D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

rapid move to the east.

Just after midnight, V Corps issued its orders. The 2eme DB with B Troop of the 102nd Cavalry Squadron was to cross the line of departure at midday, to ‘gain control of Paris in coordination with the French Forces of the Interior, and be prepared to move east as ordered by the Corps Commander’. The American 4th Infantry Division, with the rest of 102nd Cavalry, was to take a more southerly route. But Leclerc had already issued his own orders before midnight. And as Gerow’s staff noted, the 2eme DB did not wait: ‘The march on Paris began that same night.’

On 23 August,the 2eme DB’s three groupementstactiques, the equivalent of the American combat command, headed south-east in heavy rain with their seemingly endless columns of Staghound armoured cars, Stuart light tanks, half-tracks, Shermans, tank destroyers, Jeeps and trucks. Leclerc, preceding the main force, reached the Chateau de Rambouillet, the official country residence of French presidents. He sent a message back to de Gaulle, who replied that he would join him there. Leclerc then began to interview members of the local Resistance and gendarmerie, hoping to discover the least-defended route into the capital. It appeared from their information and from Commandant de Guillebon, commanding the reconnaissance patrol, that he should avoid Versailles and swing further round to the south of Paris. The fact that this might get in the way of the US 4th Infantry Division did not concern him.

In the town of Rambouillet, Leclerc’s officers were surprised to find at the Hotel du Grand Veneur a cast of characters worthy of an improbable play. Most were journalists, waiting impatiently for the liberation of Paris. Ernest Hemingway, officially a war correspondent for Collier’s magazine, was far more interested in acting as an irregular soldier with the local Resistance. He openly carried a heavy automatic pistol, even though it was strictly illegal for a non-combatant. According to John Mowinckel, an American intelligence officer there, Hemingway wanted to interrogate a pathetic German prisoner hauled in by his new Resistance friends. ‘I’ll make him talk,’ he boasted. ‘Take his boots off. We’ll grill his toes with a candle.’ Mowinckel told Hemingway to go to hell and released the boy, who clearly knew nothing.

Others at Le Grand Veneur included David Bruce, then of the OSS and later American ambassador to Paris. There was also Major Airey Neave of MI9, the secret British organization to assist the escape of prisoners of war. Neave was in pursuit of a British sergeant who had betrayed a French Resistance network to the Germans. The combat historian Sam Marshall also turned up. He had to protect Hemingway afterwards with false testimony stating that he had never seen him carry a gun. Irwin Shaw, later author of The Young Lions, also appeared with a camera crew from the Signal Corps. This cannot have eased the atmosphere, since Hemingway was in the process of appropriating his lover, Mary Welsh, who later became the fourth Mrs Hemingway.

Shaw was followed by a group of American war correspondents, all no doubt longing to claim that they were the first to enter Paris. ‘They looked like “50-mission fliers” with crushed hats to match,’ wrote Marshall’s companion, Lieutenant John Westover. ‘Among them were Ernie Pyle, and Bob Capa. Pyle was wearing a beret which made him look like Field Marshal Montgomery.’ Some of them were irritated, although not entirely surprised, to find Hemingway acting as if he were the local military commander. When Bruce Grant of the Chicago Daily News made a sarcastic remark about ‘General Hemingway and his Maquis’, Hemingway walked over and punched him.

While so many could think only of Paris’s liberation, senior American commanders were far more preoccupied with the advance on Germany. Patton flew that day to Laval to see Bradley before he left for a meeting with Montgomery and Eisenhower. Both Patton and Bradley were still worried that Eisenhower might give in to Montgomery’s demand that both the 21st and the 12th Army Groups should turn north. According to Patton, ‘Bradley was madder than I have ever seen him and wondered aloud “what the Supreme Commander amounted to”.’ Patton told him that the two of them and Hodges should offer to resign unless Eisenhower agreed to head east, instead of north into the Pas-de-Calais and Belgium, as Montgomery demanded. But Patton’s fears were groundless. Eisenhower by this stage felt that Montgomery was disloyal and he refused to listen to his arguments.

When de Gaulle reached the Chateau de Rambouillet that evening, he was deeply concerned about the state of affairs in Paris. He feared that the Communist-led rising could lead to a disaster comparable to the Paris Commune of 1871. After de Gaulle had supped off cold C-Rations in the ornate surroundings of Rambouillet’s state dining room, Leclerc briefed him on his plan of attack. De Gaulle approved. ‘You are lucky,’ he said to him after a long pause, thinking of the glory that awaited the liberator of Paris. Camped out beside their vehicles in the sodden park and forest, the soldiers of the 2eme DB cooked their rations, cleaned their weapons and shaved carefully in preparation for the welcome which awaited them.

29. The Liberation of Paris

When Colonel Rol-Tanguy gave the order ‘Tous aux barricades!’ on 22 August, the plan was copied from the anarchists in Barcelona in July 1936. There, the rising of the right-wing Spanish generals in the city had been blocked by barricades erected by the working class. Rol wanted to bring all Wehrmacht traffic to a halt and besiege the Germans in their main strongpoints, which included Choltitz’s headquarters in the Hotel Meurice, the Palais de Luxembourg, the Ecole Militaire and Invalides, the Assemblee Nationale in the Palais Bourbon, and the Prinz Eugen barracks by the Place de la Republique.

The call to arms was relayed by posters, handbills and a new wireless station, Radiodiffusion de la Nation Francaise, which acted as the voice of the Resistance. Every time it played the forbidden ‘Marseillaise’, people opened their windows and turned up the volume so that those in the street outside could hear it. Very few barricades were erected in the fashionable 7th, 8th and 16th arrondissements of western Paris. The vast majority were in the north and eastern parts, which had voted overwhelmingly for the Popular Front in 1936.

The tension in Paris was palpable as rumours became even more exaggerated. Some said that the Americans were at the gates, others that two panzer divisions were approaching from the north and the city might be destroyed. Colonel Rol continued to issue calls to arms: ‘Every barricade should be a recruiting centre recalling the “Patrie en danger” of the Revolution.’ He instructed the FFI to move around the city through the Metro tunnels to avoid the tanks guarding key intersections. Appalled to hear that ‘acts of looting seem to have taken on an unacceptable scale’, he also ordered that anyone caught would be shot immediately and a notice stating ‘Pillager’ placed on the corpse.

Colette’s husband, Maurice Goudeket, described those ‘strange, indecisive days’: ‘The Germans held Paris only by little islands, and with a few tanks which made their way clumsily through the streets. Paris babbled the first words of a forgotten liberty, newspapers no larger than a leaflet began to appear, flags were made out of scraps of cloth. While waiting for an imminent settling of accounts, the Parisian rediscovered in his deepest memory the solidarity of the barricades, a heroic banter, a smell of gunpowder and sweat.’

Despite the rumours, both Communist and Gaullist leaders were now certain that the report of 150 Tiger tanks being sent to Paris was false. So the danger that the rising in Paris would be crushed like the Polish Home Army in Warsaw greatly diminished. The Gaullists were also prepared to join the fight, now that they had secured the ministries. One of the first and most satisfying tasks was to remove the official portraits and busts of Marshal Petain. Alexandre Parodi, de Gaulle’s representative, even held a symbolic council of ministers at the Hotel Matignon, the official residence of the prime minister. For the Gaullist leaders in Paris, the arrival of the 2eme DB was vital to give substance to their skeleton administration.

The Communists, misled by their own propaganda, believed that power lay in street barricades and in the committees of the Resistance. Carried away by revolutionary exultation, they could not imagine that the last thing that Stalin wanted was a Communist uprising in France which would antagonize his American suppliers of Lend- Lease.

At dawn on 24 August, the 2eme DB moved out from the forest of Rambouillet. Leclerc sent a detachment of