Thus the Allies, who had deferred thinking about Paris for so long, now decided that they had to get to the city as quickly as possible. Eisenhower noted that the new thinking at Bradley’s headquarters was that “we can and must walk in,” an indication of both the new sense of urgency at his headquarters and the belief that if the Allies could rescue the FFI before the Germans brought in reinforcements, there need not be a major battle for Paris. Either because of Gallois’s information or their own ability to read the strategic situation, the Americans made three critical decisions: to send a force into the city immediately in the hopes of accepting the German surrender, or at least taking over quickly from the departing Germans; to make sure that a French unit was the first Allied formation into the city; and to begin the immediate dispatch of 23,000 tons of food and 3,000 tons of coal to the beleaguered French capital. If the Allies could get forces to the city before the Germans could prepare a major counterattack, Eisenhower gambled, then “no great battle would take place” and the city would fall into Allied hands with a minimum of fighting. “The entry of one or two divisions,” he presumed, “would accomplish the liberation of the city.”36
Patton must have briefed his friend Bradley about the conversation with Gallois, because a few hours earlier, at 2:00 p.m. on August 22, Bradley had arrived unannounced at First Army headquarters with the momentous news that Paris was under the control of the FFI. “Paris could be avoided no longer,” he told the assembled officers, because the Germans were preparing to violate a truce and attack. This news “demanded instantaneous action” on the part of the Allies in order to prevent terrible bloodshed. Bradley then departed, leaving it to flustered staff officers to figure out how to solve the problem. As one of them recalled, “The corps staff assembled in the war room . . . [followed by] the hasty assembling of maps, the hurried writing of movement orders, the determination of routes of march . . . [and] the careful instructions to the French, who have a casual manner of doing almost exactly what they please, regardless of orders.” That final comment was undoubtedly designed to insult Leclerc, who had so recently disappeared without telling the staff where he was going.37
Although Bradley remained frustrated that his plan to go around Paris had been undermined by the news that Gallois had brought, he resigned himself to the path before him. Having briefed his staff officers, Bradley flew to Le Mans, where Gallois and Leclerc awaited him. His plane landed at 7:15 p.m. Leclerc, too anxious to wait for Bradley to descend from the cabin, grabbed the first man he saw with stars on his shoulders, Lieutenant General Edward Sibert. With the plane’s engine still running, Sibert, Bradley’s intelligence chief, yelled to Leclerc, “You win. They’ve decided to send you straight to Paris.” Bradley then said to Gallois: “A grave decision has been made and we three bear the weight of responsibility for it: me, because I am giving the order to take Paris; General Leclerc, because he is the one who has to carry out this order; and you, because it is based on the information that you have brought that we have acted.” Tired, but pleased that he had completed his extraordinary mission at last, Gallois briefed American officers for the next three hours before meeting with Gerow, who chewed him out for not being in uniform and ordered him to go to the American supply tent and get one. Then, wearing his new U.S. Army uniform, Gallois found a place to get a well-deserved night’s sleep.38
For his part, Leclerc had finally received the orders he had waited so long to hear. Bradley, however, had given him clear instructions that “Paris was to be entered only if the degree of fighting could be overcome by light forces.” If Leclerc encountered strong German resistance, he was to retreat, regroup, and await reinforcements. His orders also forbade him from using air or artillery inside Paris itself, both to protect the city and because the Americans assumed that such weapons would be unnecessary if the German position was as weak as they suspected. Finally, the Americans made it clear that Leclerc was to relieve the FFI and ensure that regular soldiers assumed the responsibility for security in the city as quickly as possible. Soon after Eisenhower and Bradley had approved the change in American strategy, Rolf Nordling arrived at American lines; the consistency of his information with that of Gallois reassured the Americans that they had made the right decision.39
Leclerc’s greatest concern over the past few days had been finding a way to get his division from its bases at Fleuré, near Argentan, to the roads that commanded the approaches to Paris. To make the process move more quickly and perhaps force Eisenhower or Bradley’s hand, Leclerc had not waited for orders to prepare his men. They had covered 120 miles the day before in anticipation of receiving an order to head for Paris—or in anticipation of going there even without orders. Even though they knew almost nothing about the enemy’s forces or dispositions, Leclerc and his men were willing to take any risk necessary to liberate their capital. Before beginning the final drive, Leclerc had told one of his officers, “The cold logic of tactics cannot make General Gerow understand the importance of Paris for our people who have lived for four years without hope.” Now Leclerc had orders and the full support of Bradley and Eisenhower. But he still had to find a way to get his men into Paris before the Germans counterattacked. 40
Knowing that he could never move his entire division quickly enough, Leclerc decided to send a small detachment of three tanks ahead of his main force. He chose as the unit’s commander Captain Raymond Dronne, who had been with the Deuxième Division Blindée since 1940. Dronne had lived in Leipzig and Berlin before the war and had seen with his own eyes how terrible the Nazis truly were. Upon his return to France just before the outbreak of the war, he became convinced that his countrymen were not yet awake to the dangers they faced or the horrors that awaited them if the Nazis were not stopped. After the fall of France, he was among the small group of French officers to understand that Vichy would be little more than an auxiliary to the Germans. His loyalty to France now put him in the enviable position of leading a drive on to Paris. When Leclerc’s orders to run for Paris with three tanks arrived, Dronne was trimming his red beard so that he would look good when the people of Paris saw the first Free French soldiers enter their city to liberate them.41
By the time night fell on August 22, the insurgents in Paris could well claim to have already done most of the hard work for Dronne, Leclerc, and Bradley. Although the situation was so confused that buildings on the same block flew the French tricolor and the swastika, the uprising had clearly gone a long way toward retaking the city. The FFI claimed to have effective control of seventy of Paris’s eighty neighborhoods. The uprising had also made it impossible for the Germans to move through the city unimpeded or to carry out a program of demolition inside the city. The Germans maintained control of only a dozen of their original thirty-six strongpoints, although these included many strategically important buildings, including the Palais du Luxembourg, the École Militaire, and the Palais Bourbon, the home of the Assemblé Nationale.42
That night, two messages went out regarding Paris. The first, sent from Hitler to Choltitz, read, “Paris will be transformed into a heap of rubble. The general commanding in chief will defend the city to the last man, and, if necessary, be buried beneath it.” It was a desperate message from a man who had long since lost any ability to control the situation in the French capital. Choltitz set it aside for the moment but knew that he would soon have to make a choice between fighting or surrendering. He knew nothing about the Gallois mission, and he had no idea where the Nordling mission was or if it would produce the desired results.
The second message came from Leclerc to the men of the Deuxième Division Blindée, some of whom had been with him since the unit’s formation in Africa in 1940. Now that he was so close to his goal of liberating his suffering nation’s capital, he was determined to make the most of the opportunity. His message implored his men to push as hard as they could and overcome any obstacles that might bar their way. “The general demands,” it ended, “for this movement that can lead to the liberation o
f our capital, the full effort that he is certain he will obtain from everyone.” The main force of Leclerc’s armored division was set to enter the city the next day. The Allies were finally joining the battle for Paris.43
8
DELIVERANCE, AUGUST 23–24
ANY HOPE THAT THE LIBERATION OF PARIS MIGHT HAPPEN without further bloodshed or damage to the magnificent buildings of the city literally went up in smoke on the morning of August 23. Parisians, or at least those who were able to sleep that night amid the sporadic sounds of gunfire, awoke to the sight of a column of smoke towering above the Grand Palais, a massive structure completed in 1900 for the Universal Exposition of that year. Sitting near the Avenue des Champs Élysées (on what is today the Avenue Général Eisenhower and near the Franklin D. Roosevelt Métro station), the Grand Palais, with its 250,000 square feet of exhibit space, remained open throughout the war to provide Parisians with some entertainment and diversion. It had also hosted numerous exhibitions of Vichy and Nazi propaganda. On this Wednesday it was hosting Europe’s largest traveling circus. That a circus had even been able to come to Paris that week is an indication of how quickly events had transpired in the city in the previous few days. Now that circus found itself in the middle of an active war zone.
That morning, a German detachment decided to attack the Grand Palais, probably in retaliation for an FFI ambush on a German car in that area the day before. The attack might also have been an attempt to rescue German prisoners of war rumored to be in the police station in the Grand Palais’s basement. Or, it could have been the result of a misunderstanding about an order to clear a barricade nearby. In any case, unwilling to send tanks into the area without some preparation in this FFI-dominated neighborhood, the Germans decided to deploy a small remote-controlled tracked vehicle, known, incongruously enough, as a Goliath. Four feet long, two feet tall, and resembling a miniature World War I–era British tank, each Goliath could carry as many as two hundred pounds of explosives. Goliaths detonated upon a signal from operators who sat a safe distance away and controlled their machines by a telephone wire. The Germans had used Goliaths to blow up enemy tanks in Normandy until the Allies figured out that the best way to defend against them was to target the fragile cable with shrapnel shells.
On this day the Goliaths were to make their Parisian debut. In Normandy and elsewhere, they had proven their value against dense formations of infantry as well as against buildings and fixed defenses. Also known as “teletanks” or “mobile land mines,” these early drones were a much more cost-effective weapon to use in urban settings than either tanks or armored personnel carriers. They also reduced the risks of German soldiers being captured. The Germans had used Goliaths with murderous effect against makeshift barricades in Warsaw. Ironically enough, the idea for the Goliaths was originally developed in a Paris factory. Now the small number of them that the Germans had at their disposal were to be unleashed against Paris as part of a new German approach to urban warfare.
The order to attack the Grand Palais did not come from Choltitz’s headquarters, however. As the German commander knew, the building had little military value. The Germans, like everyone else in the city, knew that it was hosting a circus; many German officers had first-class tickets to that day’s performance. The Palais and its basement jail were protected by policemen sympathetic to the uprising, but the building itself was not under the control of the FFI and was full not of soldiers, but of animals and ordinary criminals. There was only a single German being held there, a francophile baron who before the war had appeared in numerous equestrian shows in the Palais. His arrest had had nothing to do with the fighting underway, and he was so unthreatening that the French police even permitted him to move freely around the main hall. He was not confined to a cell with the prisoners in the jail, most of whom were prostitutes picked up in a recent raid.1
The Palais had no military utility at all. Nevertheless, out of confusion, vengeance, or both, the Germans attacked. The German baron was the first to recognize the strange device moving toward the Palais. He sounded the alarm, creating a panic as people sought to escape, and handlers struggled to release their animals from cages that would soon turn into death traps. The Goliath set off a massive explosion that German tanks followed with incendiary shells that caused multiple fires. Local German commanders initially forbade firefighters from extinguishing the massive blaze that ensued, sending panicked lions, tigers, prisoners of war, policemen, and prostitutes alike streaming out of the building in terror. As FFI leader Claude Roy, who witnessed the scene, recalled, “the firefighters arrived. Blinded by the smoke, those trapped inside ran for the basements. Some escaped, others did not. There was an odd mixture of firefighters, Germans, rescuers, and prisoners.” Crazed and confused animals of every type ran out of the building into the streets, some of them on fire. Starving Parisians risked the fire and the wrath of the Germans, running into the Champs Élysées with knives and plates to carve into dead and dying horses for their meat, creating a truly hellish scene on one of the most famous and most beautiful avenues in the world.2
The Grand Palais was not the only structure burning on the morning of August 23. On the other side of Paris, the Germans had intentionally set fire to the massive flour mills in the far grittier Pantin neighborhood. This action was in response to rumors that the FFI was planning to attack it and seize the tons of grain stored there rather than let it be transported to Germany. The destruction of the Pantin granaries carried with it an especially bitter poignancy for Parisians, who were starving and badly in need of that grain. Word also reached the city that the Germans were blowing up stocks of ammunition in their main depots at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges and inside the Forêt de Sénard near Orly airfield to the south of the city. They were obviously planning to leave the Paris region, but no one knew what level of destruction they might be planning before they left. Fears began to spread that Paris might suffer the fate of towns like Oradur sur Glane, only on a much greater scale.3
Rumors that the Allies were approaching the gates of the city fueled the sense that the final reckoning was near. Despite their lack of weapons, the FFI fighters did not let up their pressure on the Germans. Nor did they count on receiving help from the outside. Most FFI leaders had long since learned not to base their plans on rumors of an Allied approach that seemed never to materialize. As one of them, lawyer Emmanuel Blanc, noted in his journal, “What is keeping the Americans? Every day we hear they are closer and closer, and every night we wait in vain. We hear they are at Versailles, they are at Fontainebleau, they are at Corbeil, they are at Melun. But Paris? When will they come to Paris?” More importantly, FFI leaders believed they were close to liberating the city by themselves, an achievement that they saw as erasing four long years of humiliation. As the Resistance newspaper Action remarked on August 23, “of course we want the Allies to arrive; but Paris is liberating itself. This is the source of our pride. Our friends will find their work done for them. We will receive them in a free city.” Another Parisian rhetorically asked, “Is not [an FFI] brassard worth as much as a khaki uniform?” Resistance radio stations were already beginning to use the past tense, announcing during a midday broadcast that “Paris has liberated itself.” Having begun the insurrection, Parisians were not willing to yield, even if they had to fight without allies or heavy weapons.4
Albert Camus’s writings in Combat conveyed a sense of the intensity of the feeling inside the FFI: “On the fourth day of the insurrection, in the wake of the enemy’s first retreat and a phony truce cut short by the murders of Frenchmen, the people of Paris will resume the fight. . . . The choice to kill was not ours. We were placed in a position where we had either to kill or bend our knees. And despite those who tried to put doubts in our minds, we know now, after four years of terrible struggle, that it is not in our blood to kneel.”5
Camus’s powerful words notwithstanding, ardor and will would not be enough to triumph. The situation for the FFI had grown increasingly desperate,
in large part because of the lack of weapons and ammunition. After just a few days of fighting, the FFI was nearing the end of its meager resources. Resistance leaders estimated that 500 men on their side had been killed and that more than 2,000 were wounded and in need of medical assistance, an indication of the severity of the combat. With the Allies still reluctant to air-drop weapons into the city, the FFI had to take matters into its own hands. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a frequent contributor to Combat, noted the urgency of the situation in that newspaper’s August 23 edition: “We all know the order: attack a German and take his revolver. With that revolver seize a rifle. With that rifle seize a car. With that car, seize a tank.” Sartre estimated that 3,000 Parisians were actively involved in the fight against the Germans, and that 35,000 more would join if only arms could be found for them.6
The FFI kept fighting even as the material situation of the Parisians approached crisis levels. They raided wine shops run by people whom Resistance newspapers identified as collaborators to acquire more bottles for Molotov cocktails. They also learned to use their remaining resources more effectively. By August 23 they had learned to target the last vehicle in a convoy with their Molotov cocktails in order to block the retreat of the others. Along the Boulevard St. Michel, known as the “intersection of death,” the FFI managed to disable a Tiger tank this way, creating an astonishing symbol of the power of the men of the street and essentially closing this critical artery off to German movement. By the end of the day, the FFI had captured 8 German artillery pieces, 9 German armored vehicles, and 650 prisoners of war. They also engaged in some daring exploits, such as an attack on a tunnel along the Paris ring road that the Germans were using to store three truckloads of explosives. The FFI attacked both entrances to the tunnel simultaneously, trapping the German defenders inside and leaving them little choice but to surrender. That they did it mostly on bluff and with few weapons made the feat all the more remarkable. It also testified to the increasing unwillingness of the Germans to fight to the death for Paris.7
The Blood of Free Men Page 24