D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

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It appears that Juin was particularly disliked by senior officers at SHAEF. Juin, like Leclerc, appears to have been very critical of the Americans’ indiscriminate use of artillery. According to Air Chief Marshal Sir James Robb, Eisenhower’s chief of air staff, ‘Bedell, Ike and all hands curse the French and say they can’t depend on them. Bedell says that he has taken all he cares to from Juin, who thinks that the Americans don’t know how to run a war. He says that if an American officer said to him what Juin had, he would have hit him in the face.’ Forrest Pogue, who interviewed Juin later, thought him‘ so like an American Chamber of Commerce secretary’ that he could not understand why US Army generals distrusted him so much.

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Choltitz also railed in horror at Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons on 28 September. ‘Have you read Churchill’s speech?’ he exclaimed to General von Schlieben the next day. ‘Appalling, beyond all words! A Jewish brigade to go to Germany!’

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The French Communists seemed to overlook the fact that it was General Franco’s foreign legionnaires who, in October 1936, had first invented what later became known as the Molotov cocktail, when they were attacked by Soviet T-26 tanks south of Madrid.

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That day some forty Germans were killed and seventy wounded, while 125 Parisians died and nearly 500 were wounded.

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Even before Eisenhower came to his decision, the supply side of SHAEF began to prepare for the relief of Paris. On 21 August, when the first news of the uprising in Paris arrived, a cable from Com Z (Communications Zone) Forward alerted General Rogers back in England to the likely need of feeding Paris. Rogers flew to France to start planning. The first convoy was on its way to Paris on 25 August, the day of its liberation.

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For reasons which are still unclear, Montgomery ignored Eisenhower’s invitation to send a token British force and later refused to join Eisenhower and Bradley on their visit to Paris.

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Dronne himself was mounted in his Jeep named ‘Mort aux Cons!’ — ‘Death to Idiots!’ When he first noticed this, Leclerc asked Dronne, ‘Why do you want to kill everyone?’

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The liberation of Paris cost the Germans 3,200 dead and 14,800 prisoners. The FFI probably accounted for at least 1,000 of the German casualties. The 2eme DB lost seventy-one men killed, 225 wounded and twenty-one missing in the advance on Paris and its capture. Altogether, 2,873 Parisians were killed in the month of August.

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Patton in fact died as a result of a traffic accident in Germany in December 1945.