Eleven Days in August

by Matthew Cobb

  *

  In the spring of 1944, Paris was exhausted by nearly four years of occupation. The winter had been long and hard, and with food scarce people were thin and malnourished. Although bombing raids on railway lines and German military installations in France indicated that the Allies were preparing the ground for an invasion, the end of the occupation still seemed far off. Furthermore, in Vichy there were growing signs that the fascists were gaining the upper hand in their slow and complex power struggle against Prime Minister Laval, as Joseph Darnand, the leader of the fascist Milice (militia), a French paramilitary organisation that specialised in fighting the Resistance, was made Minister of the Interior. Some sections of French society welcomed this. As well as the fringe of murderous fascists, there was also a large group of traditional nationalists, many of them fervent Catholics, who were devoted to Pétain; they feared communists and Jews, and indeed anyone who they felt might threaten their conservative world. Unlike the killers and torturers who fought for the fascist cause, these passive collaborationists were a kind of human dust that could be blown away by events, if the wind of history was strong enough.

  Against this backdrop, the liberation of Paris included a series of clashes involving all of the forces at play in the city – the Resistance, the Free French, the Allies, the Germans, the collaborationist politicians and the French fascists. But above all, liberation engaged the ordinary men, women and even children of Paris who had been subjected to four years of occupation. In the heat of August 1944, they would finally be able to settle accounts with the Germans and their French allies. In telling this dramatic story, I have emphasised the personal experiences of people from all these groups, as they all, in their different ways, contributed to how events unfolded. Diaries, eye-witness accounts and contemporary documents, many of them previously unpublished, provide a glimpse of life in Paris in those momentous days by presenting the individual voices of both historic figures and little-known ‘ordinary’ people, many of whom turn out to be extraordinary.6 Pictures, film, sound files and information relating to the events and people described here can be found at elevendaysinaugust.com.

  Exactly when the fight to liberate Paris began is a matter of debate – a good case could be made for 10 August or for 19 August. I have chosen 15 August and have described in detail the eleven days in August that followed: the ten days of heightened struggle and the first day after the Germans were defeated, which was of major political importance and had a symbolism that is still felt in France today.

  I lived in Paris for eighteen years; my daughters were born there. It is a city that shaped much of my outlook on life and is still part of me, ten years after leaving. In the summer it is particularly beautiful, with the golden late-afternoon light and the sound of swifts screeching around the courtyards and along the banks of the Seine.7 Even the occasionally oppressive heat and its sudden release through dramatic thunderstorms have their beauty. It was like that in August 1944, too, but then German troops were occupying the city, there were barricades in the streets and the Parisians were rising up against a vicious army of occupation. Thousands of people died in the fighting, most of them civilians. This book will take you back to that time, to its moments of glory and horror. I hope it will excite you, move you and above all inspire you.

  Manchester, September 2012

  Prelude

  April 1944: Bombers

  Parisian medical student Bernard Pierquin writes in his diary: ‘My activity in the Resistance continues, silently and without any fanfares. Two or three times a week I carry medicine and bandages in my bicycle saddle-bag; they are for the underground emergency medical centres we have set up in Paris in case of an insurrection . . . We are anxiously awaiting the Allied invasion: as it gets closer, everyone realises the risks of battle. Already there have been so many victims, and in the future there will be even more, and we will not be able to expect any protection from the Allies. They will attack, they will destroy, they will massacre, they will do everything that is necessary to win. That’s war, and war is horrible.’1

  Thursday 20 April

  Shortly after midnight, there was a faint rumbling in the Paris sky that grew gradually louder. Then the air-raid sirens wailed and people leapt from their beds and hurried to the nearest shelter – either the cellar of their building or the closest Métro station. All over the city, anti-aircraft guns fired into the black sky, punching lines of light into the darkness. On the northern border of the capital, eerie red flares drifted down above the massive railway yards at La Chapelle, showing the Allied bombers where to strike. Millions of thin strips of aluminium foil floated on the air, confusing German radar and fluttering down onto the roofs and pavements below. The first squadrons flew in from the south, dropping thousands of bombs, some of them weighing half a ton. The planes came in six waves, four minutes apart. As smoke and dust drifted over the target, more flares were dropped, but they were carried by the wind and soon they marked a wide area of the northern and eastern suburbs. And so the bombs rained down there, too, as a second attack came from north to south. Over two hundred aircraft were involved in the operation.2

  For Jean Guéhenno, a schoolteacher, the bombs seemed to start falling as soon as the sirens sounded: ‘There was no time to find shelter. We stayed in our fragile building, with the windows open, and could do nothing but watch the show. Magnificent, but frightening. Man is incredibly powerful and stupid.’3 Sixty-four-year-old Berthe Auroy could not appreciate the magnificence, as her apartment in the 18th arrondissement was directly under the bombs. Terrified by the scale of the bombardment, she decided to seek shelter with her neighbours in the apartment above:

  I open the door onto the stairway and recoil in horror. The staircase seems to be surrounded by flames. It makes terrible cracking noises, it shakes with each explosion. I don’t dare go up the ten steps. I go back to my shaking bed. Normally, a raid doesn’t last very long. But the earth has been shaking for half an hour already; surely the nightmare must end soon . . . The electricity goes off. I light a candle. The bombing is still very intense. An hour! This torture has been going on for a whole hour! Have they decided to destroy the whole of Paris?4

  Albert Grunberg, a 46-year-old Jewish hairdresser, did not have the opportunity to find shelter. For the previous eighteen months Grunberg had been hiding with his brother Sami in the attic of his building in the Latin Quarter. He had not gone outside once, and almost none of his neighbours knew he was there. There was no question of joining them in the safety of the cellars.5 Grunberg was eight kilometres away from the target6 but was nevertheless horrified by the bombardment:

  It lasted two hours, from midnight to 2 o’clock. For the first time everyone in the building went into the cellar, except Sami and me of course. It was awful! We held onto each other in the corridor. The doors and fanlights were wide open. The whole building shook . . . We saw things we will never forget: flares so bright you could read a newspaper, tracer bullets, salvos of anti-aircraft fire and shrapnel falling in the rue des Ecoles and the rue Monge. Bits of metal rained down into the courtyard, and onto the fanlights of the kitchen and the bedroom.7

  By 01:30 it was over. The bombers returned back to base, with a minimal loss of only six aircraft.

  On the ground, however, the losses were immense. One thousand two hundred and sixty-five tons of high explosive had been dropped. The railway yards were pitted with craters; the rails were ‘twisted like skis, locomotives thrown on top of each other in monstrous copulation’.8 In the surrounding areas the devastation was terrible: 670 people had been killed – 372 of them in smashed buildings in Montmartre. Among the dead were a teacher from the boys’ school on the rue Sainte-Isaure and her two children. Two pupils from the school were also killed, and most of the windows and doors in the school building were blown out.9 Some were lucky: 4530 people in Montmartre were eventually pulled alive out of the debris, having made it safely to the cellars while their buildings collapsed on top of them in a night of no
ise, destruction and horror.10

  Wednesday 26 April

  Marshal Pétain came to Paris to honour those killed on the night of the 20th. Although Pétain had been the head of the French State since France capitulated to Germany in June 1940, in all that time he had not set foot in the capital. Three days earlier, Pétain had celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday. He was semi-senile and unable to keep much in his mind for very long, so his encounter with the Parisian public was planned down to the last detail. At 11:00, Pétain and his entourage arrived in front of Notre Dame, where a memorial Mass was said for the dead of the La Chapelle raid. Around four thousand people crowded into the Gothic cathedral, including Prime Minister Pierre Laval and SS General Carl Oberg. Then Pétain was driven the short distance to the Hôtel de Ville; after a meal with various dignitaries and celebrities, he walked out onto a specially built dais in front of the building, where he was acclaimed by about ten thousand invited participants. The children in the front rows were particularly enthusiastic – they had been given the day off school.11 An impressed adolescent wrote: ‘The place de l’Hôtel de Ville and the rue de Rivoli are covered in people. People are grouped together, perched on the lampposts; others have clambered onto cars that are drowning in the crowd.’12 Pétain made an anodyne speech and then was whisked off to visit injured victims, before leaving the city and returning to Vichy. That evening, Albert Grunberg, seething with rage in his attic refuge, wrote in his diary: ‘The Radio Paris announcer, not bothering to disguise his joy and triumph, has just announced that the awful old man who goes by the name of Pétain is in Paris. Every time things are going badly for his Hun friends, he’s always ready to help them . . . Despite his best efforts since he surrendered, Pétain hadn’t completely degraded himself; well, he’s just gone the whole hog in coming to sully the soil of revolutionary Paris.’13

  Two days later, Pétain made a radio broadcast in which he denounced the promised liberation of France by the Allies and praised ‘the defence of the continent by Germany’. The old man was not always lucid, but when he was, he knew he was on the side of Germany. The next time Pétain visited Paris would be in July 1945 – to face charges of treason.

  1

  June–July: Hope

  Tuesday 6 June, D-Day. For Benoîte Groult, a young woman whose husband, a Resistance fighter, had recently died of his wounds, there is now a reason to hope again: ‘There are already 180,000 men on the Continent. What an amazing exploit. It is a technical and human epic that already resembles a legend. This time, it has happened; hope is no longer in heaven, it is within our walls.’1

  On D-Day the Allies assembled the largest invasion force ever, changing the course of history and sending a wave of hope through the whole of occupied Europe as Allied soldiers stepped onto French soil. But many French men and women felt that hope was not enough – they wanted to transform hope into action, into an uprising. In 1942, General de Gaulle had proclaimed that ‘National liberation cannot be separated from national insurrection,’ but two years later both the Free French and the Allies were convinced that liberation should be the work of the Allied troops, not the French population.2 Although D-Day was accompanied by a coordinated surge of Resistance action aimed at German supply lines, there was no national insurrection. The scattered spontaneous uprisings that did occur after D-Day were met with savagery by the Germans, who were at first able to engage the Allies in a bloody stalemate in northern Normandy and on the Cotentin peninsula. The population of France soon realised that liberation was not a certainty, and that Allied progress would be slow and hard.

  Nevertheless, the invasion was a cause for rejoicing and optimism, and it gave Parisian film-makers Albert Mahuzier and Gaston Madru the confidence to record an amazing stunt. They were both members of a Resistance ‘escape line’ that helped downed Allied airmen to escape occupied Europe, and they decided to film some Allied airmen before they were exfiltrated. With incredible audacity, Mahuzier and Madru decided to film them in the streets of occupied Paris, to show the world how the French were resisting the German occupation.3 On a beautiful June day, Madru, who had an official permit to make films, set up his equipment on top of a car and followed Mahuzier and three airmen – a Scottish fighter pilot called Stewart, and two Americans – as they walked around a city crawling with German soldiers on leave. At Trocadero, there was a large group of German troops relaxing on the esplanade opposite the Eiffel Tower, so Mahuzier boldly walked his trio among them; they were also filmed standing next to a smart German officer who was wearing his ceremonial dagger, in front of a German road-sign indicating the route to the front, and, most audaciously, by one of the bookstalls on the banks of the Seine, where Stewart cheekily took a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf from a German officer. At the end of an adrenalin-filled afternoon, they all had a well-deserved beer in a bar on the boulevard Saint-Germain.4

  *

  On Wednesday 14 June 1944, four years to the day since the Germans entered Paris, Charles de Gaulle visited the small Normandy town of Bayeux, which had recently been liberated by the Allies. The Americans and the British had been extremely wary about letting him make the trip from the Free French headquarters in Algiers, for throughout the war de Gaulle’s relationship with the Allies had been stormy, and the Free French leader’s natural stubbornness had been strengthened by his complete financial and military dependence on the Americans and the British.5 Against all expectations, de Gaulle received an overwhelming welcome. There was genuine joy on the faces of those who crowded the streets to see the man who, up until then, had been nothing more than a voice on the BBC.6 The very real support expressed by the crowds of ordinary French men and women showed that de Gaulle was seen by the bulk of the French population as their leader – for the moment, at least. The rapturous welcome dissipated the Allies’ dreams of bypassing the Free French, whom they still did not officially recognise as the Provisional Government of France. At the end of an eventful day, de Gaulle returned to Britain, leaving the Allies with much to ponder.

  While de Gaulle was lapping up the applause in Bayeux, there was a furious row in Paris between the military leaders of the Resistance and the Parisian representatives of the Free French. Not for the first time, the three members of the Comité d’Action Militaire (Committee of Military Action – COMAC) were arguing with the Free French Délégué Militaire National (National Military Delegate), Jacques Delmas (‘Chaban’), over who was in control of Resistance action. Chaban was an athletic, confident and good-looking 29-year-old, who had recently been promoted by de Gaulle to the rank of general despite being a civil servant by profession.7 Urbane and suave, Chaban did his best to placate or neuter the three COMAC firebrands, but the two sides did not agree on what exactly should be done to fight the Germans, to what end, and under whose command.8

  This time Chaban’s task was extremely hard, as he had to explain that General Koenig, the commander of the Free French Army (under whose command the armed wing of the Resistance nominally came), had ordered the Resistance to avoid large-scale confrontation with the Germans and to limit guerrilla attacks as much as possible, because the Allied advance was progressing slowly.9 Furthermore, there would be no more supplies parachuted to the Resistance until the August full moon – over six weeks away. The members of COMAC protested that these measures ran counter to their view that it was necessary to attack the Germans wherever possible. Chaban was sympathetic, but could do nothing, as everything was in the hands of London, which was the heart of the Allied war machine.

  Tensions were further heightened because two of the three members of COMAC were politically suspect in the eyes of the Gaullists: 30-year-old insurance agent Maurice Kriegel (code name ‘Valrimont’) was close to the Communist Party, while 43-year-old Pierre Villon was a hardened Communist Party full-time worker (he did not bother with a code name). The third member of COMAC, Count Jean de Vogüé (code name ‘Vaillant’), was hardly any better from a Free French point of view. Although he was a right-wing naval office
r, aristocrat and businessman, de Vogüé was also in favour of an insurrection, but in the image of the French Revolution of 1789, not the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.10 The radical forces of the Resistance wanted a mass, popular insurrection to drive out the Germans and take power; the Gaullists wanted the Resistance and the population to act as passive participants in de Gaulle’s triumphant entry into Paris. These two forces were on a collision course. However, even if all the Resistance leaders and rank-and-file had wanted to launch an uprising, the numbers simply did not add up. By the middle of August it was claimed there were around 35,000 Resistance fighters in the Paris region, but their armament was pitiful – 166 machine guns, 825 revolvers, 562 shotguns and rifles and only 192 grenades. There were neither heavy weapons nor explosives.11 They would not be able to beat the German Army with such a weak arsenal.