Eleven Days in August

by Matthew Cobb

  14

  Thursday 24 August, Evening: Arrival

  A journalist for Franc-Tireur, one of the main Resistance newspapers, writes: ‘As we approach the capital, the atmosphere becomes utterly extraordinary. As the capital gets closer, the soldiers can no longer hide their joy, which they express by clumsy, large childlike gestures that are so moving. They blow kisses, and with the backs of their rough hands they dry cheeks that are wet with tears. They are surprised, and somewhat embarrassed, by the marvellous privilege they have been given by destiny. Rising up on the horizon before them they can see the beautiful indented profile of the city, the sky still pink from the last glimmer of the sun.’1

  In the late afternoon, General Leclerc was stuck in the centre of Antony, frustrated by the lack of movement. He knew that the US commanders were becoming impatient – General Barton of the 4th Infantry Division had just been ordered ‘to force a way into the city as rapidly as possible.’2 This impatience was understandable, but any implied criticism of the 2e DB’s progress was unfair. A British intelligence report noted that ‘the French Armoured Division is moving into Paris . . . Those enemy elements . . . in the way . . . have been very roughly handled indeed.’3 The price that had been paid by the 2e DB that day was not small: 71 dead and 225 wounded, with the loss of 35 armoured vehicles.4

  Nevertheless, under pressure from General Gerow to continue his advance that night and perhaps fearful that the US might enter the city first, Leclerc took decisive action.5 A small Piper reconnaissance aircraft was sent towards Paris, hopping over the rooftops. The plane’s crew – pilot Captain Jean Callet and observer Lieutenant Etienne Mantout – were told to drop a message into the courtyard of the Préfecture de Police, which was much more difficult than it sounded. As the plane approached the building, Callet pitched the nose down and the plane plunged into a steep dive. At the last moment, Callet pulled out of the dive and Mantout threw down a small weighted bag containing the message, then the plane turned back home, dodging flak and bullets.6 Mantout did not quite reach his target – the bag with its bright gold streamer fell just outside the Préfecture, on the corner of the quai du Marché Neuf. Scribbled on an official US Army telegram form, the message was simple: ‘General Leclerc says: Hold on, we’re coming.’7

  To back up that promise, Leclerc found Captain Dronne, whose 9th Company of Mechanised Infantry was heading south, away from Paris, to avoid the traffic jam that was building up. ‘What the hell are you doing, Dronne?’ snapped Leclerc. ‘Heading south, sir,’ replied Dronne, ‘I was given an order, sir.’ ‘You should never obey a stupid order,’ said Leclerc.8 And with that the stocky captain was instructed to assemble a column rapidly: ‘Quickly, get whatever forces you can . . . Head straight for Paris. Go by whatever route you want. Tell the Parisians and the Resistance not to lose their nerve, and that tomorrow the whole Division will be in Paris.’9

  The 9th Company – some parts of which were still far south of Antony, stuck in the giant traffic jam – was nicknamed ‘La Nueve’ (‘Nine’ in Spanish) because 146 of its 160 members were either of Spanish origin or were Spanish exiles. Most of them were communists or anarchists who had fought in the Civil War, and they were allowed to wear the Spanish Republican flag on their Free French uniform. In a very public declaration of their origins, five of the vehicles in La Nueve were named after Spanish Civil War battles or leaders.10 To complement his half-tracks, Dronne requisitioned three Sherman tanks – Romilly, Champaubert and Gaston Eve’s Montmirail. In the gathering twilight, the twenty-two vehicles and 150 men set off for the capital at around 20:00, with Dronne’s jeep leading the column.11 Taking side roads, and avoiding the Germans’ makeshift but effective anti-tank weapons, they moved rapidly northwards without meeting any opposition. Dronne decided they would head for the Hôtel de Ville because, as he later put it, ‘it was the heart of the capital and the symbol of Parisian and national liberties.’12

  *

  All through the day, Parisians had heard that the Leclerc Division was coming to the capital. Now it appeared to be true. The progress of the Dronne column was feverishly followed in the newly created newsrooms of the Resistance newspapers and broadcast by the radio station. Telephone calls came in from contacts in the southern suburbs, heightening the journalists’ greatest fear – that they might miss the most momentous event in the city’s history. Shortly after 18:00, journalist René Dunan and a couple of his colleagues piled into a car and went off to find the Leclerc Division, zigzagging past the barricades, driving alongside crowds of men, women and children who all seemed to be heading in the same direction.13

  In less than an hour Dronne and his men were at the place d’Italie in southern Paris, by which point the crowd was so dense that the vehicles could barely move. René Dunan and his colleagues found themselves caught up in the mêlée: ‘About 30 metres away I can see a tank, immobile, covered in people. In an effort to hold on, people are grasping each other, limbs are intertwined, heads close together. The crowd around the tank wave their arms, scream their lungs out, use any means they can to show their elation . . . The young soldiers, in khaki uniforms, their American helmets tipped back on their heads, their faces tanned, deep rings around their eyes, are stunned and astonished by the welcome.’14 One of those soldiers was the driver of Montmirail, Gaston Eve:

  We were being kissed on our faces and on our berets as so many people were totally overwhelmed by the madness of the moment. Our blackened faces were soon smeared with lipstick. People were giving us bottles of wine and these were put away in the tank safely. We gave away packets of biscuits, little bits of our survival rations of chocolate and of course we returned the kisses being given us and hugged the people we were fighting for . . . To open up a path through the crowd the Lieutenant decided to give some blasts of the siren while advancing very gently. I started to tell those on and around the tank that they must get off and those round about started pushing and shouting ‘Get off!’ That proved effective and we started to see clear ahead of us. We departed behind Romilly very slowly because the way through was very narrow. Everybody was shouting I don’t know what and waving us goodbye with their hands. We responded and waved away like gladiators going into the arena. What a moment for a soldier to have lived. Such moments live on in the soul ever more, believe me!15

  Shortly before 21:00, Camille Vilain was standing on sentry duty by ‘his’ barricade near the Jardin des Plantes when he saw a crowd rushing down the boulevard de l’Hôpital. Vilain turned, expecting to see a German armoured car. Instead, in the fading light, what he saw amazed him:

  Coming down the boulevard de l’Hôpital, swept along by a tornado of applause, are the first armoured vehicles of the Leclerc column, covered in flags and young FFI fighters. They have French names written on their steel flanks. The enthusiasm is indescribable. People are singing, dancing, jumping up and down, shouting, screaming. Every time a vehicle goes by, the noise doubles in intensity. We form a human chain to stop the crowd from being knocked down by the tanks, whose path they are blocking. Women are perched on the top of some of the tanks, looking joyful. They are here! They are here!16

  Guided by a young motorcycle rider, the twenty-two vehicles in the Dronne column crossed the Seine by the Gare d’Austerlitz and then followed the right bank of the river westwards, until they arrived at the place de l’Hôtel de Ville as night fell. The three tanks backed up to the building and parked with their guns facing onto the square, defending this key symbol of Republican France. The time was 21:22 and the Leclerc Division had arrived in the heart of Paris.

  *

  Claude Roy had been waiting in the Hôtel de Ville, finding the situation unbearably tense and thinking of his comrades in exile or in prison. Also waiting was a young woman from Alsace, a region that had been annexed by the Germans in 1940. Her name was Jeanne Borchert, and she had turned up in traditional Alsatian costume – a red skirt, a white blouse with a black apron, and a large black head-dress. Clutching a French flag, J
eanne hung around the Hôtel de Ville all day, waiting for the Free French Army to arrive. Inside the building, in the large office of the Prefect of the Seine, a bust of ‘Marianne’ – the symbol of the Republic – had been dug out of a cupboard and perched on a trolley, and the leaders of the insurrection sat impatiently. Every now and then the telephone would ring and news would come through of the progress of the Leclerc Division. Above the fireplace there was a badly reproduced photograph of de Gaulle with a tricolour ribbon across it, while the open windows were filled with sandbags and bristled with machine guns pointing onto the square in front of the building. In the courtyard, FFI fighters cobbled together Allied flags.

  In the early evening, everyone went to the refectory to eat pasta and bread.17 Suddenly, Bidault stood up, called for silence and announced that French tanks were in Paris and had crossed the Seine. There was chaos as some people clambered onto the tables and began to sing the ‘Marseillaise’, while others rushed for the doors. Outside, the three tanks of the Dronne column had just arrived and were bathed in eerie light as flares were set off in celebration.18 Monsieur Lecomte, a hospital administrator, was in the Hôtel de Ville with the résistants. He wrote: ‘I hadn’t seen the tanks arrive, so their sudden appearance was like magic. A crowd seemed to appear from nowhere, covering the square, and the high windows of the Prefect’s office were lit up like they have not been for five years, illuminating the night.’19 Soon there were hundreds of Parisians on the square, singing and dancing.

  Dronne was almost carried up to the Prefect’s office, where he was welcomed by Georges Bidault, in the name of the ‘soldiers without uniform’ who had been fighting in France.20 As Bidault moved to embrace him, Dronne protested: ‘But I’m so dirty, so filthy – it’s been such a long drive!’ Suddenly a burst of machine-gun fire crashed into the room. Everyone dived to the floor, then someone managed to turn the lights off. The Germans were still in the city, and they could still kill.21

  Shortly before Dronne arrived, radio journalist Pierre Crénesse, who had spent the whole day producing the broadcast from the Préfecture, walked over to the Hôtel de Ville to check the radio set-up for what he thought would be a momentous day. As he arrived in front of the Hôtel de Ville, he was amazed to see Dronne’s tanks. He rushed into the building, grabbed a telephone and called the studio, demanding to be patched through, live to air.22 Breathless with excitement and exhaustion, Crénesse gave an improvised report that lasted over five minutes and which captured the meaning of the moment:

  Tomorrow morning will be the dawn of a new day for the capital. Tomorrow morning, Paris will be liberated, Paris will have finally rediscovered its true face. Four years of struggle, four years that have been, for many people, years of prison, years of pain, of torture and, for many more, a slow death in the Nazi concentration camps, murder; but that’s all over . . . For several hours, here in the centre of Paris, in the Cité, we have been living unforgettable moments. At the Préfecture, my comrades have explained to you that they are waiting for the commanding officers of the Leclerc Division and the American and French authorities. Similarly, at the Hôtel de Ville the Conseil National de la Résistance has been meeting for several hours. They are awaiting the French authorities. Meetings will take place, meetings which will be extremely symbolic, either there or in the Préfecture de Police – we don’t yet know where.23

  Crénesse then handed the phone over to Bidault, who made a brief speech underlining that Germany was still not beaten, and urging the whole of France to support the Allies. Then Rol spoke – he had arrived at the Hôtel de Ville a few minutes earlier. He emphasised that ‘the capital has largely been liberated thanks to the guerrilla tactics carried out by the FFI,’ before closing with an appeal that could have been made by de Gaulle: ‘Open the road to Paris for the Allied armies, hunt down and destroy the remnants of the German divisions, link up with the Leclerc Division in a common victory – that is the mission that is being accomplished by the FFI of the Ile-de-France and of Paris, simmering with a sacred hatred and patriotism.’24

  As they were broadcasting, the great bell of Notre Dame, which had been silent throughout the occupation, began to toll in celebration – Charles Luizet had ordered a dozen policemen to the cathedral to ring it.25 From the radio studio, Pierre Schaeffer called on all the churches of the city to join in and ring their bells, too. And all over Paris, the noise of bells rang out.26

  In the tumult, two policemen turned up at the Hôtel de Ville and summoned Dronne to the Préfecture. The Gaullist Delegation could easily have made the trip over the Seine, but they clearly wanted to regain the media initiative from the Resistance, and highlight their presence at the Préfecture, with all that it symbolised in terms of the re-establishment of the state. Once Dronne had walked the few hundred metres across the Seine, Parodi was shoved in front of the radio microphone: ‘I have in front of me a French captain who is the first to arrive in Paris. His face is red, he is grubby and he needs a shave, and yet I want to embrace him!’27 When the interview was over, Luizet asked Dronne if there was anything he needed; the soldier replied simply: ‘A bath’. After a brief ablution in the relative luxury of Luizet’s official apartment, Dronne – clean and not quite so tired – took his leave and returned to the Hôtel de Ville. He spread his sleeping bag on the pavement next to his jeep and went to sleep, to the sound of his Spanish comrades singing republican songs.28

  *

  A few minutes after Dronne arrived at the Hôtel de Ville, Colonel Massu’s column, accompanied by a group of Americans led by Captain Peterson of the 102nd Cavalry Group, had reached the pont de Sèvres, only two kilometres away from the south-western edge of Paris.29 A journalist from Franc-Tireur described the situation in an article published the next day:

  It all happened in a flash. First the place was empty then, without warning, the bridge was full of tanks, real tanks, and not simply young men armed with rifles and revolvers. The lads of Leclerc’s army are here. The tanks are covered with young girls, with women who are hugging these first uniformed men of the French Army. They get down from their tanks. They move among the crowd which presses around them to hail them, to thank them for being there. I push my way through the madding crowd, a crowd that is crying for joy, and which can do nothing other than cry its joy.30

  All of a sudden, the electricity came on and the streets were flooded with light, the river below the bridge flashing as the reflections danced in the water.31

  Colonel de Langlade was with Massu’s column, and he ordered a group of tanks to cross the Seine and to wait on the other side of the river. Having set up his headquarters in a café on the western bank of the Seine, near the massive Renault factory situated in the middle of the river on the Ile Séguin, de Langlade repeatedly tried to contact Leclerc’s headquarters to explain their position. It was impossible to get through on the radio. The men at the headquarters of the 2e DB were equally frustrated: a Free French intelligence report glumly concluded that ‘for all practical purposes, liaison between the columns no longer exists.’32 De Langlade was, however, able to get through to his mother, by simply picking up the telephone in the café and dialling her number. It was the first time he had spoken to her in five years. He said he would be with her on the following afternoon, and that under no circumstances should she go outside.33

  Shortly afterwards, Lieutenant Lorrain Cruse turned up at de Langlade’s headquarters with news of the situation in the city. Although Cruse was an FFI officer, he was one of Chaban’s men and liaised with Nordling at the Swedish consulate; he was also in continual contact with the spy Bender.34 Although it was clear from Cruse’s description that there were few if any German troops between Sèvres and the centre of the city, any advance would require passing by the Bois de Boulogne where, Bender had claimed, an SS regiment was stationed.35 The issue was finally resolved when de Langlade discovered that the tanks were nearly out of fuel, and the refuelling convoy had yet to arrive. They would have to wait.36

&n
bsp; *

  In the Hôtel Meurice, von Choltitz and his closest advisors, including his secretary, Fraulein Grün, were taking a last supper together. They were morosely drinking champagne and drawing parallels with the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which had taken place in Paris exactly 372 years earlier, on 24 August 1572, and in which thousands of French Huguenots were killed.37 Then they heard the bells ring out.

  ‘So, they are here!’ said Colonel Jay to von Choltitz.38

  Von Choltitz went into his office, picked up the telephone and spoke to Speidel and Model. He held the telephone out of the window, into the night that was full of the sound of bells ringing.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I can hear bells,’ Speidel replied.

  ‘That’s right,’ said von Choltitz, ‘the Franco-American Army has entered Paris.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Speidel.

  After a short silence, von Choltitz asked for orders. Speidel and Model had none to give him.

  ‘In that case, my dear Speidel,’ sighed von Choltitz, ‘there remains nothing for me to do except to bid you adieu. Take care of my wife, and of my children.’

  ‘We will do that, General,’ said Speidel, ‘we promise you.’39

  And with that, von Choltitz’s group went to bed. Von Arnim took his father’s old suitcase, which had accompanied him throughout his military career, and packed away his few precious affairs. He slipped a Bible and a copy of Conversations with Goethe into his trouser pocket, then lay down on the bed in his small attic bedroom.40