Paris '44: The City of Light Redeemed

by Mortimer Moore, William

  “A strange impression,” Leclerc remarked perkily.

  “Awfully pleasing,” replied Girard, matching his boss’s mood.

  Nearing the beach they encountered photographers; only two at first, but this quickly became twenty, jostling for the best photograph or cine-footage of France’s most famous combat general coming home. Next, a short American general, smiling broadly, pushed past the photographers, introduced himself as General Walton Walker, the XX Corps commander, and shook Leclerc by the hand.

  “Could you shake hands again, please?” asked a photographer.

  Would General Leclerc return to the jetty and repeat his landing in France, a cine-photographer asked.

  “Non,” he replied firmly. “We’re here to fight a war. Leave me alone.”2

  La Madeleine became a scene of furious activity as LSTs opened their bow doors and lowered ramps. Shermans, Tank-Destroyers and self-propelled artillery—emblazoned with the blue and white map of France superimposed by the Cross of Lorraine—rolled ashore. “But we were a little embarrassed,” wrote Paul de Langlade. “A little shy, as if kissing in public after five years of separation, the woman one loved.”3 Soon they were driving inland to assemble at Area B near Saint-Germain de Varreville. “Everywhere there was an unforgettable magma flow of American troops and equipment,” Langlade continues. “Great rows of trucks and tanks were disgorged, disembarking every day from the holds of ship convoys that arrived and left, also delivering great containers of petrol and supplies.”4

  After a fitful night, Ensign Philippe de Gaulle surveyed the French coast with binoculars and was delighted that Varreville’s church spire remained intact. Watching his Tank Destroyers disembark, he noticed the emotion rising in every man; not just anticipating combat but returning home. Those who could dismount their TDs easily grabbed handfuls of damp sand, squeezing it through their fingers “avec délectation”.5 Here and there white tape cordoned off uncleared minefields. Everywhere Philippe witnessed the destruction of war: wrecked houses, shell craters, shattered trees, ruined farms and the sickly sweet, retch-making smell of corpses, either human or livestock. Suddenly, aircraft swooped down like a tornado. In an increasingly rare occurrence, four Focke-Wulf 190 fighter-bombers had penetrated Allied air cover. Next, a flight of USAAF Thunderbolts screamed after them. The Focke-Wulfs dropped their bombs among a battery of 2e DB artillery, inflicting casualties and damage to equipment. With their vehicles so closely parked, Philippe remembered how the flower of French chivalry, including one of his ancestors, had perished at Agincourt, in a disaster caused by the crowd as much as by English longbow men.6

  Rochambelle* Édith Vézy watched with horror as German bombs destroyed several ambulances and crippled a fellow Rochambelle for life. Thenceforward, she always parked her beloved ambulance Gargamelle under cover rather than leaving her in the open. “Our homecoming had been so happy and here was the terrible reality,” Édith wrote. The Rochambelles quickly began gathering the 2e DB’s wounded.7

  Unfazed by the destruction, Jacques Massu confessed to an overwhelming sense of well-being and optimism that sustained him throughout the liberation campaign, and which “helped me accomplish my tasks in the best conditions for success”, he later wrote. “If the Germans had turned our lines in 1940, it was quite simply their turn to have the same thing done back to them to repay them for the years of waiting and the anxiety they caused. It therefore followed that they should be conducted with the least possible delay back towards the Rhine; a direction we all knew. We were trained and equipped to carry out this task and that is what we were going to do.”8

  Amid all this, Normandy’s stoic peasants were uncomplaining. Most were thrilled to see a smart, modern, well-equipped French division. Hidden caches of cider and calvados were offered and, in several instances, they gave the 2e DB their most precious gift, their sons. Hundreds of Normans now joined Leclerc and were trained on the march.9

  Initially it appeared the 2e DB would join Walker’s XX Corps, although this was far from certain. General George Patton’s US Third Army had only been activated that very day. Bradley now commanded the new 12th Army Group, comprising both his former command, the US First Army, and the new Third Army. With Third Army’s activation came several new corps, including General Wade Haislip’s XV Corps which so far consisted of the US 79th and 90th Infantry Divisions and the US 5th Armored. XV Corps’ role was to push southeastwards around the German Seventh Army’s unguarded southern flank. It was questionable whether only one armoured division was sufficient for such a task.

  FOUR YEARS AND SIX WEEKS after General Walter Warlimont overflew Paris in his Storch spotter plane and landed on the Champs Élysées, it fell to him to deliver Hitler’s orders for a counterattack to Field Marshal von Kluge. Operation Cobra—the Allied breakthrough operation, which had begun on 25 July—was turning into a roaring torrent which would force a German rout unless it was stopped. Withdrawal from France would deprive Germany of her land-link to Spain and Portugal’s neutral ports, as well as France’s Atlantic ports.10

  Having been on the periphery of the 20 July conspiracy, Field Marshal von Kluge was a troubled man. His sense of honour prevented him from joining the plot but also made it impossible for him to inform on brother officers. Now Warlimont’s task was to stiffen the wavering Kluge. Hitler wanted Sepp Dietrich’s 1 SS Panzer Corps withdrawn from its positions facing the British at Caen and sent west, supported by other Panzer units, to attack the east flank of the American corridor through Mortain and cut it off on the coast at Avranches. Kluge greeted this plan with dismay, believing that withdrawing Dietrich’s corps from its positions would simply allow a British breakthrough on top of an American one. Furthermore, while the plan was similar in concept to both the Arras counterattack in 1940 and Manstein’s operation against Zhukov’s push along the Black Sea coast in 1943, such operations only succeed with troops who are reasonably fresh and well-supplied rather than exhausted units.

  Panzer Group West’s General Eberbach thought Hitler’s plan was utterly unsupportable, dreamt up by someone in serious denial. Most divisions were well below strength. SS General Sepp Dietrich, utterly loyal to Hitler since the early days, thought the Mortain plan was nonsense, while paratroop General Eugen Meindl looked at Warlimont as though he had fallen from a box of toy soldiers. German ground forces no longer had Luftwaffe support, while Allied fighter-bombers roamed at will.11

  THE ALLIED ACQUISITION OF BRITTANY deprived Kluge of three divisions holed up in Brest. When the US 4th Armored Division was diverted to reduce the German garrison at Rennes, its commander, General John S. Wood, complained, “We’re winning this war the wrong way, we ought to be going towards Paris.”12 Wood sincerely believed that he could have led 4th Armored to Chartres within two days, and pre-empted Kluge’s coming counterattack. Previously Patton might have backed Wood, but Patton still had to regain both Eisenhower’s and Bradley’s confidence after his gaffes in Sicily the previous year. Besides, “Ham” Haislip’s XV Corps was incomplete; it had been allocated two armoured divisions to accomplish its onerous tasks and Leclerc’s 2e DB was not yet fully disembarked.

  At Utah beach the weather prevented the unloading of anything except an LST which could drop its ramp. Dronne’s Spaniards, who often associated beaches with miserable internment camps hastily erected in 1939 for Republican refugees on France’s Mediterranean coast, began singing La Cucaracha, an old Spanish favourite about soldiers’ boredom, dating from Napoleon III’s Mexican adventure. Even more frustrating was that most of Joseph Putz’s third battalion were among the first ashore.13

  The weather cleared overnight, enabling la Nueve to begin disembarkation at 8am on 4 August. The lifting operation that loaded their half-tracks onto the ships in Southampton docks was repeated in reverse, this time into landing craft, each half-track looking like a giant beetle as it swung through the air. Eventually the first landing craft chugged towards the coast, followed by a second and so on through the morning. It was
1.30pm when Dronne finally stepped onto French soil, his heart almost missing a beat, his eyes moistening. He touched the ground with his fingertips. It was there. That was enough.14

  With la Nueve ashore, Putz’s battalion was complete. They camped that night in a ruined village. As Dronne’s men set about camouflaging their vehicles they were visited by de-housed villagers sleep-walking through their astonishment and distress. But news that Patton’s US Third Army had broken out of the bridgehead and the 2e DB would be part of his “right hook” energised the men.15

  5 August 1944

  NEEDING AUTHORITATIVE INSIGHT into Allied intentions towards Paris, Jacques Chaban-Delmas decided to visit London. After a broken train journey due to railway sabotage, Chaban reached Lyon. Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury had told him of a bistro whose owner would connect him to the Lyon resistance. Chaban presented himself there, inserting several résistants’ codenames into the conversation until, eventually, the manager trusted him enough to take him through to the back to meet the region’s head of air operations. Forty-eight hours later Chaban was hiding in a farmhouse awaiting a British aircraft. Once the BBC’s French Service gave the signal “Notre Printemps, c’est d’être ensemble”, Chaban knew he was going to London.

  At 1.00am a Glen Martin bomber landed on a remote, grassy airstrip. By dawn Chaban was in London being welcomed to Carlton Gardens’ Free French HQ by Colonel Henri Ziegler. Chaban savoured being able to walk unwarily around London until evening when General Marie-Pierre Koenig took him to dinner at the Army and Navy Club. Watched with slight curiosity by British officers, Chaban tucked into London’s best wartime fare while explaining to Koenig his concerns that the over-eager Paris Resistance might attack the Germans prematurely, risking disaster. He needed to know when the Allies would reach Paris.

  The man most able to give Chaban that answer was General Eisenhower. Nevertheless Koenig arranged an appointment for him to see Winston Churchill at 10 Downing Street on 7 August. When Chaban arrived, however, Churchill was taking his siesta and it fell to the Secretary of the War Cabinet, General Sir Hastings Ismay, to take the interview. Ismay hailed from a solid colonial family that had produced several soldiers and administrators. Marriage to an Anglo-American heiress had also made him exceedingly well-to-do; added to which his experience in military diplomacy ensured his promotion to high rank.

  Chaban got straight to the point. The number of résistants in Paris was between twelve and fifteen thousand men who, while enthusiastic, lacked training and sufficient weapons—barely a rifle or Sten gun for one man in ten. On the German side the Paris garrison appeared to be about sixteen thousand men, who could probably be supplemented by troops in transit through the city, along with artillery and tanks. Above all, Chaban impressed upon General Ismay that, after four years of humiliation, the Paris Resistance was desperate to show what it could do. In this eventuality, Chaban told Ismay, Paris needed to be liberated sooner rather than later.

  Ismay coolly impressed upon Chaban that, according to his information on Allied plans and target dates, the Allied Expeditionary Forces were unlikely to reach Paris before D+90; that is, ninety days after the landings, or early September. Disappointed, Chaban told Ismay it would be impossible to restrain the Paris Resistance for that long. Unless Allied plans were reconsidered, Chaban said, Paris could become another Warsaw.

  Ismay was well aware of what was happening in Warsaw that summer. It must also be noted that, since 1940, Ismay had performed many undersung deeds to support Free France; Chaban could not have found a more sympathetic listener. As Chaban took his leave, Ismay emphasised how much he loved France and would hate to see Paris suffer Warsaw’s fate. Ismay finished by assuring Chaban that his arguments would be faithfully reported to Churchill.

  It is hard to see how much more Ismay could have offered. Yet Chaban regarded his trip to London as “six wasted days”. After debriefing by General Koenig, Chaban needed to return to Paris as fast as possible. A lot had happened during his absence; Patton’s breakout was transforming the Normandy campaign. In the meantime Koenig heard from Algiers: “No popular insurrection in Paris without my orders”, a message from de Gaulle.16

  6–7 August 1944

  WHILE GENERAL ERICH VON DEM BACH-ZELEWSKI tore Warsaw apart and his hanging judge “Raving” Roland Friesler condemned the 20 July conspirators to the gallows of Plotzensee, Hitler needed a new, unconditionally obedient general as military governor of Paris. The involvement of several Paris officers in the plot necessitated new appointments. After his suicide attempt at Verdun only blinded him, General Karl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel was taken to the Gestapo cells underneath Berlin’s Prinz Albrecht Strasse where, during a restless night, he shouted, “Rommel, Rommel!”—outbursts that sealed Rommel’s fate. While Stulpnagel awaited trial, the newly promoted General Wilhelm Burgdorf shortlisted personal dossiers from which new military governors for France and Paris would be chosen.

  Burgdorff alighted on the file of General der Infanterie Dietrich von Choltitz. On the face of it von Choltitz was a Prussian stiffneck with an unblemished record. “By disposition and ability an able soldier and officer” began a 1942 report. “Has a good tactical grasp and can make rapid decisions. Gets to the heart of a problem with few words. In battle leads his regiment with a sure, strong hand. When he puts his mind to it can be a personal example. Many successes can be credited to his personal initiative. Adept at socialising. Unfortunately, owing to the war, suffers from a stomach complaint. The increased nervousness makes him irritable at times and he then becomes very excitable as a consequence.”17 This assessment undoubtedly attracted Burgdorf, but if he sought a ganzharter—a whole hearted Nazi—willing to execute Hitler’s wishes, however distasteful, Burgdorf’s ignorance of Germany’s aristocratic milieu meant that he had shortlisted the wrong man for what Hitler intended. Unknown to Burgdorf, von Choltitz was socially connected with several 20 July conspirators, including Carl Goerdeler and Claus von Stauffenberg. But having only been on the sidelines, von Choltitz escaped investigation.

  Born of Silesian landed gentry, von Choltitz once served as a pageboy to the Saxon court. He fought competently during the First World War as an infantry lieutenant and, after the Treaty of Versailles, he was retained by the hundred-thousand-strong Reichwehr. Promotion, marriage and children followed and, when the Nazis expanded the army, von Choltitz was appointed colonel of the “air-portable” 16th Infantry Regiment. In this capacity he seized the smoking ruins of Rotterdam when Germany’s Blitzkrieg in the West kicked off on 10 May 1940.

  During 1942 von Choltitz took part in General Erich von Manstein’s push along the Black Sea coast into the Crimea where, despite over 90% casualties, von Choltitz’s regiment took Sebastopol. It was in the Crimea that von Choltitz was drawn into anti-Jewish aktions in support of Dr. Otto Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe D, which was attached to Manstein’s Army.

  Although von Choltitz himself has not attracted a serious biography, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein has attracted several* which, to varying degrees, recognise Manstein’s powers of denial during post-war tribunals. Senior British Germanist Richard J. Evans confirms that questions about Manstein’s involvement in Nazi atrocities remain “largely unanswered”.18 Yet Manstein’s Chief of Staff, Colonel (later General) Hans Wohler, acknowledged Einsatzgruppe D’s activities in 11th Army’s sector, while Colonel Friedrich Hauck confirms that 11th Army gave Ohlendorff’s men both logistical support and supplementary manpower to carry out mass shootings of Jews.19 As Michael Burleigh writes, “There is no way that their commander, Manstein, did not know what his [Ohlendorf’s] officers and men were doing.”20 By April 1942, Einsatzgruppe D had murdered ninety thousand Crimean Jews,21 deaths which haunted von Choltitz, although his personal role remains unclear.

  Dronne describes von Choltitz as a general who never hesitated to destroy anything he was ordered to, proudly carrying a picture of “Karl”, the massive siege mortar used at Sebastopol, in his wallet.22 Conversely, in his me
moirs, von Choltitz claims that while commanding rear guard actions during 1943, the year Germany suffered great reverses in Russia, he was never ordered to commit wanton destruction, nor would he have obeyed such orders.23 However, this conflicts with threats he made to Pierre Taittinger and Raoul Nordling during the following weeks; incidents they both mention in subsequent writings.

  From the periphery of 20 July, it was with a mourner’s regret that von Choltitz wrote in his memoirs, “The 20 July put an end to our last hopes of changing the politics of our country. Similarly, that day was the point at which the Wehrmacht began to disintegrate. Seven hundred officers, including twenty-six generals, paid with their lives for the too long deferred attempt to rid ourselves of Hitler.”24

  Following Burgdorf’s summons, von Choltitz reached Rastenburg on the morning of 7 August, knowing that many of his friends were facing execution. The effects of Stauffenberg’s botched assassination attempt were everywhere; the wrecked map room, heightened security and the air of distrust between Wehrmacht officers and their SS counterparts.25 After briefly explaining the Paris appointment, Burgdorf walked von Choltitz across to Hitler’s bunker. As they entered, both General Guderian, the famous tank commander, and Admiral Karl Donitz, the head of the Kriegsmarine, were leaving a conference. Entering the bunker, von Choltitz noticed that Burgdorf was looking jerkily around in an obviously agitated state. After removing his cap, belt and pistol in the ante-room von Choltitz was led into the Führer’s presence.

  Von Choltitz thought Hitler appeared run down and had gained weight since he last saw him at a conference near Posen. Eighteen days after the assassination attempt, Hitler remained badly shaken. His hearing was damaged and his raw, sore-looking hands twitched uncontrollably. Warned by Burgdorf to be careful when shaking Hitler’s hand, von Choltitz moderated his usual firm soldier’s grip. A slight, welcoming smile lightened Hitler’s pallid features.