Shortly before the liberation of Paris, de Gaulle was angered when Churchill visited the newly liberated island of Corsica without first consulting the GPRF in Algiers. De Gaulle, supported by several British MPs, thought it perverse that Churchill’s government should recognise Italy’s first post-Mussolini government before that of France.13 When, in late October, de Gaulle learnt that Churchill was intending to visit Paris, de Gaulle sent the following message to the Quai d’Orsay and all relevant ministries: “If Mr Churchill happens to pass through Paris, no arrangements, no demonstrations, no presence of any kind must be organised on the French side without my agreement. Inform everybody that I attach the greatest possible importance to this.”14
It took the combined efforts of Georges Bidault and Duff Cooper to get the relationship between the French and les Anglo-Saxons onto a more gracious footing. Armistice Day, 11 November, was suggested as a good opportunity for an official visit by Churchill. At first de Gaulle objected that this celebration was not exclusively French, but Georges Bidault pulled the Constable around. On the British side, despite Lord Beaverbrook’s petty frog-bashing behind the scenes, Churchill was also persuaded to put on a show with his former protégé in Paris.15 De Gaulle issued the invitation on 30 October. Roosevelt was also invited but declined, possibly because he was involved in his fourth election for the US presidency. Churchill, accompanied by his family as well as Anthony Eden and General Ismay, arrived in Paris on 10 November. “We received them as best we could,” wrote de Gaulle. “Paris, to acclaim them, gave all its voice. With Bidault and several ministers, I went to Orly to welcome them and conducted the British Prime Minister to the Quai d’Orsay where we were accommodating them.”16
Armistice Day 1944 was chilly. After collecting Churchill, who wore an RAF uniform and greatcoat, from the Quai d’Orsay, de Gaulle took him across the Seine to the Place de la Concorde, escorted by the Garde Republicaine on horseback. Parisians turned out in force to see Great Britain’s war leader who, in 1940, picked out de Gaulle as l’homme du destin. “The Champs Élysées was crowded with Parisians and lined with troops. Every window was filled with spectators and decorated with flags,” wrote Churchill.17 Duff Cooper had never seen anything like it either. “Never have I heard such a sustained roar of cheering as heralded their approach,” wrote General Ismay.18 Standing in an open car, Churchill made his famous two-fingered V sign as Parisians yelled, “Vive de Gaulle! Vive Churchill! ” Eventually they reached the Étoile where both men laid wreaths of poppies on the tomb of the Soldat Inconnu. “After this ceremony was over,” wrote Churchill, “the General and I walked together, followed by a concourse of the leading figures of French public life, for half a mile down the highway I knew so well.”19
When they reached Georges Clémenceau’s statue, Churchill laid another wreath. Then, prearranged by de Gaulle, the band played Le Père la Victoire, the patriotic song made famous by Jean-Paul Habans, aka Paulus, during the belle époque. “For you!” said de Gaulle in English. “That was fitting,” wrote de Gaulle. “Since, remembering how at Chequers, at the end of a very bad day, he sang to me* that old song of Paulus without forgetting a single word.”20
Their next stop was Les Invalides to visit the tomb of Marshal Foch. While there, Churchill looked over the marble balustrade at Napoleon’s red quartzite sarcophagus as Hitler had done fifty-three months before. “Dans le monde,” growled Churchill, “il n’y a rien de plus grand.”—“There was no-one greater in the world.”21 Had Churchill’s ancestor been Wellington rather than Marlborough, he might not have said that. But on this occasion he was being generous, and de Gaulle was the perfect host. Arriving at the Ministry of War for lunch, Churchill was confronted by a bust of Marlborough, placed there on Gaston Palewski’s orders. “It’s too much,” murmured Churchill.22
Turning to business, de Gaulle asked Churchill for weapons. Churchill’s response was sensible but pragmatic. If the war was only going to last a few more months then it made sense to concentrate new equipment on proven units. If, on the other hand, matters dragged on, then the Allies would call for more French forces who would be equipped. “Without the French Army, there can be no European settlement,” said Churchill. Bidault replied that it was crucially important for the French to participate as fully as possible, “They have to revenge themselves for the past.”23
TO THIS END GENERAL LECLERC was doing his utmost. He also had a sympathetic US Corps commander in General Wade Haislip who knew about the oath Leclerc and his men had sworn at Kufra, that they would never lay down their arms until the Tricolore flew again over Strasbourg Cathedral. Haislip arranged things so that it was the 2e DB who swept into the city after a brilliant campaign of feint and manoeuvre at Saverne. Among the division’s tragic losses was their senior chaplain, Père Houchet.24
For de Gaulle, the impoverishment of French life after the Occupation, the disappointing return of pre-war politicians to old quarrels, and France’s continuing poor relation status rankled. It made him impish, capable of behaving naughtily among the other powers. Visiting the Soviet Union, de Gaulle was taken to see Stalingrad. According to legend de Gaulle said to Molotov, “What a great people, the Germans I mean,” apparently admiring the Wehrmacht’s military achievement in making such enormous inroads into European Russia. This Patton-like gaffe went down very badly with the Soviets and was vehemently denied on the French government’s behalf by the diplomat Jean Laloy. Yet Laloy admitted that the previous day de Gaulle had expressed admiration for Germany’s war effort.25
For Christmas, de Gaulle took refuge among the 2e DB. The renascent French Army was in turmoil. De Lattre’s First Army was incapable of keeping order in those areas of France it had liberated, allowing resistance factions to impose rule of the gun behind his front line. Leclerc contemptuously named these areas “zones contaminées”, which provided him with a useful pretext for refusing to serve under de Lattre. When eventually prevailed upon to co-operate with First Army to reduce the Colmar pocket, Leclerc criticised de Lattre all the way; their rows becoming the talk of Parisian society. US 6th Army Group commander, General Jacob Devers, had no option but to allow Leclerc’s return to American command.
For indulging Leclerc’s conduct towards de Lattre, the French chief of staff, General Alphonse Juin, felt Leclerc owed him a favour. While two-thirds of the 2e DB was allowed a period of rest, GT Langlade was sent to reinforce the taking of the Atlantic town of Royan, one of the so-called “Atlantic pockets” still held by the Germans. Knowing these redoubts would fall in good time, Leclerc was furious, calling the mission a “coûteuse inutilité”—a “costly waste of time,” which it was. It cost the division several good men and the brilliant planner André Gribius was seriously wounded. Furthermore, with Hitler’s Reich now collapsing, the Royan operation risked preventing the 2e DB from being on German soil for the final Allied victory.
Thanks to both Leclerc’s lobbying and the resourcefulness of his logistics team, the 2e DB soon re-joined Devers’ 6th Army Group for the push into southern Germany. When the US 12th Armored Division entered Munich to take up garrison and occupation duties, the only armoured force available to push on to Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden was the 2e DB. There is much controversy over which Allied unit reached Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest first, or which part, but the 2e DB was certainly prominent.* When Jacques Massu visited Dachau’s French political prisoners, Abbé Hénocque, a former chaplain at Saint-Cyr military academy, fell into his arms, and Gaullist résistant Edmond Michelet gave Massu a guided tour.26
Around Berchtesgaden the 2e DB found stashes of looted French artefacts including cases of vintage wines, and packed them up for return to France, causing a serious altercation with a staff officer from US XXI Corps under whose authority Leclerc’s division now came. This time Christian Girard prevented a re-run of the Gerow affair and the matter ended amicably.27
On the whole Leclerc got through the war with a string of successes and little controversy, but he
would not escape forever. When the Americans delivered a dozen veterans of the French SS Charlemagne Division, which had been virtually destroyed fighting the Russians in Pomerania and Berlin, controversy arrived with knobs on. The 2e DB’s staff eyed Hitler’s Frenchmen with interest.
“Aren’t you ashamed to serve in this [German] uniform?” Leclerc asked an officer.
“You look very fine in an American one,” he replied.
Recoiling, Leclerc muttered, “Débarrassez moi de ces gens-la.”—“Get rid of those people.”28 It is uncertain whether Leclerc intended these words to be taken as a death sentence, but they were shot by a firing squad from the Chad Regiment the following day. Perhaps seeing Dachau influenced Leclerc’s snap decision; according to French military law it was an open and shut case. But the extent of collaboration, especially when Nazi conquest was at its height, forced de Gaulle’s government to invent new punishments like a “period of national indignity” for those who chose le mauvais camp. With hindsight this episode, which blights Leclerc’s reputation to this day, could have been avoided if he had simply fed these young men into the épuration’s justice system.
Towards the end of May 1945, with the war in Europe over, the 2e DB retured to France. On 18 June, the fifth anniversary of de Gaulle’s Appel from London, there was a big parade in Paris led by Leclerc in his command tank, Tailly. De Gaulle had new tasks for Leclerc, in the Far East. On 22 June he said good-bye to the 2e DB at a private parade at Fontainebleau.
“Why, nearly two years ago, did we not hesitate to take into this division men of the most varied origins and beliefs?” Leclerc asked his men. “Because we knew that France could only revive itself through a great union of all Frenchmen. Why did we demand and obtain the right to land in Normandy with the other Allied troops? Because we knew that it was indispensable that the Ile de France, the heart of our country, should be liberated in part by French troops. Why did we march on Paris? Because the Division understood the moral importance for our country.”29
WITH GERMANY’S DEFEAT, IMPORTANT COLLABOS now fell into the hands of de Gaulle’s government. Senior Miliciens Joseph Darnand, Max Knipping and Jean Bassompierre would never receive the Constable’s mercy; after trials whose verdicts were forgone conclusions, they were shot.
But could the Constable consign his first colonel to such a fate? Marshal Pétain returned voluntarily to French soil via Switzerland in April 1945. He was met at the border by General Koenig who told the guards neither to salute nor acknowledge the marshal. When Pétain offered Koenig his hand, Koenig refused it. In Gaullist eyes Vichy had much to answer for: the suspension of French freedoms, the political trials at Riom, which condemned pre-war politicians like Leon Blum and Georges Mandel to imprisonment in Germany, a two-year undeclared war with the British and, concurrently, a civil war with the Free French, not to mention the Milice and co-operation with the Nazis’ anti-Jewish programme. The conspiracy theorist Albert Bayet put it about that Pétain had been against his fellow Frenchmen since 1918 and had longed to see France stumble so that the extreme Right could take over the country.30
Obviously Bayet’s ideas were nonsense. But, although a very old man, Pétain was neither senile nor devoid of moral compass and clearly knew what was happening under Vichy. Predictably, he claimed to have been as much a prisoner of the Germans as anyone else. “Each day, with a dagger at my throat, I struggled against the enemy’s demands,” he said.31 A central tenet of his defence was that he was merely a figurehead while Laval prostrated France before her Teutonic conquerors. Jacques Isorni, an immensely talented barrister, undoubtedly did his best for Pétain and became fond of him during the trial.* Some of the prosecution’s case was undoubtedly unreasonable; for example, accusing Pétain of agreeing to a treasonous armistice in 1940 when the Wehrmacht had totally defeated France’s army. But the new government required a guilty verdict and got it.
When it came to sentencing, the court faced a difficult situation. The obvious punishment for treason in wartime is death; otherwise the French penal code allowed a punishment of prison with hard labour. Since Pétain was clearly too old for hard labour he was sentenced to death. But Pétain was also the hero of Verdun. Could de Gaulle see his former colonel shot? He commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on the Ile d’Yeu off the Atlantic coast.
At his trial Laval seemed not to fully recognise that his life was at stake, expecting his esprit and fluency to protect him. When he was condemned to death he could not believe it. Laval’s lawyers pleaded unsuccessfully with de Gaulle to commute Laval’s sentence to life imprisonment. “If Laval is executed, after everything that’s happened, would it really be an execution?” asked Pastor Marc Boegner. But de Gaulle listened impassively. In that case the law of his épuration had to take its course.32
Shortly before his execution Laval took poison, but he was found before it took effect. After his stomach was pumped, Laval groggily admitted getting the poison from the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline in Germany the previous winter. Perhaps Céline was defrauded; it merely made Laval ill.33
In a fabulous display of scruple, Prefect Luizet referred to de Gaulle, wondering if Laval should be executed before he had recovered. The Constable listened with a pained expression, his eyes half closed, then said, “Pierre Laval no longer belongs to us. Let the officer commanding the firing party perform his duty.”34
Outside Fresnes prison the firing squad was kept waiting, being given second servings of rum to steady their nerves. When Laval was finally presented to them, their volley was un-uniform and messy, though not quite botched. Other collabos inside the jail shouted and banged on their cell doors, “Bandits! Salauds! Assassins! ”35
FROM THE AUTUMN OF 1944, PARISIANS clamoured for memorials to those who were killed during the Liberation. The Bailly family requested a memorial for their son who died on the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and the Place de la Concorde on the 25 August. Then the Comité de Libération de L’Hay-les Roses requested that Sergeant Marcel Bizien, who was killed on the Place de la Concorde as he dismounted his Sherman that same afternoon, should also have a commemorative plaque. Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, now vice-president of the post-liberation Municipal Council, became involved and the idea mushroomed. The inscriptions are not uniform; some plaques carry the Cross of Lorraine, others crossed Tricolores or emblems important to the person commemorated.36 Bizien’s plaque reads, “ICI TOMBA HÉROIQUEMENT LE 25 AOUT 1944 MARCEL BIZIEN CHEF DE CHAR 2EME DIVISION BLINDÉE DU GÉNÉRAL LECLERC APRES AVOIR ATTAQUÉ ET DÉTRUIT UN CHAR TIGRE ALLEMAND.” (“Here fell heroically on 25 August 1944, Marcel Bizien tank commander of the 2e DB after having attacked and destroyed a German Tiger tank.”) The fact that the German tank was in fact a Panther is unimportant; the plaque, set into a sandstone wall above an alcove with a stone plant stand, provides a dignified tribute to a fine young man cut off in his prime.* So too does the plaque near the Place de la République where twenty-two-year-old Michel Tagrine fell when, after the Germans had raised a white flag, he went to help a wounded comrade and was shot by a Waffen SS soldier.37
All these plaques which discretely adorn Paris are immensely moving, but particularly so are those to several people, like that commemorating Maurice Violeau and ten of his comrades in the Garde Républicaine who died of smoke asphyxiation when the Caserne Schomberg was hit by incendiary bombs during the air-raid on the evening of 26 August.38
Usually these plaques are uncontroversial and the facts described on them are un-contestable. But at 65 Rue Chardon-Lagache a plaque was put up to commemorate the forty-two victims of the Captain Jack sting who were shot by the waterfall in the Bois de Boulogne. It read, “ICI, DANS CE GARAGE, ONT ÉTÉ TROUVÉ LE 17 AOUT 1944, LES CORPS DE QUARANTE-DEUX PATRIOTES, JEUNES CATHOLIQUES COMBATTANTS, ORGANISATIONS CIVILE ET MILITAIRE, FTP, FFI, FUSILLÉS PAR ORDRE DU GÉNÉRAL ALLEMAND VON CHOLTITZ.” (“Here, in this garage, were found on 17 August 1944, the bodies of forty-two patriots, Jeunes Catholiques Combattantes, Organisation Civile et
Militaire, FTP, FFI, shot by order of the German General von Choltitz.”) Two details on this plaque were incorrect. First, the bodies were only taken to the garage on Rue Chardon-Lagache after being found beside the waterfall in the bois. Second, they were not shot on the orders of General von Choltitz, who was immensely frustrated at being unable to control SS and Gestapo personnel during the Occupation’s last days. These inaccuracies would have probably remained uncorrected if von Choltitz had not heard about it and visited Paris privately during 1963. “I never ordered any Parisian to be shot,” von Choltitz told French libel barrister, Maitre Louis Guitard. After three years of legalities involving witness reports, including Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Alexandre Parodi, by then senior French politicians, the Prefect of the Department of the Seine, Haas-Picard, ordered the wording altered to “shot by order of the Gestapo”.39
AFTER HIS SOJOURN AT TRENT PARK, General von Choltitz was transferred to a POW camp in America. In 1947, while a French military attaché at the UN, Pierre Billotte obtained from General Eisenhower a release date for von Choltitz. “His colleagues, the other German generals, could not help but accentuate their disapproval of him, which they had already shown, for an astonishing perversion of their ideals in disobeying the monstrous orders of the Führer,” wrote Billotte.40
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