“Paul, Paul,” Madame Girard called to her husband. “It’s Christian.”
Unable to speak, Girard replaced the receiver. After a few moments anxiously wandering the station he asked for twenty minutes’ leave. Leclerc offered his driver. Apart from a white-shrouded nurse outside the Laennec Hospital, the Rue de Sèvres was deserted. Along the Rue du Bac the crowd grew. The Rue de Varenne turning soon appeared and, seconds later, they halted at Number 19 where Madame Girard was waiting outside the high, arched front door, wearing a black day-dress.
“Te voila, mon fils.”—”There you are, my son,” she said, opening her arms.205
HAVING INFORMATION THAT GENERAL VON CHOLTITZ would capitulate once Allied forces arrived, Pierre Billotte wrote him a letter. “I would invite the Commandant of Gross-Paris to cease all combat rendered pointless by the inequality of available forces,” was the key sentence. Billotte elaborates in his memoirs: “So as not to make it worse for his men, if Choltitz surrendered to my present invitation, and in any case since he would be in our hands, we would demand of him that he sign the capitulation of troops under his command throughout the sector of Gross-Paris and will organise with him the surrender as quickly as possible of the isolated packets of resistance. … So I rapidly dictated these terms to La Horie, assisted by Felix Gaillard, who kept the draft under plate glass on his desk until his death,” wrote Billotte. He then signed it, “General Billotte, commanding the First French Armoured Brigade”, to impress von Choltitz, even though he was merely a colonel and his battlegroup was never an independent entity.206
Then, believing von Choltitz might prefer being offered terms by a Frenchman of equivalent social rank, Billotte sent La Horie, escorted by two Spahi M8s, to Nordling’s Rue d’Anjou consulate. Despite his diminutive physique, La Horie was a fine horseman and brave as a lion, something he concealed behind a laid-back manner. Nordling was standing in the road with Bender when the Spahi M8s arrived via the Rue Saint-Lazare. As local residents poured into the street, La Horie introduced himself and, having established Bender’s bona fides, directed the more threatening aspects of Billotte’s terms towards Bender. There was only one possible solution, both humane and honourable: capitulation. Bender warned La Horie that, while von Choltitz was no Nazi, he cared about military honour.207
“Il pria,” wrote Nordling. “He [La Horie] begged the consulate to kindly pass on the ultimatum to von Choltitz.” While Nordling was willing to plead with von Choltitz for Paris within days of suffering a heart attack, he suddenly had staff problems. With gun battles raging around the Place de la Concorde, Nordling’s chauffeur refused to drive him. During the previous week the poor man had been under fire several times; he had his family to think of. Bender offered his services.208
They reached the Madeleine without incident, but thereafter found themselves amid intense gunfire, forcing them to wait on the corner of the Rue Royale. They continued on foot to the Rue Saint-Honoré where German sailors manned a checkpoint. Seeing Nordling and Bender approach in smart suits, the sailors ordered them to stop. Waving a white handkerchief Bender advanced slowly, offering his papers to a Kriegsmarine officer. From outside the Café Weber, Nordling saw that Bender was having difficulties; the Kriegsmarine were frequently as uncompromising as the SS. Bender explained that they were trying to negotiate the German garrison’s surrender to the French.
“In the Kriegsmarine we don’t know what a white flag looks like,” replied the naval officer disdainfully. Eventually Bender was allowed into the Hôtel Crillon to telephone the Hôtel Meurice. Merely a hundred metres separates these two hotels but, with Germans on the Rue de Rivoli exchanging gunfire with résistants on the Champs Élysées, it required a brave man to make that walk. Lieutenant Dankwart von Arnim met Bender at the junction of the Rue Royale. “General von Choltitz has got your measure,” said von Arnim loudly. “He won’t accept it.” Then, in a low voice, Arnim gave Bender off the record information regarding von Choltitz’s true position, admitting that if von Choltitz was taken prisoner he would co-operate with Billotte’s demands. “In effect,” wrote Nordling, “von Choltitz was ready to lay down his weapons at the very moment that French regular forces penetrated the Hôtel.”209
After rejoining Nordling outside the Café Weber, they returned to the Swedish Consulate where Bender told La Horie that von Choltitz could not surrender without a fight.
“You’ve just got to make a lot of noise,” said Bender.
“So it’s a baroud d’honneur,”* La Horie remarked.
“Absolument! ” said Bender.
“We will attack around 3pm,” replied La Horie.210
ADVANCING INTO CENTRAL PARIS from the Pont de Sèvres, Sub-group Massu was quickly overwhelmed by the crowd, slowing their progress virtually to a standstill.211 Atop the Sherman Champagne, Lieutenant Berne had a good view over the thickening crowd. But those following behind could barely see what was happening. Reaching the Porte Saint-Cloud, Massu was amused by thirty Gardiens arriving on bicycles from the Bois de Boulogne to control the crowd.212
Reduced to a crawl, they witnessed all the joy and, in some instances, downright ugliness of liberation. Sorret’s platoon saw FFIs pushing along a naked and degraded girl with head shaven and breasts daubed with black tar swastikas for collaboration horizontale.
“‘My heart is French, but my cunt is international!’ That’s what they say,” someone explained.
“What a pity, mon lieutenant,” said Sergeant Picquet. “She’s quite a looker, that little one.”
Much had happened since Sorret last dined at Fouquet’s.213
Colonel Paul de Langlade now ordered Massu’s sub-group to halt. Though Massu’s men were unlikely to be fazed by 20mm machingun fire from German remnants holding out around Garches, Langlade recognised the potential panic and civilian casualties. Having located the offending guns, GT Langlade’s artillery rained 105mm shells on them so that, for a few minutes, western Paris reverberated with explosions.214
Massu visited Langlade’s CP.
“Mon vieux Massu, you really should look at yourself in a mirror,” said Langlade, laughing heartily. “You’re covered in lipstick. One would think a Red Indian had enlisted.”
“You would know, mon colonel,” replied Massu. “My face could hardly be worse than yours.”
Langlade inspected his own face in a Jeep’s wing mirror and frantically rubbed rouge from his jawline.215
“It was a triumphal march amid cries of ‘bravo!’,” wrote Massu. “Carried by popular enthusiasm we arrived within sight of the Étoile. Now it had become serious; we had exact information on the positions of German pillboxes and knew that the area around the Hôtel Majestic would be well defended.”216
A call of “Attention! ” soon came as FFI emerged from a crossroads. “There are plenty of Germans up ahead.”
Moments later a GMC lorry was badly shot up by machine-gun fire from a first floor apartment. At once Sergeant Mesnier, a Thompson in one hand and a grenade in the other, entered the building and ran up the stairs. After killing two German soldiers he found two teenage lads wearing Tricolore brassards and a Frenchman in Wehrmacht uniform claiming that a German had stolen his clothes at gunpoint and forced him to wear his discarded uniform. Outside the two lads begged forgiveness from the FFIs, but no one knew what to make of the Frenchman in Wehrmacht uniform.217
CHRISTIAN GIRARD REGAINED THE GARE MONT PARNASSE in time to escort General Leclerc to the Préfecture. Neither Leclerc nor Billotte were surprised when La Horie reported that von Choltitz would fight. The attack would go ahead.218
US 4th Infantry Division’s General Barton arrived for the big luncheon prepared in the Préfecture’s dining room. “He did not seem very happy,” wrote Girard. “I think our situation seemed strange to him.” Leclerc summoned Girard outside, needing to confide his impatience that von Choltitz remained inside the Meurice with de Gaulle arriving that afternoon. After Leclerc returned to the dining room, Girard found Commandant Bagneux
dining downstairs with several FFI. “I joined them,” wrote Girard, “and enjoyed an excellent lunch in an atmosphere of extraordinary festivity. To this day it seems so unreal when considering what was happening only a few hundred metres away.”219
While others dined, Billotte finished his plan. Jacques Branet would lead a group of tanks and infantry along the Rue de Rivoli up to the Place de la Concorde, while Lieutenant Bricard took a similar force along the rive droite quays, to take on any Panther tanks supposedly in the Tuileries gardens. Sammarcelli would take the Rue Saint-Honoré, covering the Rue de l’Opéra and the Rue Royale, while Putz took a southerly axis from the Place Saint-Michel towards the Jardins du Luxembourg. Billotte hoped the Germans would surrender honourably when faced with overwhelming forces and therefore ordered his men not to fire first; chivalrous considerations he later regretted.220
“La Horie came to find me,” wrote Branet. “We’re going to attack the Hôtel Meurice, the centre of German resistance. The German general was there and, opposite, Panthers in the Tuileries. Probably they would surrender. [We’re] not to fire first.”221 Branet’s tanks would be supported by two platoons from 3/RMT’s 11th Company commanded by lieutenants Franjoux and Karcher. La Horie mentioned a baroud d’honneur.
“A baroud d’honneur?” said Branet. “And what, I wonder, is their conception of ‘honour’?” he thought.
La Horie arranged an advanced CP beneath the arches of the Théatre Française whose young actresses set up a First Aid post using nurses’ uniforms from the costume store.
“It’s the best part they’ve ever played,” quipped Branet, smiling indulgently as he mounted his Jeep.
“I would like to be just lightly wounded,” said Lieutenant Franjoux, “enough to come and get one of your autographs.”222
THE BRASS-HELMETED FIREMEN rehanging the Tricolore above the Soldat Inconnu had escaped German gunfire.223 But when 2/RMT’s 5th Company reached the Étoile a MG42 opened up from a pillbox on the Rue de Presbourg. The 12e RCA’s Sherman, Bourgogne, promptly turned towards the pillbox followed by Lieutenant Gauffre’s platoon. For a moment silence was absolute.
“It’s like going to an execution, isn’t it?” piped up Tirailleur Murcia, as the Bourgogne’s crew cranked down its 75mm gun. A high-explosive shell was fired straight into the pillbox’s gun slit which shattered the plate window of an adjacent novelty shop, showering broken glass all over the street. The pillbox’s occupants were undoubtedly dead.224
Once Sub-group Massu arrived in force on the Place de l’Étoile, at 2.30pm, Shermans and Tank-Destroyers sealed off every junction. Massu breathed a deep sigh of relief. Paul de Langlade arrived and, together with Commandant Mirambeau, they approached the Arc de Triomphe and introduced themselves to the firemen. Standing soberly to attention before the Soldat Inconnu’s bronze-plated covering, no sooner had they saluted than a shell fired from the Champs-Élysées, clearly aimed at the newly hung Tricolore, whistled over their heads. A second shot hit the Arc de Triomphe itself, damaging one of the four high relief sculptures which decorate its uprights—François Rude’s Le Départ des Volontaires de 1792. Stone fragments littered the pavement where the officers were standing.225
“MOTEURS EN ROUTE,” shouted La Horie. Policemen blew whistles and Branet watched the crowd evaporate, leaving the Rue de Rivoli utterly empty and looking enormous.226 At the opposite end, from her beloved Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland watched nervous Wehrmacht soldiers crouching behind sandbags in the museum courtyard.227
Franjoux’s platoon began advancing, crossing the Rue de Rivoli and taking positions alongside the Finance Ministry, while Karcher’s platoon threaded their way forward between the elegant arches outside the smartest shops in the world. Behind them followed Shermans Mort-Homme, Villers-Cotterets and Douaumant like enormous olive-green snails.228
Branet followed behind, walking alongside his idling Jeep holding a radio microphone. Ahead of them the road remained eerily empty. Behind them, once they passed, Parisians re-emerged from buildings, silent and fascinated. Franjoux eventually reached the Louvre’s northwest corner on the Place des Pyramides with Emmanuel Frémiet’s golden statue of Joan of Arc to his right and the Louvre’s open courtyard on his left. In the Jardins des Tuileries, tank engines were audible. Franjoux continued to the Rue de Castiglione junction. Then the obvious happened. A German machine-gun opened up from a hotel balcony, knocking down four of Franjoux’s men. Immediately Franjoux ordered the rest of his platoon under the shelter of the archways on the north side.
“If I had known that I was expected to play ‘moving targets’, I would have refused,” Franjoux said afterwards.
Karcher’s platoon threw grenades at windows and balconies where machine-guns had been identified, climbing up building facades to neutralise them.229
Branet decided to send his Shermans a few metres ahead of his infantry. The Mort-Homme took the lead, advancing towards the Hôtel Meurice where Germans were firing from windows and the roof. Sergeant Bénard was standing in Mort-Homme’s turret with the hatch open when hand-grenades began showering down from the Meurice’s roof. Most glanced off the armour before exploding harmlessly a few metres away, but one fell inside Bénard’s hatch before exploding. Bénard and his gunners managed to escape, burnt and bleeding. The Meurice’s defenders refrained from gunning them down as they walked away, leaving Mort-Homme smoking outside the Meurice.230
Villers-Cotterets pushed past Mort-Homme just as a Hotchkiss tank emerged from the Jardins des Tuileries. Seeing this pre-1940 French tank, painted with a black Balkenkreuz, Villers-Cotterets’ gunner loaded an armour-piercing shell and knocked it out. Moments later Villers-Cotterets’ commander, Sergeant Laigle, standing in his turret’s open hatch, was killed by machine-gun fire from the Ministry of Marine.231
There was now fighting at both ends of the Champs Élysées. The Panther whose fire had disturbed Langlade, Massu and Mirambeau as they saluted the Soldat Inconnu was firing from the Obelisk* on the Place de la Concorde.
AFTER THE PANTHER’S SECOND SHELL smashed into the Arc de Triomphe’s northeast upright, Massu called forward RBFM Tank-Destroyers, Simoun and Sirocco. From his Jeep, Naval Lieutenant Durville surveyed the Champs Élysées through binoculars. All along its length it appeared deserted, its occupants keeping back from windows, and the pavements free of les badauds. Durville directed Simoun to the Étoile’s north side while Sirocco took up position beside him. German machine-gun bullets scythed the trees above them, bringing foliage down onto Sirocco’s open turret. Sensing the unfolding danger, the Panther switched its machine-gun fire to the north side, wrecking a street lantern near Simoun. The Panther’s nervous crew now fired three shells, each missing Simoun and arching towards the Bois de Boulogne. Second Mate Quiniou ordered Simoun and Sirocco slowly forward.232
Post-war enquiry confirms that only one Panther emerged from the Jardins des Tuileries, hence Robert Wallraf, watching from the Crillon, wrote accurately when he called it “the last tank in the defence of Paris”. Sergeant Bizien’s Douaumont was hurtling along the Rue de Rivoli past the Mort-Homme, obscured from the Panther’s view by the Jardins des Tuileries’ sumptuous greenery and the Jeu de Paume, while simultaneously, from the Arc de Triomphe, Lieutenant Durville ordered his Tank-Destroyers to engage the Panther. Quiniou ordered his gunner Robert Mady to load an armour-piercing shell and set the gunsight for fifteen hundred metres. But Mady, being a Parisian, knew from boyhood that the Champs Élysées was eighteen hundred metres long and set the sight to the correct distance.
Wallraf’s testimony suggests that the shot which disabled the Panther came from Bizien’s Douaumont as it approached from the Rue de Rivoli. But during these hectic seconds Bizien decided that Douaumont’s best chance at such close range was to ram the Panther. Whether it was Simoun’s shot, or a shell fired by the 12e RCA’s Lieutenant Nouveau, whose Sherman Champagne arrived on the Champs Élysées at the Rond Point, remains a small historical mystery; both tanks carried the 76mm gun ca
pable of disabling a Panther.233
Either way, the Panther’s crew debouched and escaped into the Jardins des Tuileries, just as Sergeant Bizien was dismounting from the Douaumont to take them prisoner. The sight of Bizien, triumphant in that city’s greatest square, would have drawn any sniper’s eye. During the morning a Parisienne had died taking bullets meant for him; this time they found their mark. Marcel Bizien was a Gaulliste de la première heure and an original member of the squadron Branet forged in England.234
With Bizien down and Douaumont slammed into the Panther by the Obelisk, Lieutenant Bricard’s troop of Shermans reached the Place de la Concorde from the rive droite, immediately raking the Crillon’s frontage with machine-gun fire and sending its occupants, Robert Wallraf included, scurrying for cover. When a young SS soldier fired a Panzerfaust through a broken window, hitting one of Bricard’s Shermans, another Sherman fired back, destroying the Crillon’s fifth column.235
The attack on von Choltitz’s lair was becoming costly. But Franjoux and Karcher’s platoons had reached the Meurice’s front entrance with Branet close behind. Looking up at that world-class hotel, Branet was on the verge of triumph. Then a grenade fell from above injuring two Chad infantrymen, soon followed by another which exploded near Branet. His ears singing, he stumbled through the Rivoli arches and collapsed under the covered way, oozing blood from shrapnel injuries down his back and side.236
While Branet’s driver organised his evacuation, Lieutenants Franjoux and Karcher took over.
“Not so clever are you, captain?” Franjoux quipped cheekily as Branet was lifted onto a stretcher.
Followed by their men, the two lieutenants rushed the Meurice’s front door, firing anywhere a German hesitated to raise his hands. An official portrait of Hitler, hosed by machine-gun fire, clattered to the floor.
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