: dozens of cases of champagne, all of the bottles full and all bearing the label of Pierre Taittinger’s champagne house.
With only momentary hesitation and slight regret, Joliot-Curie and his colleagues began uncorking the bottles and pouring their precious contents down the drain.
Taittinger, meanwhile, had finally gotten the appointment he had requested with von Choltitz. The Paris mayor walked into the Hôtel Meurice, down its marble-floored corridor and up the stairs to the sumptuous room that was the headquarters of the commander of Paris. The ivory-colored paint on the boiserie was nicked and the gilded trim had tarnished and flaked off in places, but with its massive crystal chandelier, it was still imposing. Von Choltitz, in his neatly pressed uniform, his medals gleaming, fit in perfectly.
The general got right to the point. Paris, he warned, would suffer the fate of Warsaw if there was an uprising by the Resistance. If any Germans were fired at, he would “burn all the houses in that particular block and execute every inhabitant.”
Taittinger pleaded with von Choltitz to reconsider. “Paris,” he said, “is one of the few great cities of Europe that remain intact; you must help me to save it!”
Von Choltitz replied that he had his orders. In the same breath, however, he admitted that he had no wish to destroy Paris. Leading his guest to the balcony, he confessed that one of his great pleasures was looking outside at the city and watching people move about.
The reflective, almost philosophic comments surprised Taittinger, who tried to take advantage of what he sensed was a change in the general’s mood. Turning
to von Choltitz, he said, “Generals rarely have the power to build, they more often have the power to destroy.” He urged von Choltitz to imagine what it would be like to return to Paris one day and stand on the same balcony. “You look to the left, at the Perrault colonnade, with the great Palais du Louvre on the right, then the Palais de Gabriel and the Place de la Concorde,” Taittinger said. “And among these splendid buildings, each one charged with history, you are able to say, ‘It was I, Dietrich von Choltitz, who, on a certain day, had the power to destroy this but I saved it for humanity.’ Is that not worth all a conqueror’s glory?”
Taittinger’s eloquence had a telling effect. “You are a good advocate for Paris. You have done your job well,” von Choltitz said, but he did not tell the politician what he would do.
Taittinger returned to his office to wait. He knew that explosives had been planted throughout the city. In addition, 22,000 troops, mostly SS, 100 tiger tanks and 90 bombers were standing by, waiting for the signal to level the city. That signal, however, was never given.
For the first time in his life, von Choltitz disobeyed an order. On August 25, when General Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division rolled into Paris, the German general surrendered the city intact.
The following day, Charles de Gaulle made a triumphal entry into Paris with a parade down the Champs-Elysées. Excited French soldiers, a bottle in one hand and a rifle in the other, scampered across the city’s rooftops looking for German snipers. One of them, Yves Fernique, was checking out the roof of the Hôtel Continental when the maître d’ appeared with a silver tray, a crystal glass and a cold bottle of Sancerre.
But the Germans were not quite through with Paris. While they did not try to destroy the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe or any of the city’s other great landmarks, they did go after a different kind of monument: Paris’s Halle aux Vins, the city’s wholesale wine center.
Earlier, before von Choltitz surrendered, the Germans had tried unsuccessfully to commandeer the stocks which leading wine merchants stored there. Now, as celebrations were taking place in other parts of the city, German planes suddenly descended on the wine center and dropped several bombs. Champagne corks popped and thousands of valuable bottles of cognac and other spirits burst like bombs from the heat of the fire. As firemen poured streams of water on the wreckage, bottles continued to explode, sending showers of glass into the air. Soon, only the walls of the Halle aux Vins were left. Inside were piles of melted glass that had been stores of outstanding wine.
One wholesaler tried to make the best of it. Retrieving two large casks of Bordeaux from the inferno, he hooked up a rubber hose, and, as one witness recalled, “began serving the wine in quaint, shallow silver cups to firemen and anyone else who seemed thirsty. It was being poured like water, and more was hitting the ground than the cups.”
About the only one who did not lift a glass that day was Charles de Gaulle. At the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall, a Vichy-appointed official offered the general a flute of champagne; de Gaulle refused it, saying he did not drink with collaborators or those soft on Nazis.
The bombing of the Halle aux Vins sent shivers down the spines of wine merchants in Bordeaux. They could easily see their precious stocks suffering a similar fate.
Bordeaux was still occupied by 30,000 German troops, but everyone, including the Germans, knew that it was just a matter of time before they had to pull out. As in Paris, the question was whether there would be anything left after they did so. Much of the city, especially its port, had been planted with 1,700-pound bombs, which were to be set off when troops abandoned the city.
With millions of bottles of wine stored in warehouses around the port and millions of others hidden away, destruction of the port would spell disaster for Bordeaux’s wine trade. The worst seemed inevitable with the Allies on the march and activity by the Resistance increasing.
Last night, oil reservoirs were bombed. Machine-gun fire is constant [wrote May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing in her diary]. But I am repairing the flag! The Anglo-Americans are coming toward Bordeaux and we are waiting for them!
Louis Eschenauer was waiting too—apprehensively. The “king of Bordeaux” had made a great deal of money selling wine to his close friends from the Third Reich. He worried about what would happen to him now, so he made some final calls to his German friends. “Don’t blow up Bordeaux when you leave,” he begged.
One of the first he called was Captain Ernst Kühnemann, commander of the port. It would be the captain’s job to carry out the destruction when such an order was issued. With wine merchants and others in Bordeaux pushing him to use his influence, Eschenauer invited his distant cousin to lunch. Kühnemann, a wine merchant himself, was not surprised. He loved good food and wine as much as Louis did and the two had dined together regularly, often at Louis’s restaurant, Le Chapon Fin.
Eschenauer pleaded with his cousin to save the port, describing in detail the anguish and hardship its destruction would cause. Kühnemann listened sympathetically. He said he did not want to destroy the port, that such a move now would be nothing more than an absurd act of vengeance. “But if Berlin orders me to do it, I will be in a very difficult position,” he said.
On August 19, an order marked “top secret” and numbered 1–122–144 arrived at Kühnemann’s headquarters. Destruction of the port was to start in five days at precisely 1700 hours. The atmosphere in Bordeaux suddenly changed.
The city has been closed off, surrounded by German troops. It is like a state of siege. There is no water, no gas, no electricity, absolutely no food to be seen, and no traffic either. (Diary of May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing.)
While Kühnemann agonized about what to do, a subordinate who shared his commanding officer’s feelings took matters into his own hands and blew up the blockhouse where the detonators were kept. The blast killed fifteen German soldiers and was heard miles away. German authorities mistakenly blamed the Resistance.
Aug. 24: Last night, a terrific explosion from the direction of Bordeaux. Unclear why. Although the Maquis has liberated Château Beychevelle and other parts of Bordeaux, we still hesitate to fly the flag because there is only one Resistance group near us. Nevertheless, at 5:30 this afternoon, we sang the Marseillaise with our staff. The Americans are only fifteen kilometers from Bordeaux! (Diary of May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing.)
In fact, the Americans were nowhere near Bordeaux, but the Germans did not know that and began making preparations to evacuate. Fearing the Resistance was far stronger than it was, the Germans decided to bluff, warning they still had enough explosives to destroy Bordeaux if their troops were fired on during withdrawal. The Resistance agreed to hold its fire.
On the evening of August 27, German troops began evacuating Bordeaux. The last one out was Ernst Kühnemann.
FAMOUS WINE COUNTRY FOUGHT OVER
Rome, Sept. 10 — The French and Americans have been fighting the Germans over perhaps the most famous vineyards in the world—the Burgundy district. How much damage has been done to this heritage has not yet been reliably assessed, but, according to many reports, the Germans have already gone a good distance toward the total ruination of the envied countryside.
—The New York Times, Sept. 11, 1944
There was just one problem with that report. It was wrong. The vineyards of Burgundy survived. The Germans and Allies may have fought over them but they did not fight in them.
It was called “the Champagne Campaign,” a name conjured up almost at the very moment French and American troops landed on the Côte d’Azur in southern France. “We had put down a tremendous barrage before dashing for the shore,” wrote British war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. “We were expecting to be mown down by machine guns but not a single bullet whistled past us: the Germans had tactfully pulled out a few hours before, and in their place an immaculately dressed Frenchman advanced out of the dust of war. He carried a tray with a magnum of champagne and ten glasses. ‘Welcome, gentlemen, welcome,’
he beamed; ‘but if I may venture a little criticism, you are four years late!’ ”
The goal of the Champagne Campaign, officially known as Operation Anvil, was to push north through the Rhône Valley and Burgundy and link up with forces which had landed in Normandy. Sometimes it was difficult to keep that goal in mind. There were too many distractions.
Among them was a sumptuous watering hole called the Hôtel Negresco, which the Americans had taken over for their headquarters. The Negresco, located in Nice on the Riviera, was known for its fine cuisine, exquisite wines and one of the best nightclubs in the world. One of those who “checked in” as often as possible was Sergeant Major Virgil West. “We would go out on patrol during the day,” he said, “maybe getting into a little firefight, perhaps getting all bloody and muddy in the process, then five hours later be sitting in one of the biggest nightclubs in the world with a babe and a bottle of champagne.”
But it was not all babes and bubbly. According to another soldier, “The overwhelming thing was the strange character of the combat there. It was hard, it was tough and we lost a lot of men. We didn’t destroy the beautiful Riviera, so we’d go back and have a bottle of wine and a bath, then go back up into the mountains for another battle.” Even when bullets were flying, however, soldiers described how “women kept trying to give us wine and flowers.”
Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 20