4 Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 73; Jean Galtier-Boissière, Mon Journal Pendant L’Occupation (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1944), 237.
5 “1944: D-Day Marks Start of Europe Invasion,” BBC, On This Day, June 6, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/6/newsid_3499000/3499352.stm; Pierre Bourget, Paris, Année 44: Occupation—Libération—Épuration (Paris: Plon, 1984), 64; Jacqueline Gaussen-Salmon, Une Prière dans la Nuit: Journal d’une Femme Peinture sous l’Occupation (Paris: Documents Payot, 1992), 192; Charles Braibant, La Guerre à Paris (Paris: Corrêa, 1945), 489; Yves Cazaux, Journal Secret de la Libération (Paris: Alban Michel, 1979), 13.
6 Victoria Kent, Quatre Ans à Paris (Paris: Editions le Livre du Jour, 1947), 193; Henri Michel, La Libération de Paris (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1980), 167.
7 Ernst Jünger, Second Journal Parisien, Journal III, 1943–1945 (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1980), 301.
8 Pierre Bourget and Charles Lacretelle, Sur les Murs de Paris et de France (Paris: Hachette Réalités, 1980), 172.
9 Olivier Wieviorka, Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 203.
10 Claude Roy and the Comité Parisien de la Libération, Paris: Les Heures Glorieuses, Août, 1944 (Montrouge: n.p., 1945), 57.
11 The Dieppe operation, whose strategic goals remain a source of historical debate, cost the Allies 4,384 casualties out of a total landing force of almost 6,000 men, most of them Canadian.
12 Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London: Pocket Books, 2008), 38.
13 Braibant, La Guerre à Paris, 498; Wieviorka, Normandy, 238.
14 Perrault, Paris Under the Occupation, 48. Perrault did not mention the death camps in Germany, an indication that he did not know about them.
15 Quoted in Cobb, The Resistance, 250; Yvon Morandat to Emmanuel d’Astier, June 14, 1944, Archives Nationales de France, 72AJ/234/VI, pièce 13.
16 Galtier-Boissière, Mon Journal, 238–239.
17 Wieviorka, Normandy, 124–125.
18 Jean-Pierre Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation, 1938–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 179.
19 Cunningham, quoted in Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West 1941–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 476; Wieviorka, Normandy, 125–130. See also Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas About Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chapter 5; Stephen A. Bourque, “Operational Fires: Lisieux and Saint-Lô—The Destruction of Two Norman Towns on D-Day,” Canadian Military History 19, no. 2 (2010): 25–40; Eddy Florentin, Quand les Alliés Bombardaient la France (Paris: Perrin, 1997).
20 Wieviorka, Normandy, 131; Dominique Veillon, Vivre et Survivre en France, 1939–1947 (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1995), 265; Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under the Nazi Occupation, 1940–1944 (London: HarperPress, 2009), 353; Bardoux, La Délivrance de Paris, 248.
21 Veillon, Vivre et Survivre, 267.
22 Alice-Leone Moats, No Passport for Paris (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1945), 237–239.
23 Ibid., 203; Sisley Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, 1939–1947, An Eyewitness Account of War, Occupation, and Liberation (New York: Devin-Adair, 1955), 243; Bardoux, La Délivrance de Paris, 268.
24 Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, 248.
25 Thomas Childers, In the Shadows of War: An American Pilot’s Odyssey Through Occupied France and the Camps of Nazi Germany (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 185; Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, 274; Moats, No Passport for Paris, 217.
26 Wieviorka, Normandy, 242.
27 Georges Mazeaud, quoted in Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 90–92; Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, 247.
28 Robert Aron, France Reborn (New York: Scribner’s, 1964), 226.
29 Bardoux, La Délivrance de Paris, 215; A. J. Liebling, “Letter from Paris,” New Yorker 20 (September 9, 1944), 42.
30 Allan Mitchell, Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940–1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 143; Aron, France Reborn, 227; Braibant, La Guerre à Paris, 498.
31 Gaussen-Salmon, Une Prière dans la Nuit, 216; Janet Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1965 (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 5; Catherine Gavin, Liberated France (New York: St. Martin’s, 1955), 50. Gavin was a British journalist who was among the first correspondents in the city after its liberation.
32 Bobkowski, En Guerre et en Paix, 571, 580.
33 Moats, No Passport for Paris, 206–207.
34 Bobkowski, En Guerre et en Paix, 581.
35 Aron, France Reborn, 249. Pierre Cambronne was one of Napoleon’s officers at Waterloo. After the battle, when the pursuing English and Hanoverians demanded that he surrender, he supposedly shouted “Merde!” although he claimed that he said the much more poetic “The Guard dies but does not surrender.” Victor Hugo used the “Merde!” anecdote as a symbol of French heroism in his famous novel Les Misérables. Hugo apologized for using profanity in the book but called it “the most beautiful word perhaps that a Frenchman has ever uttered,” thereby cementing Cambronne’s name as a rough French equivalent to the English “screw you!” Bienvenue does mean “welcome” in French, but the station, attached to the Gare Montparnasse, is actually named for Fulgence Bienvenüe (note the slightly different spelling), one of the chief engineers of the Paris Métro.
36 Huddleston, France: The Tragic Years, 246; Duras, The War, 96; Michel, Paris Résistant, 288; Morandat to d’Astier, June 14, 1944, Archives Nationales de France, 72AJ/234/VI, pièce 17. Most sources list the official exchange rate as 50 francs to the dollar, but Alice Moats found that her dollars bought her 400 francs each, so that is the rate of exchange I have used here. Compare the price of butter in Paris, equivalent to about $33 per pound, to that in the United States, where butter was also rationed. On the American black market in 1944, butter cost around $1.25 per pound. My thanks to Kelly Cantrell for helping me on this topic.
37 Childers, In the Shadows of War, 181; Bourget, Paris, Année 44, 45.
38 Duras, The War, 89; Moats, No Passport for Paris, 218.
39 Moats, No Passport for Paris, 228–229, 243.
40 Bardoux, La Délivrance de Paris, 277; Gaussen-Salmon, Une Prière dans la Nuit, 205.
41 Mitchell, Nazi Paris, 145; Richard D. E. Burton, Blood in the City: Violence and Revolution in Paris, 1789–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 215. Burton noted that although the extreme Right often accused the Jews of Paris of being “foreigners,” despite their very high level of assimilation, Jews were in fact overrepresented in the French Army in 1940 as they had been throughout World War I. The largest roundups of Parisian Jews occurred in July 1942, when Vichy police crammed 13,000 Jews (4,000 of whom were children) into the Vélodrome d’Hiver (known colloquially as the Vel d’Hiv), a bicycle racetrack. There were just two doctors on hand to treat the Jews, almost all of whom died in death camps before the end of the war.
42 Bardoux, La Délivrance de Paris, 212.
43 The French decided to leave Oradur sur Glane in the ghost-town state in which it was left by the SS. It stands today as living testimony to the horrors of the Nazi occupation.
44 Quoted in Cobb, The Resistance, 252. In Tulle, the Germans hung 99 townspeople at random, stopping only when they ran out of rope. They deported 150 more to Dachau, only 48 of whom survived the war.
45 Raymond Massiet, La Préparation de l’Insurrection et la Bataille de Paris (Paris: Payot, 1945), 32; Kathleen Cannel, quoted in Glass, Americans in Paris, 351.
46 Moats, No Passport for Paris, 246; Perrault, Paris Under the Occupation , 46.
Chapter Two
1 Patrick Marnham, Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of
the French Resistance (New York: Random House, 2000), 129–132.
2 Agnès Humbert, Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 7, 21.
3 Hilary Footitt and John Simmonds, “The Politics of Liberation: France 1943–1945,” in Michael Scriven and Peter Wagstaff, eds., War and Society in Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: Berg, 1991), 105.
4 Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 143.
5 See the work of Robert Paxton, especially his Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972).
6 Ian Ousby, Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944 (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 240.
7 The death of Moulin, and the possible identity of the informer(s), remains a topic of heated debate, and no one knows the details for certain. After the war, one of Moulin’s associates, René Hardy, was twice tried and acquitted of having betrayed him to the Gestapo. Hardy’s escape from the meeting at which the Gestapo arrested Moulin and others aroused enough suspicion that another leading Resistance figure tried to poison Hardy, but failed.
8 Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 33.
9 Quoted in Cobb, The Resistance, 140.
10 Jean-Pierre Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation, 1938–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 186.
11 Claude Roy and the Comité Parisien de la Libération, Paris: Les Heures Glorieuses Août 1944 (Montrouge: n.p., 1945), 7.
12 Willis Thornton, The Liberation of Paris (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), 103–104.
13 Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation, 178.
14 Martin Blumenson, Breakout and Pursuit. The US Army in World War II: The European Theater of Operations (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1961), 594–595.
15 Cobb, The Resistance, 129.
16 Forrest Pogue, The Supreme Command. The US Army in World War II: The European Theater of Operations (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1954), 239.
17 Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, ed. Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 11–13.
18 Thomas Childers, In the Shadows of War: An American Pilot’s Odyssey Through Occupied France and the Camps of Nazi Germany (New York: Holt, 2002), 186.
19 Jacques Soustelle, in Philippe Raguenau and Eddy Florentin, eds., Paris Libéré: Ils Étaient Là! (Paris: France-Empire, 1994), 267.
20 Oral history of FFI commander Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, in Philippe Raguenau and Eddy Florentin, eds., Paris Libéré: Ils Étaient Là! (Paris: France-Empire, 1994), 93.
21 Colonel [Henri] Rol-Tanguy and Roger Bourderon, La Libération de Paris: Les Cent Documents (Paris: Hachette, 1994), 25. Like many Resistance figures, Rol-Tanguy hyphenated his name after the war to include both his surname and his Resistance nom de guerre. He chose Rol to honor a fallen comrade from his unit in Spain.
22 FFI report of April 15, 1944, quoted in Rol-Tanguy and Bourderon, La Libération de Paris, 76. Hereafter I will use FFI to describe the members of all of the Resistance groups active in Paris under Rol’s nominal authority, including the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans.
23 Rol-Tanguy and Bourderon, La Libération de Paris, 140; Adrien Dansette, Histoire de la Libération de Paris (Paris: Fayard, 1946), 51.
24 Dansette, Histoire de la Libération de Paris, 36.
25 He later hyphenated his name to Chaban-Delmas and went on to a remarkable political career, serving as mayor of Bordeaux from 1947 until 1995 and simultaneously serving as a deputy and prime minister of France from 1969 to 1972.
26 Richard D.E. Burton, Blood in the City: Violence and Revolution in Paris, 1789–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 233.
27 Alice-Leone Moats, No Passport for Paris (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1945), 246.
28 Ernst Jünger, Second Journal Parisien, Journal III, 1943–1945 (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1980), 303; Gilles Perrault and Pierre Azéma, Paris Under the Occupation (Paris: Vendôme, 1987), 48.
29 Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 37; Jünger, Second Journal Parisien, 305.
30 Ousby, Occupation, 271.
31 Marie Granet, Le Journal “Défense de la France” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 261–262.
32 Alexandre Arnoux, “Fièvre de Paris,” in Jacques Kim, La Libération de Paris: Les Journées Historiques (Paris: OPG, 1944), n.p.
33 Moats, No Passport for Paris, 222.
Chapter Three
1 Omar N. Bradley, A General’s Life: An Autobiography by General of the Army Omar N. Bradley (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 308.
2 Philippe Ragueneau and Eddy Florentin, eds., Paris Libéré: Ils Étaient Là! (Paris: France-Empire, 1994), 18.
3 Olivier Wieviorka, Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 217.
4 Jean-Pierre Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation, 1938–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 185; Thomas Childers, In the Shadows of War: An American Pilot’s Odyssey Through Occupied France and the Camps of Nazi Germany (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 178; Le Comité Parisien de Libération, Paris: Les Heures Glorieuses, Août 1944 (Montrouge: n.p., 1945), 73–77.
5 Charles de Gaulle, Lettres, Notes, et Carnets, vol. 5, Juin 1943 à Mai 1945 (Paris: Plon, 1983), 262; Hilary Footitt and John Simmonds, France 1943–1945 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 104.
6 “De Gaulle in U. S.,” Life, July 24, 1944, 35; Quoted in Willis Thornton, The Liberation of Paris (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), 123.
7 Generalleutnant Freiherr von Boineburg, “Northern France,” Foreign Military Studies D739.F6713, no. A-967, United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1.
8 Freiherr Wilhelm von Boineburg, “Organization for the Defense of Greater Paris,” Foreign Military Studies D739.F6713, no. B-015, United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1–3.
9 Kurt Hold, “First Army Organization and Replacements,” Foreign Military Studies D739.F6713, no. B-732, United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 10.
10 Raoul Nordling, Sauver Paris: Mémoirs du Consul de Suède, 1905–1944 (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 2002), 78; Kurt Hesse, “Defense of Paris, Summer, 1944,” Foreign Military Studies D739.F6713, no. B-611, United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 5–6.
11 Hesse, “Defense of Paris,” 9. See also Albert Emmench, “Northern France,” vol. 7, “The [German] First Army (11 August to 15 September 1944),” Foreign Military Studies D739.F6713, no. B-728, United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 3.
12 Wieviorka, Normandy, 8.
13 Martin Blumenson, Breakout and Pursuit. The US Army in World War II: The European Theater of Operations (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1961), 591.
14 Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 19–20.
15 For all the jeering that the Maginot Line has taken from amateurs and armchair strategists, it should be remembered that in 1940 the Germans feared it enough to go around it rather than attack it. The Allies feared it enough to take the gamble of parachuting men into Holland via Operation Market Garden in an attempt to outflank the line. When the Allies did attack the Maginot Line in the winter of 1944–1945, they found it tough going indeed.
16 Blumenson, Breakout and Pursuit, 590; Omar Bradley, A Soldier’s Story (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 384.
17 Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1949), 296.
18 Carlo D’Este, World War II in the Mediterranean, 1942–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1990), 175–177.
19 Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 296.
20 Bradley, A Soldier’s Story,
385; Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation , 178.
21 Bradley, A Soldier’s Story, 384; Collins and Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? , 14; Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, Mémoirs Rebelles (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1999), 64.
22 Jacques Bardoux, La Délivrance de Paris: Journal d’un Sénateur, Octobre 1943–Octobre 1944 (Paris: Fayard, 1958), 298–299; Yves Cazaux, Journal Secret de la Libération (Paris: Alain Michel, 1979), 64.
23 Footitt and Simmonds, France, 109; Edith Thomas, La Libération de Paris (Paris: Mellottée, 1945), 16.
24 Ragueneau and Florentin, eds., Paris Libéré, 45.
25 Allan Mitchell, Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940–1944 (New York: Beghahn, 2008), 140–141.
26 Henri Michel, La Libération de Paris (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1980), 41–47.
27 Nordling, Sauver Paris, 80; Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, 114; Bardoux, La Délivrance de Paris, 299–300, 309.
28 Stauffenberg was the great-grandson of Count August von Gneisenau, a legendary Prussian general who had fought Napoleon and helped to design the reform of the Prussian Army in the early nineteenth century.
29 Hesse, “Defense of Paris,” 17.
30 The bomb plot is too complex to deal with in detail here. For more information, see Danny Orbach, “Criticism Reconsidered: The German Resistance to Hitler in Critical German Scholarship,” Journal of Military History 75, no. 2 (2011): 565–590, and Joachim C. Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death: The Story of the German Resistance (New York: Metropolitan, 1996).
31 Gerhard Heller, Un Allemand à Paris (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981). At the Battle of Valmy, Revolutionary citizen-based French forces defeated the professionals of Prussia and Austria, supposedly because their newfound revolutionary ardor gave them superior motivation. The battle seemed to usher in the era of men fighting for liberty instead of dynastic aims.
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