Despite his downplaying of the Resistance’s ability to pose a serious threat to German positions in Paris, there is little doubt that Choltitz feared Parisians more than he feared the approaching armies of the Allies. He hoped to deal with any trouble from civilians in the city by imposing a harsh regime. Although he may have been disappointed in the resources at his disposal for controlling Paris, he had little doubt that he had enough force to intimidate the FFI, for whom he had nothing but disdain. In his first few days in his new command, Choltitz gave an interview to the Petit Parisien newspaper in which he said that he “would not hesitate to use the most brutal measures of repression” at his disposal to put down an uprising in the city. On the same day, he made an official statement that read: “It is important to stress that order shall be maintained at all costs. The Military Governor of Paris has resolved to respond to cases of sabotage, attacks, or riots with the most severe and most brutal measures. The proximity of the front gives German military authorities particular responsibilities which justify this harsh attitude. Any and all measures that can deal with disorder, no matter how severe, will be used.”12
Choltitz also threatened to level any city block from which a single shot was fired at a German soldier. German authorities tried to take some of the sting out of these harsh declarations by claiming that they were necessary to guarantee the steady supply of food into the city, but Parisians, most of whom knew of Choltitz’s reputation, understood his message.
From his hideout on the Rue de Meaux in northeast Paris, Rol carefully observed the new German garrison and its actions. He studied the German dispositions for the city and saw nothing original or creative about them. As Rol later wrote, they suggested that the new German commander “didn’t understand that the situation had changed” in the past few weeks. The strikes of July 14 and the refusal of the Paris police to intervene, he concluded, had turned the tide in the city to the FFI’s favor. The strategic outlook for the Resistance was good. In the event of a major uprising, the German strongpoints would become isolated and unable to assist one another. The FFI could surround and attack them one by one, especially if by doing so they could deny the Germans easy movement through the streets.13
Rol developed a new plan for seizing control of the city once the opportunity presented itself. The main impediment remained the lack of weapons. Rol begged and pleaded with his contacts in London to air-drop or smuggle weapons into the city. Without weapons, there would be little that Rol’s dedicated band of FFI agents could do. To him, the dilemma was obvious, and the need for weapons even more so. The continued silence from London frustrated him and made him suspect the motives of de Gaulle and the Allies. “Can the Military Delegation [in London] be ignorant of this situation?” he demanded in a message to French officials, but still he got no answer and no weapons. Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont assumed that the Allied refusal to air-drop weapons was part of a larger plan to impose an American military government on a prostrate and beaten France. But whatever its cause, the implications were clear: If the FFI was going to fight the Germans, they would have to take the extreme risk of doing so without outside help.14
Events outside the city, and not just in London, continued to have a dramatic impact on Paris. As Choltitz was leaving Rastenburg to assume command of Paris, the Germans launched the counteroffensive that Hitler had mentioned. German forces attacked the advancing Allies in the region directly south of the Normandy beaches around the strategically important town of Mortain. Hitler hoped that the attack would delay the Allies for six to ten weeks. German forces could then redeploy their infantry units east of Paris along defensive lines that they could build on the same lines where German forces had held off the Allies in 1916 and 1917. These positions had bought time for the Germans, which allowed them to design the Ludendorff Offensives for the spring of 1918. Those offensives had experienced temporary success but had ultimately failed, leading to German defeat, but this important detail seems not to have influenced German strategists.
Although Hitler held out high hopes for the August 7 attack, the Allies knew it was coming thanks to the cryptographers involved in the Ultra project, a top-secret effort that broke the German codes. On the appointed day, three armored divisions advanced more than seven miles and retook Mortain, and the Germans at first thought they had won a great victory. The Allies, however, had been ready; they had carefully retreated to high ground in good order, leaving the Germans with a salient, or bulge, in their lines that looked like a finger poking into Allied positions. Now surrounded on three sides, the German advance had become a trap with Allied units in place to threaten the only route of escape. Bradley quickly moved forces to the base of the salient, hoping to pinch it off simultaneously from the north and south, thereby trapping the Germans inside what became known as the Falaise-Argentan pocket, named after the two French towns on either side of the gap.15
With one drive coming from the north and another coming from the south, the Allies had to proceed with great care, lest they either allow the Germans to slip away or accidentally fire upon one another. Although the Allies possessed many advantages, the situation was still precarious. It occupied the full attention of the Allied (and German) commanders for two weeks, further diverting their eyes from the situation in Paris. A debate began in Allied circles about whether a short hook that cut off the main roads or a complete encirclement of the pocket was the best way to capitalize on the precarious German position. Allied commanders saw a chance to win a major victory and possibly open the routes to the east if they acted quickly and carefully. Intensive planning began for a counterattack to be launched on August 14. Little wonder, then, that Rol had trouble getting Eisenhower and his staff to focus their energies on the FFI’s lack of weapons inside Paris.
The Falaise pocket proved to be more difficult to eliminate than Eisenhower had hoped. In military terms, the Allies possessed exterior lines, meaning that the Germans could move forces inside the pocket more easily than the Allies could move them outside the pocket. Although the Allies held the tremendous advantage of being able to fly over the pocket and destroy German armor and infantry formations from the air, they knew that the Germans would fight tenaciously out of their fear of being surrounded and trapped. Fierce fighting began inside the pocket shortly after the Germans reached Mortain as the Allies tried to close the noose and prevent German troops from escaping to the east.
Inside the pocket sat twenty-one German divisions whose only line of communication to the rest of the German Army was a tenuous fourteen-mile gap in the line. Almost as soon as the German offensive began, Eisenhower and his staff started moving units behind the German divisions to cut off the pocket. The Allies employed a devastating strategy of pounding the pocket with aircraft and heavy artillery, leading the German high command to decide, on August 13, that it had indeed made a terrible mistake. Thereafter, the German focus centered on getting as many men out of the pocket as possible before the Allies closed the gap, which they began to do, as planned, around August 14. By August 18, the Allies had narrowed the gap to just three miles.
The failed Mortain offensive and the battles to close the Falaise pocket decimated the German Army in the west. An estimated 10,000 Germans died and another 50,000 became prisoners of war by the time the pocket finally closed on August 19. Eisenhower described Falaise as “unquestionably one of the greatest killing grounds of the war,” and Montgomery called the carnage “almost unbelievable.” In Eisenhower’s chilling recollection, “forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap I was conducted through it on foot, to encounter scenes that could be described only by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.” Since June 6 the German Army in France had lost 158,930 men and received only 30,069 replacements. The German position in France, weak to begin with, was coming close to collapsing, even if thousands of German soldiers had managed to escape the Falaise gap’s final closing.16
The f
ailure of the Mortain counteroffensive convinced even many of the most ardent Nazis that the German Army’s days in France were numbered. Hitler’s headquarters continued to dream of a German thrust to the English Channel coast as late as August 13. Knowing full well that such visions were completely without a basis in reality, German commanders in the west sought by mid-August to find ways to get as many men out of France as possible. They knew that the Allies would try to exploit the massive defeat they had just inflicted and that the dominance of Allied air power made the movement of men and supplies almost impossible except at night, when they could move under the cover of darkness. Only the Allies’ own supply problems, most notably the desperate shortage of gasoline, could stop them from crossing the Seine and cutting off German avenues of retreat.17
Those supply problems, plus the continued presence of thousands of German soldiers from the Falaise pocket, continued to prevent Allied commanders from making plans for Paris. At the same time, events in other parts of France also occupied Allied attention in mid-August. On August 15, just one week after the Germans’ Mortain counteroffensive began, the Allies landed in southern France as part of Operation Dragoon. The landings put 94,000 men and 11,000 vehicles between Toulon and Cannes on the first day, opening up new supply routes for the Allied advance and sending thousands of German soldiers north in flight. The fighting was far less intense than in Normandy, giving the operation the nickname the Champagne Campaign, and it provided a tremendous boost to French morale, especially since more than half of the forces for Dragoon were French. France was, at long last, taking an active role in its own liberation.
To move all of their retreating units and reestablish a fighting line in the east, the Germans desperately needed Paris and its transportation infrastructure intact. Although they sent no new infantry or armored units to the city (as a result of the disaster at Falaise, there were none to send), the Germans did deploy twenty additional 88 mm antiaircraft guns to the Paris region as part of an effort to protect the bridges they needed against attacks by Allied bombers. These deployments show that the Germans were not planning to hold Paris for longer than a few weeks. But they still needed to be able to use the city as a supply and transportation center for the German units streaming in disorder and disarray toward the Seine. To Choltitz, the chaos on the French front meant that Paris was even less defensible against an Allied attack than it had been just a few days earlier. On August 14, he informed Kluge that in his view, the Germans should not hold the city, for risk of being encircled and cut off. Nor did it make sense to plan for ultimately futile street fighting in an attempt to defend Paris.18
Better, Choltitz argued, for the Germans to hold the city long enough to enable an orderly withdraw to the east. To do so, the Paris garrison would need to maintain order in the city for as long as possible at any cost. German reports continued to suggest that the Allies were still preparing to move around the city rather than through it, meaning, for Choltitz, that internal security remained the most pressing problem. He would need to make sure that the residents of Paris would continue to obey his orders without question. Such exigencies led Choltitz to justify some of the harshest measures he ordered during the occupation, although his callousness would not, ultimately, stave off disorder.19
What to do with Paris once the Germans finally did have to give it up became a point of debate among leading German officials. Kluge and General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s closest military adviser, wanted the city’s bridges and industrial sites rigged for demolition and then destroyed as soon as German forces had moved east. To accomplish this mission, Jodl had promised to make available the warheads of thousands of torpedoes destined for German U-boat pens in Brittany that now sat in Allied hands. Jodl also dispatched four German engineers with blueprints of key sites, such as the Palais du Luxembourg, the main railway stations, and the central telephone exchange. They were to advise the German high command on the best way to cause maximum destruction with the explosives available. In addition, Jodl wanted forty-five bridges, as well as aqueducts, gas works, and electric substations, to be demolished.
Choltitz pronounced the plan “perfectly sound” and told Kluge that he had no problem with it in theory. Even Taittinger noted that Choltitz was prepared “to destroy Paris as indifferently as if it were a crossroads village in the Ukraine.” Choltitz did, however, want to delay the plan’s implementation as long as Paris remained calm. Because the German Army still needed Paris, he saw no reason to provoke its residents unnecessarily. Kurt Hesse, commander of the St. Cloud garrison west of Paris, agreed with Choltitz, noting that no one in the Paris garrison in mid-August doubted the German ability to hold the city until the German Army had escaped to the east. Jodl thus consented to delay the plan’s implementation, although he reminded Choltitz of Hitler’s desire to see Paris demolished rather than for it to be handed over to the Allies intact.20
While Parisians sat anxiously monitoring German actions, some of their countrymen were beginning to get into the battle. To accomplish the remarkable feat at Falaise, the Allies had relied on units from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Poland, and, crucially, France. As part of the drive to close the southern shoulder of the Falaise pocket, Bradley had ordered into action the Deuxième Division Blindée, the Free French Second Armored Division. Composed largely of men from the French Empire in Africa, the Deuxième Division Blindée had come over from England in the wake of the Normandy invasions under the command of the determined Major General Philippe Leclerc. Born Philippe François Marie, comte de Haute-clocque, into an aristocratic family that had served France since the Crusades, he had attended the French military academy at St. Cyr and risen quickly through the ranks. Wounded in action in 1940, Leclerc had twice escaped from German prison camps before finding his way to join de Gaulle in London. He had changed his name to protect his family from Nazi reprisals.
At age forty-two and cutting an impressive military bearing, Leclerc projected energy and competence to a badly demoralized nation. In August 1940, de Gaulle sent him to French Equatorial Africa, where he took command of Free French forces in Cameroon and Congo and persuaded the administrations of both colonies to rally to de Gaulle’s cause. Through sheer will and determination he built an army out of former Vichy French soldiers and Africans from France’s empire, then led it 1,500 miles in thirty-nine days across the desert to link up with the British Eighth Army in Tunisia. Containing men of all political, ethnic, and national backgrounds, the Deuxième Division Blindée was a truly imperial unit with a high level of cohesion and morale. Leclerc, its leader, attained legendary status and de Gaulle’s trust. He became the face of Free France’s military efforts and, being a more sympathetic figure than de Gaulle, the frequent subject of Allied newsreels. Eisenhower quickly saw the value in having a formidable French unit take part in the Normandy campaign. He had the Deuxième Division Blindée fitted out with modern equipment and American uniforms, although they also wore distinctive red berets that identified them as French. The Deuxième Division Blindée became attached to the American Fifth Corps and Third Army in France, landing on Utah beach on August 1 to great fanfare.
Leclerc had long set his eyes on Paris, but, consistent with American strategy, he had received orders instead to head for the town of Alençon on the southern edge of the Falaise pocket. Leclerc was doubtful of American strategy and suspicious of the unwillingness of American leaders to let him drive toward Paris. He therefore went toward Alençon as ordered, but he disregarded the plan drawn up by his corps commander, an American general who had once been a student at Paris’s École Militaire on the Champ de Mars just opposite the Eiffel Tower. Oddly enough, the American, Major General Wade Hampton, had fonder memories of Paris than Leclerc did. Leclerc did not particularly like Paris or big cities in general, but he understood the strategic importance of the capital and bristled at what he saw as American indifference to Paris’s plight.
At Alençon, the Deuxième Division Blindée had fought well, g
aining thirty miles and helping to begin the final encirclement of German forces in the Falaise pocket. Leclerc, however, had followed his own vision of the battle instead of the orders he received from Hampton, creating confusion along Allied lines of communication. He thought that the American orders contained mistakes resulting from American inexperience and overreliance on bureaucracy. He was also deeply offended when he received orders for the Deuxième Division Blindée to remain at Alençon while American units headed east toward the Seine in an effort to pressure German supply lines. Believing that his division had earned its stripes in battle and was thus entitled to an equal role in the push eastward, he went to see his army commander, George Patton, who spoke French and did not hold his French colleagues in the same contempt that characterized the attitudes of many senior American officers.
The Blood of Free Men Page 13