“One particularly happy incident,” Woodcock continued, “was when a delightful and exceedingly well-spoken man … came across from some flats nearby and, after introducing himself, asked, ‘If you are not otherwise engaged tonight I should be most honoured if you would come and have dinner with me.’ When I, and another of the fellows, were able to accept his invitation, he said, ‘I would very much like you to meet my two daughters. I have not let them go out of the house since the Germans arrived.’ And this was quite true; these two absolutely charming girls—as we found out—had actually been incarcerated ever since the Germans entered Paris.”101
AMONG THE BRITISH OFFICERS arriving in Paris was Lieutenant Colonel Victor Rothschild, a British member of the Jewish international banking family. Being a bomb disposal expert, Rothschild’s primary concern was explosives and booby traps. Another pressing concern was taking possession of his family’s substantial property in the leafy Avenue de Marigny before anyone else requisitioned the building.102
Not wishing to rattle around alone inside No. 3 Avenue de Marigny, Rothschild offered temporary lodgings to Malcolm Muggeridge, who struck up a fascinating rapport with the Rothschilds’ superb butler, Félix Pacaut. “It astonished me, when we first moved into the house, to find its contents intact and undamaged,” wrote Muggeridge. “As belonging to one of the most famous Jewish families in Europe, one would have expected it to have suffered. During the German occupation, it was taken over by a Luftwaffe general [Hanesse] who, according to Monsieur Félix—he continued to function as a matter of course—behaved impeccably; not only refraining from tampering with the house and its contents himself, but also preventing others from doing so. When I got to know Monsieur Félix better, I asked him how he accounted for the general’s good behaviour, he being, after all, a Nazi. His reply was interesting; Hitlers come and go, he said, but Rothschilds go on forever. He said it with a droll smile; not a man, I concluded correctly, to tell me that he had hidden RAF officers in the cellar along with the Mouton Rothschild. Someone clearly with his wits about him. We often had chats together after that.”103 In truth, General Hanesse was as greedy and corrupt as any other senior Luftwaffe officer close to Goering, but Pacaut was wise to him, discreetly removing family treasures and either hiding them in the building or elsewhere in Paris.104
Following a roundabout route into Paris via Chartres came four young officers from the second (armoured) battalion of the Grenadier Guards, one of the Guards Armoured Division’s three tank regiments. Allowed a brief period of relaxation after the Wehrmacht’s Normandy débacle, Lieutenant David Fraser—a future general, Captain the Lord Carrington—a future Foreign Secretary, and two others called Teddy Denny and Neville Berry decided to check out freshly liberated Paris. Fraser, though the most junior, was elected their guide since his father had been British military attaché during the 1930s. Reaching the Champs Élysées around early evening, passing GT Langlade’s Shermans parked under the trees, they found immense, joyful crowds everywhere.
“Where shall we go now?” they wondered as they passed the knocked-out Panther on the Place de la Concorde.
“To the Ritz,” said Fraser.
“We were travel-stained and certainly had no easily negotiable funds,” wrote Fraser, “but Neville Berry was put in charge of that side of life and persuaded us (and indeed the Ritz) that any shortfall would be made good by Kemsley newspapers.”105
Although the Ritz was full of foreign journalists, the four officers took a suite. Exploring the hotel’s salons and bars where they drank several glasses of Perrier Jouet champagne, they saw Ernest Hemingway and noticed “perched at bar stools, long rows of very chic Parisiennes who looked as if they had been there every evening since the war began, and probably had”. After meeting up with a Welsh Guards officer who arrived at the Ritz accompanied by several résistants and a rifle slung over his shoulder, the four Grenadiers ordered dinner. In perfect English the head waiter apologised for the limitations of the menu and took their orders.
“Did you speak English when the Germans were here?” Carrington asked.
“I spoke German when the Germans were here,” replied the head waiter.106
AMERICAN JOURNALIST MARY WELSH caught up with Hemingway at the Ritz, being greeted in his suite with “a welcoming merry-go-round bear hug”, like the one he had given Sylvia Beach the previous afternoon. He introduced his latest love to four of the irregulars who had followed him from Rambouillet. Looking around, Welsh noticed a K-ration stove set up in the fireplace and Hemingway’s newly acquired combat jacket bearing the US 4th Infantry Division’s four-leaf ivy insignia.
Hemingway’s mob now consisted of three committed résistants and Marcel Duhamel, who acted as his secretary. Thanks to Duhamel, Hemingway was soon visited by André Malraux, whose adventures almost matched his own. While Ernest and his little band, whom he jokily called “worthless characters”, cleaned their weapons, sitting on “nice delicate old furniture”, Malraux breezed into Hemingway’s room dressed in a French colonel’s smart khaki tunic and polished high boots.107
“Bonjour, André,” said Hemingway.
“Bonjour, Ernest,” Malraux replied. “How many have you commanded?”
“Ten or twelve,” Hemingway replied, modestly on this occasion. “At the most two hundred.”
“Me, two thousand,” replied Malraux, contorting his face.
“What a shame then that we didn’t have your help when we were taking this little town of Paris.” Hemingway replied.108
Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker develops this scene, quoting one of Hemingway’s sidekicks offering “to shoot the fool”. Olivier Todd, Malraux’s biographer, although maintaining an affectionate yet unimpressed attitude to Malraux, knew his claims could be “pretty preposterous”. Both Hemingway and Malraux enjoyed bragging. Nevertheless de Gaulle respected Malraux enough to appoint him Minister for Cultural Affairs.109
AT 11.30PM, JOYFUL PARISIANS were shaken back to reality by loud explosions. In vengeance for losing the French capital, the Germans were bombing Paris. At first the aircraft engines sounded like Allied bombers heading for Germany. Then air-raid sirens sounded and destruction fell from the sky. Those capable of counting aircraft from engine noise reckoned there were one hundred and fifty, representing a considerable Luftwaffe effort at that time.110
Les Invalides was not only a veteran’s hospital and Napoleon’s final resting place, but also the residence of the military governor of Paris. After spending much of the evening discussing the Gerow affair, interim governor General Leclerc and General Marie-Pierre Koenig turned in for the night. Hearing the first explosions, semi-undressed, de Gaulle’s two most loyal generals ran barefooted from their rooms to the balcony overlooking the front esplanade, from where they witnessed explosions to the north and east. It was the hardest the Germans had hit the city since their use of “the Paris Gun”—sometimes mistakenly called “Big Bertha”—during the First World War.
“Les salauds! Les salauds!” said Leclerc. “The swines! The swines!”111
The aircraft came over in several waves, mainly dropping incendiary bombs.
“The Ack-Ack was very feeble,” wrote David Bruce. When it began Bruce sallied forth into the streets, noticing that “people were shooting at the airplanes with pistols, rifles and machine-guns. In a few minutes, the sky back of Morgan’s Bank was glowing brightly. An alcohol dump was on fire there.”112
Checking on the damage, Prefect Charles Luizet called at the Halles des Vins, whose stocks of alcohol challenged the city’s firefighters, illuminating central Paris “like a Bengal fire”. Driving further eastwards, Luizet was stopped by 2e DB soldiers, “It’s the front line!” Luizet could not believe that they had marched down the Champs Élysées with the enemy so near. Not only were the remaining German forces never under von Choltitz’s command, but more troops were arriving on bicycles to reinforce them.113 Recognising that the air-raid was his priority, Luizet turned back.
At the Préfecture, a curious bonne bouche ended Luizet’s evening; his predecessor, Amedée Bussière, pushed a neatly scripted rectangle of paper into Luizet’s hand. During the previous week’s excitement Bussière had forgotten to hand over a cheque for fifty thousand francs that he had been given for the Police social fund.114
With little water to douse the fires, over five hundred buildings were destroyed. The human cost was one hundred and twenty three dead in central Paris, including members of the Garde Republicaine at the Caserne Schomburg and two American soldiers, and four hundred and sixty-six injured. In the north and eastern banlieues there were eighty dead and four hundred and twenty-two injured.115
27 August 1944
AT 6AM, WITH ALL DOORS LOCKED, arch-deacon Monsignor Brot and Canon Lenoble performed the sacrament of reconciliation to cleanse Notre Dame of any evil that might have tainted her during that turbulent week. The last time this ritual had been performed was fifteen years before, when someone committed suicide within her confines. Fully robed, and with no congregation, the priests toured the nave and transcepts, inside and outside, saying prayers of cleansing and sprinkling eau grégorienne (St Gregory’s water), a mixture of water, salt, ashes and wine, on the grey medieval carved stone. Thereby, as Pierre Bourget wrote, “The Church, Catholic and Apostolic, of Rome symbolically effaced all traces of human misdeeds which have no place within consecrated walls.”116
AS DUST FROM THE NIGHT’S AIR RAID SETTLED, Paris awoke to her first Sunday of freedom. David Bruce could congratulate himself on saving the retired General Aldebert de Chambrun from arrest for being too loyal for too long to Pétain. Bruce also prevented JP Morgan’s Paris premises from being shelled by a 2e DB Sherman; all “between two courses at dinner”. On Sunday morning, Bruce’s eventful life did not let up. “The most unusual requests are made of one here,” he wrote. “As I was talking to someone on the street outside the Ritz, a young Frenchman came up to me and introduced quite a nice-looking young man in civilian clothes whom he said was a German soldier who wanted to surrender to the American authorities. The German had formerly enabled the Frenchman to escape when the latter was a prisoner in Germany, and now wanted a favour in return. The story was very complicated; technically, the soldier had once been an American citizen. I finally arranged something about his disposition which was almost as complicated as the story.”117
The four Grenadier Guards officers’ first visit was the British Embassy at 35 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which was protected by a custodian of enemy property throughout the Occupation, though an elderly servant playfully told the young officers that he had personally shooed Goering away. David Fraser was happy to find that possessions from his family’s former apartment had been brought inside the Embassy. When, the following month, Sir Alfred Duff Cooper arrived as first British Ambassador to liberated France, he found that 35 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré had become a furniture depository for over thirty British households.118
After liberating his country’s embassy, Lord Carrington was returning to the Ritz when he was hailed by an elderly lady.
“Young man, are you from the Times?” asked Lady Westmacott, the elegant widow of a British Indian Army general.
“No, as a matter of fact I’m in the Grenadiers,” replied Carrington.119
Lady Westmacott, a known Francophile and collector of Rodin sculptures, was another elderly grande dame whose comfortable survival in wartime Paris seems incongruous.
Checking on his family’s apartment on the Rue Cognacq-Jay,* David Fraser found the same concièrge, albeit more careworn than when he previously saw her. She politely asked after his mother while, in her office, a dark-haired, plump looking girl eyed Fraser nervously.
“Are you Jewish?” asked the girl.
“No,” he replied, hoping not to sound curt.
“I am,” said the girl.
At last she could say this to someone in uniform without being afraid. “There must have been a mighty pressure of relief, of escaping fears, behind that exchange,” Fraser wrote.120
For these British officers their Paris visit was necessarily fleeting. The 4th/7th Dragoon Guards had crossed the lower Seine. British Second Army was gobbling up northeastern France. Guards Armoured Division would soon have their own great city to liberate, Brussels. In any case the Ritz, along with other hotels, had run out of food.
Also leaving Paris was Madame Marie-Hélene Lefaucheux. Though bursting with pride as she watched de Gaulle march down the Champs Élysées on the 26th, she was dressed in black, just in case she was already a widow. She too had a faith to keep; to find out what had become of her husband, Pierre.121
WHILE JACQUES BRANET SPENT THE NIGHT of 26–27 August at his family’s Avenue Hoche apartment, the remnants of his squadron bivouacked in the Bois de Boulogne, watching the rich, who had kept their horses safe throughout the Occupation, take their early morning rides as though nothing had changed. As for Branet’s wounds, the 2e DB doctors advised a few days’ light duty.122
With GT Dio fighting east of Paris, Leclerc set up his advance CP in a café-tabac at the Porte de la Chapelle. His first choice had been a café owned by a Breton lady. But on learning that her parents had died during the bombardment of Fougères, he chose somewhere else.123 “We were finishing operations in order to disengage from Paris,” wrote Girard. “There were still numerous islets of resistance, notably at Le Bourget. It is unbelievable to be making war in such familiar places and in an atmosphere of Bastille Day! I was obliged to contain the crowd while the general read a message from a liaison officer, consulted a map and decided which orders to give. How does one explain to these brave people that we’re doing something serious?”124
The stakes remained quite high. The German 47th Infantry Division was arriving in strength from the Pas de Calais and making its presence felt aound Saint-Denis, Vincennes and Le Bourget airport.125 In some northeastern districts the Germans regained a few mairies, took hostages, and there were even summary executions.
Attacking towards Saint-Denis, Écouen and Montmorency, GT Dio quickly ran into trouble at Le Bourget where, once again, German 88s and 20mm machine-guns took a heavy toll of men and vehicles. “We watched the Nazis coming back at us across virtually flat terrain,” wrote Philippe de Gaulle. “They showed yet again that their infantry are the best in the world.” But the 12e Cuirassiers’ Shermans pushed their way onto Le Bourget supported by Chad infantry. No sooner was one objective taken than more Germans fired on them from the airfield’s many drainage ditches. Captain Gaudet’s tanks hosed the area liberally with machine-gun fire.126
“It was a serious business,” wrote Alain de Boissieu. “Commandant Corlu, Lieutenant de Waziers, a cousin of General Leclerc, and Lieutenant Pity, Gaudet’s deputy, were killed before General Leclerc’s eyes while other brave men, such as Captain Samarcelli and Lieutenant Kirsch were seriously wounded.”127 The German 47th Infantry Division left hundreds of dead at Le Bourget.
Writing to de Gaulle, Leclerc mentioned painful losses like Jean-Marie Corlu, who had made a long camel trek from Niger in late 1940 to join the Free French. Leclerc also said that, after three weeks in action, the 2e DB needed a rest.
DE GAULLE DISMISSED THE WILDCAT GUNFIRE in Notre Dame as “a vulgar piece of showing off”. Nor was he impressed by the untrained résistants wandering around Paris. “Many are walking about with weapons, excited by the fighting of these last days, always ready to fire at the roofs. The first shot starts a wild fusillade. We shall stop this too.”128
General Eisenhower was due to visit, his first time in Paris since serving with the War Graves Commission. He smiled serenely as Kay Summersby drove his armoured Cadillac through villages decorated with Allied flags. After hooking up with General Gerow in a side street, Ike’s convoy was greeted at the Porte d’Orléans by General Koenig and led to de Gaulle at the Préfecture.129
“I went to call on de Gaulle promptly, and I did this very deliberately as a kind of de facto recognition of him as
the provisional President of France,” Eisenhower told Don Cook after the war. “He was very grateful, he never forgot that. After all, I was commanding everything on the Continent, all the troops, all that de Gaulle could count on, everything supplied by America was under my orders. So he looked upon it as what it was, and that was a very definite recognition of his high political position and his place. That was of course what he wanted and that Roosevelt had never given him.”130
The Champs Élysées was filled with cheering Parisians shouting, “Eisenhower! Eisenhower!” Military police cleared a passage through the crowds for Ike’s Cadillac to reach the Étoile. Getting out of his car, Eisenhower had both cheeks wetly kissed by a large Frenchman. “The crowd squealed with delight,” said Bradley, “as Ike reddened and fought free.” Bradley tried to escape by running to a Jeep but a heavily rouged Parisienne caught him.131
Now the serious business of Ike’s visit began; with liberation, de Gaulle faced new worries. Paris needed food and fuel. Knowing his own supplies would barely last a few days, Eisenhower authorised a relief operation; exactly the kind of demand he foresaw would delay his armies’ principal task of destroying the Wehrmacht. The US official history states, “More than a month and a half after the liberation of Paris, French relief was still a consequential Allied military responsibility.”132
ANOTHER PROBLEM FACING DE GAULLE was the useful employment of Resistance personnel. While Henri Rol-Tanguy had nobler instincts than de Gaulle credited, his regular officer’s distaste for partisans remained. Although the FFI were essential for rebuilding French self-respect, de Gaulle knew that irregular units attracted lawless elements; a view Leclerc shared. Dividing the FFI into three categories, Leclerc called the top ten percent “very good, brave and real fighters”, twenty to twenty-five percent were “acceptable but needed leading”, while the remainder, over sixty percent, he dismissed as “racaille et fumisterie”—“rabble and con-artists”. “This isn’t really my affair, being only a soldier, but having witnessed some unforgettable scenes, I thought it needed pointing out.”133
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