by Matthew Cobb
The Comité Parisien de la Libération also changed gear in its preparations for the insurrection. In a new round of instructions to the local liberation committees in the region, the CPL described what should be done with collaborators. Those to be arrested included hardline fascists and members of the Milice, important Vichy collaborators, leaders of the fascist political parties, and, more vaguely, those individuals ‘whose attitude and speech have been particularly outrageous over the last few months . . . in this task as in all others involved in the insurrection, it is popular rule that must be victorious and assert itself’.88 In some cases, of course, ‘popular rule’ could be a recipe for personal score-settling and profound injustice. But the stakes were high – the Milice and their German masters had a terrifying track record of murderous violence and intimidation. They would have to be taken off the streets by any means necessary and dealt with by the legal system once peace was restored.
Posters issued by Rol’s subordinate, Raymond Massiet (‘Dufresne’), appeared on the walls of the capital calling for a ‘general mobilisation’ of all FFI members in the Paris region. Dufresne was a member of Ceux de la Résistance and, like his comrade de Vogüé, he was an ardent advocate of insurrection.89 This was not yet a call for an uprising, but it was the penultimate step towards that goal.
Even those far removed from the military preparations on either side could sense the scale of the imminent conflict. Jewish housewife Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar wrote in her diary:
The heat is heavy, grey and suffocating. Right now we can often hear the sound of artillery fire from the west . . . A kind of silent oppression weighs on the city, the café terraces are full, but people barely speak. The Parisians are waiting. The women are wearing their light-coloured summer dresses, very full – that’s the way they’re worn this summer (yes, people are still interested in fashion!), with their hair loose. Many of these women look beautiful, but if you observe them closely, you can see that their faces are drawn, their eyes are feverish and that nervous fatigue has hollowed out their features. The difficult daily struggle to find food, getting about on a bicycle, work, children, fighting for their family, has worn out these women, producing an underlying fever that has left cruel lines underneath the makeup . . . The city is like a pressure cooker, the temperature is slowly rising. Will we be declared an open city? Will they lay siege to Paris? Alone in the great Parisian silence, birds sing in the trees, children play in the squares, while old people, indifferent to the madness of the world, doze on park benches.90
4
Tuesday 15 August: Turning-point
BBC journalist Godfrey Talbot broadcasts from the south of France: ‘Our air armada was a tremendous sight. Tow-planes and gliders, four abreast in one great procession a mile or two long, flying at 2000 feet high in the blue sky, with fighter cover glinting and whirling overhead and the placid blue sea below . . . I saw fourteen gliders land beautifully, close together, in one not-too-big field, half grass, half ploughed. They raised just a dust cloud, and then they stopped and out came men. And we, we wheeled and back we went, our plane and the tow-planes, and still unopposed, back over the coast, a Riviera coast that was lovely, beautiful there in the hot sun. Still not a shot, still not a soul to be seen, not a vehicle, not a movement. This is a great day, a new assault on the enemy in great strength. Great things are happening in the area between Nice and Marseilles.’1
Operation DRAGOON – the Allied invasion of the French Mediterranean coast – was not quite as peaceful as Talbot’s bird’s-eye view suggested. A fleet of over 600 vessels, including six battleships and four aircraft carriers, lay offshore. For two hours before the first Allied boot touched a Provençal beach, the German defences were subject to a ferocious air and naval bombardment, shaking the earth for miles around. At one point, 400 naval guns fired 16,000 shells in less than twenty minutes. The landings took place on a thirty-five-mile strip of coast to the east of Toulon, and were made by the Seventh US Army, backed up by de Gaulle’s 1st French Army. The Allies were relieved to discover that the German defences that had survived the bombardment were relatively light and easily disposed of. German naval forces and the Luftwaffe in Provence had been severely weakened by Allied attacks and by a series of bad choices by the German High Command, who had moved men and machinery away from the region, perhaps trying to second guess Allied intentions or to meet the Allied offensive in Italy. Although the number of soldiers on each side was roughly comparable – 250,000 Allied men and around 210,000 Germans – the situation in the air was completely skewed: there were fewer than 200 German aircraft of all types in the region, compared to over 4000 in the US attack force. That statistic alone shows the inevitability of Allied victory over Germany.2
By the end of the day, thousands of men were dead – mainly Germans – and the Allies were in control of the beachhead. The Allies were ready to split into two groups: one to move west along the coast, dealing with German forces in Toulon and Marseille before moving north along the Rhône valley, the other to head through the stunning foothills of the Alps, driving along the winding Route Napoleon – the same mountain road that Napoleon’s forces had followed in 1815.3 All along their way the Allies were helped by the Resistance who harried the retreating Germans, provided intelligence to the advancing Allies, and launched insurrections to help ensure liberation. In less than a month, far ahead of schedule, the Allied armies, supported and aided by the Resistance, had liberated the whole of France, except for its north-east corner. The unravelling of the German occupation of France began in earnest with the landings in Provence. It is hardly surprising that on 31 August Hitler confided to two of his closest advisors: ‘15 August was the worst day of my life.’4
In Paris, news of the Allied landings spread quickly. The BBC announced it at lunchtime, and soon the cafés were buzzing. There were already plenty of reasons to be happy about the military situation – the whole of Brittany was liberated, with the exception of a few pockets, such as Brest, which would not fall for another month; American troops were in the suburbs of Blois and Orléans, and above all, the Allies had taken Chartres, a mere ninety kilometres south-west of Paris. With the Allies now fighting on two fronts, liberation seemed certain.
The proximity of the Allied armies to Paris led to a sharp increase in German air activity in the region. At lunchtime there was a massive aerial dogfight over Rambouillet, mid-way between Chartres and Paris, which saw the destruction of eighteen Allied and German aircraft. In the late afternoon, Allied raids on Luftwaffe airfields near Versailles wrecked planes on the ground, leading the Germans to withdraw at least one of their squadrons to the relative safety of the southern suburbs.5
Sensing that the situation around Paris was reaching a tipping-point, Leclerc again pestered Patton for orders to move on the capital. Patton became somewhat irritated, as he confided to his diary that night: ‘Leclerc came in very much excited. He said, among other things, that if he were not allowed to advance on Paris, he would resign. I told him in my best French that he was a baby and . . . that I had left him in the most dangerous place [at the front]. We parted friends.’6 The 2e DB stayed where it was, around Argentan, moving to close the German exit from the Falaise pocket, which was now like a U on its side with the 2e DB near its open, eastern end. They were doing vital work for the Allied cause, but they were still over 150 km from where they wanted to be: Paris.
*
In Paris, economic life was grinding to a halt. The Métro was closed; households would have electricity for only an hour a day after 22:30.7 It was impossible for anyone who had to travel more than a few kilometres to carry on working.8 The most visible sign of the growing crisis was the police strike, which began with the morning shift, as planned. The word had been spread the previous evening and every police service was affected, including the emergency service and the police guarding the prisons.9 Those who had not got the message learnt what was going on when they turned up for work. Sometimes, striking officers were not clear w
hose instructions they were following – a couple of policemen told Yves Cazaux that some colleagues had told them either to go home or to change out of uniform, but they were unsure whether these men were from the Resistance or the Prefect of Police.10
Posters were put up outside each police station, explaining the reasons for the strike; passers-by gathered to find out what was happening. Paul Tuffrau left his apartment near the Jardin du Luxembourg to see what was going on: the rue Jean-Bart police station was shut, while the commissariat at place Saint-Sulpice was completely empty. A passer-by told him that on the nearby rue d’Assas they had seen fifty policemen marching silently in civilian clothes, but wearing their official white belts and brandishing their truncheons, carrying a placard reading ‘Death to the Prefect of Police’.11 Not far away, in the police station at Saint-Germain, the commanding officer, a notorious collaborator called Turpeau, tried to convince his men to work as normal. Officer Le Rousès cut him short: ‘You are the ex-Divisional Officer; you are no longer in command here. We obey only the orders of our Resistance leaders and of Algiers, until the Germans have left.’ ‘They’re still here,’ snapped Turpeau. ‘Not for long,’ replied Le Rousès.12
As the police strike took hold, supported by 95 per cent of the morning shift, the Prefect of Police, Amédée Bussière, desperately organised a series of meetings with rank-and-file police officers.13 In the Mairie (town hall) of the 6th arrondissement, Bussière addressed over 300 policemen, all in civilian clothes, many in shirt-sleeves because of the heat. He pointed out the improvements he had made to their conditions – more cigarettes, free meals, a canteen and so on – but then played the moral card, reminding them that they had not deserted their posts in 1940 when the Germans arrived, and exhorting them not to do so when the Germans were on the point of leaving. Above all, he warned them against the ‘incalculable consequences’ of going on strike. None of this had any effect. In the afternoon, in an attempt to appease the strikers, Bussière sacked Hennequin, the hated Director of the Municipal Police. That made no difference, either.14 Under the hot August sun, there had been a political earthquake: the police had changed sides.15
Paradoxically, this development alarmed Alexandre Parodi and in an urgent message to Algiers, which got badly garbled in transmission, he warned that the city was growing increasingly tense. Once again he underlined the danger of ‘bloody reprisals’ by the German commanders, urging the Free French to make a new appeal to the population ‘in order to prevent a premature uprising’.16 But by the time the message was received in Algiers, a week had passed and the uprising was in full swing.
The police strike had an immediate effect on Laval’s scheme to stop the Gaullists from taking power in Paris. As well as urging Herriot to call a meeting of the National Assembly, Laval had been trying to persuade Pétain to be in Paris when the Allies arrived. However, by late afternoon Laval was forced to accept that the police strike could lead to a decisive shift in the situation by hastening the disintegration of state power in the capital. Laval felt that the moment had passed when Pétain could surf on a wave of popular acclaim and defuse the threat of insurrection. Equally important, Laval learnt from Darnand, the Vichy Minister of the Interior, that the Milice was going to be concentrated in the main cities, principally Paris and Lyons.17 This was yet another sign that the French fascists were trying to take over law enforcement and were organising for civil war. They wanted to ensure that nothing happened in the major conurbations that might go against their plans, which were aimed against Laval and his scheme for a compromise with the Americans. Events were slipping out of Laval’s grasp.
The Resistance plot to kidnap Herriot, hatched the previous day, proved short-lived. André Enfière, who had first come up with the idea of bringing Herriot to Paris, heard of the scheme from a friend in the Resistance and immediately telephoned Laval and told him that there were plans to ‘assassinate’ Herriot. With Laval’s agreement, an elite squad of heavily armed policemen, who had not joined the strike, was sent to the Hôtel de Ville to guard Herriot’s apartment. Then Enfière contacted Georges Bidault, the head of the CNR, and warned him that any attempt to kidnap Herriot would be vigorously resisted. In the late afternoon, as Honneur et Police were putting the finishing touches to their plan that allegedly involved 300 men, Bidault and the leader of Honneur et Police discussed the situation with Parodi in a café behind the Ecole Militaire. As always whenever Parodi was involved, prudence prevailed, and the project was abandoned.18 Rather than support direct action, Parodi merely informed Algiers that he ‘hoped it would be possible’ to let Herriot know that the Resistance did not want the National Assembly to meet.19 The upshot was that Laval was free to continue with his scheming and the heavily armed police squad remained in the Hôtel de Ville.
As Parodi prevaricated, the growing tension in the region led the two main military forces of the Resistance – the FFI and the communist-led FTP – to move their headquarters into the capital. The day before, Colonel Rol had decided to split the FFI centre into two and locate them in the inner southern suburbs – one in Malakoff, the other in Montrouge – to respond rapidly to the changing situation. On the morning of 15 August, Rol met with his FTP comrade Pierre Le Queinnec and emphasised that the insurrection was not far off. Surprisingly, Le Queinnec was hostile to the move towards open conflict, and Rol had to forcefully explain that any hesitation in coming into the open could lead to decisive opportunities being missed. This was an accurate diagnosis of the problem that now faced all wings of the Resistance. The reflexes of secrecy had been burnt into Resistance fighters over the previous four years; stepping out of the shadows into the light of day was now proving just as difficult as going underground had been.20 Meanwhile, Rol’s wife Cécile, accompanied by her mother, brought guns and equipment from their house in the southern suburb of Antony. Cécile’s mother pushed a pram containing Rol’s son Jean, together with a typewriter and a machine gun; the pair walked past the German checkpoints without encountering any difficulty, then Cécile got on a bicycle together with her precious load, leaving her mother to take the baby back home.21
The leadership of the FTP was making similar moves. Their military headquarters had been based in Charles Tillon’s house in the sleepy village of Chevreuse, twenty-five kilometres to the south-west of the capital; now it was to be moved to the heart of events. But getting to Paris was a problem. Tillon, his wife Colette and a comrade were preparing their bicycles for the long ride to their new urban base, and were loading them up with parcels of documents and weapons when a dozen German troops arrived and began setting up a machine-gun nest at the crossroads outside the house. The soldiers were distracted by the offer of beer, which they gratefully drank in the shade of a nearby tree. Meanwhile, Tillon and his two comrades clambered onto their bicycles and made their way to Paris, dodging German patrols.22
To make it absolutely clear which way the wind was blowing, the leader of the Communist Party, Jacques Duclos, wrote an article in the party’s underground newspaper, L’Humanité, which was the closest anyone had come to calling for an insurrection: ‘Men and women of Paris, young and old, everyone must fight, by any means, and make our great capital city, the heart of France, the site of a popular insurrection and an insurrectional general strike. This will help us win the battle of Paris and will hasten the time when the whole of France will be free.’23
This kind of statement was exactly what the more authoritarian wing of the Free French Delegation in Paris feared. In a letter to Emmanuel d’Astier in Algiers, Léon Morandat outlined the differences within the Delegation; Regional Military Delegate Roland Pré (‘Oronte’) was in favour of ‘order at any price’ and was preparing for armed confrontation with Resistance insurgents. Morandat himself had a completely different position: he was prepared to take a gamble and to call on the Parisian population to rise up. Morandat recognised that this was ‘dangerous’, but his reasoning was quite logical: ‘an uprising of the Parisian population is inevitable, an
d if it is not we who lead it, then it will take place against us. We will have to be strong in order to lead it, and not to be led by it. That is why the General must be here as soon as Paris is liberated.’ Predictably, Parodi had not decided which approach he agreed with – ‘temperamentally he is with Oronte, but he has a good political sense, and despite everything he understands the advantages of our position and feels it is inevitable,’ wrote Morandat.24