When Paris Went Dark (37 page)

In his memoir, Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul in Paris who played a capital role in formulating the surrender of the city by the Germans in late August of 1944, wrote about the news of the disembarkation in Normandy: “Paris was still relatively far from the new front, and life went on as before, but there were many signs of an increasing nervousness. Troop transports toward the west [the Normandy front] grew day by day, while in the circles of German leaders [of the Occupation authorities], great efforts were made to remain optimistic.”
¹
A former Parisian remembered that, as a young girl, she used to watch these trucks from her windows and hear their sonorous rumbling as they passed her on the way to school. Other witnesses wrote of the changed atmosphere following the unbelievable news of June 6: fast-moving transports and tanks were passing through and around Paris as the Wehrmacht, under the manic control of a deeply paranoid Adolf Hitler, tried with some early success to push the Allied forces back into the English Channel. Beginning in late June and early July, however, signs of the enormous cost to the Reich of the D-day
invasion became more visible. (Hundreds of thousands of German troops would die in the three months between the invasion and the collapse of the Wehrmacht in France in late 1944.) Ambulances, trucks, tanks, even staff cars filled with wounded, frightened soldiers, were increasingly seen heading eastward toward the Rhine; camouflaged panzer units were retreating. One French wag covered his rickshaw-like
vélo-taxi
with dead branches as he rode around Paris, mocking the German attempts at evading Allied bombers.

For purely military reasons, the Germans were desperate to keep Paris in their hands. “From a strategic perspective, the transportation network of Paris and its suburbs was the single most important military asset of the capital.”
²
The symbolic reasons that had earlier dominated so much of their policy were much less important now. All French railroads and major highways passed through Paris; geographically, the city also provided a generous redoubt to allow the Wehrmacht to “regroup,” because Hitler had forbidden his armies to retreat. They also hoped that keeping Paris would give their armies retreating from Normandy time to reach Germany before being surrounded.
Festung Paris
(Fortress Paris) was the keystone in what was left of the German Occupation of France, for on August 15, the Allies had invaded the nation from the Mediterranean and were rushing northward to cut off the Germans trying either to reinforce the Atlantic Wall in Normandy or move eastward to the Rhine. Yet to defend and hold Paris would have taken, as the French themselves had estimated in 1940, at least three corps (anywhere between sixty thousand and 135,000 first-line troops). And where was the
General von Gross Paris
to get those numbers and the materiel necessary to support them? On top of this, they still had to feed the Parisian population, if for no other reason than to prevent uprisings.

The Germans did have one advantage, though it was unknown to them at that moment. Allied generals Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley did not regard “Paris itself [either] as a major Allied objective [or] a German strongpoint.”
³
In fact, Ike would not decide to march into Paris until August 22, three days after the Parisians themselves had begun their insurrection. Given the significance that the city had had
for Germany’s propagandistic aims just four years earlier, and given the amount of attention the major branches of the Reich’s government had lavished on the French capital, it might come as a surprise that the Allies did not consider its liberation strategically crucial. This conundrum—if we set aside the military reasons for such a hesitancy—brings us back to Albert Camus’s description of how deeply the inhabitants of an occupied city feel about being abandoned, or forgotten, or overlooked. The hole such anxiety leaves in a population’s psyche takes much time to fill, especially after the hardships endured seem to call for some sort of closure.

Was Paris worth less to the Allies than it was to the Germans? For one military commander, at least, it remained symbolic: soon after the Allies broke through the Wehrmacht’s defensive front in Normandy, Adolf Hitler began plotting to use the city as a means of slowing the enemy’s advances. At first his attention turned to the region’s railway depots, major highways, airports, and the Seine bridges, which he was planning to disable well before the Allies reached Paris. But soon his instructions took on a more hysterical tone: to some of his subordinates, he appeared to want to raze the City of Light, to make it permanently dark. His obsession with Paris was fueled by the fact that he did not trust his commanders in the west (i.e., the Normandy front). Many of the German senior staff in Paris and nearby had been implicated in the assassination plot of July 20, and he was suspicious that his orders were only being dilatorily carried out.
^*
In part, he was right. A German historian remarks that

Paris had become a military conundrum for both sides.

We have seen how tired of living close together both the Occupier and Parisians had become by the summer of 1944. Hope for liberation became almost palpable in the streets of the capital. Yet on the other hand, there was the concern that Paris, like Stalingrad and Warsaw, would become a battleground and that perhaps it would be best for the Allies to skirt the city, isolating a weakened German garrison as they pushed on toward the Rhine and an end to the war.

From the first discussions of an invasion of France, de Gaulle had had the liberation of his nation’s capital at the forefront of his strategy. Did the persistent resistance from both the Americans (Roosevelt never trusted the French general’s political ambitions) and the British (Churchill referred to de Gaulle as his “Cross of Lorraine to bear”) reveal a lack of understanding of what Paris meant to the French psyche? This would have been a strange notion, given the fascination that both nations had for France and her capital. But de Gaulle, along with his supporters as well as those French who were still ambivalent about him, seemed to have best grasped that without Paris, no French government would have the credibility needed to salve the nation’s wounds.
^*
De Gaulle never caved on his demand that Paris be liberated as soon as possible and, at least in part, that it be liberated by French troops.

His problem was that he did not command the French troops necessary to do the job, nor were there enough of them. He
had
to rely on the Allies, on General Eisenhower and General Bradley, for materiel,
support, and men. And, as we have noted, the Allies, taking signals from their forceful leaders, Roosevelt and Churchill, were not overly impressed with the leader of the Free French. They had not even told de Gaulle the date of the Normandy invasion until a few hours before dawn on June 6; they tried to stop him from flying to France on June 14, when he received a rapturous welcome from the citizens of Bayeux, the first major French town liberated. And they made every effort to hamper communications between him and General Philippe Leclerc, the commander of the Second Armored Division, the best equipped Free French unit in the Allied army. At the same time, de Gaulle was worried about the strength of the Communist Party’s resistance movement and about the independence of the FFI, the Forces françaises de l’intérieur, who were acting only partially in concert with him and the Free French stationed in Algiers. He thought it quite possible that the internal resistance movements might assert a moral right to an equal status with the Gaullist initiative or, worse, that the well-organized and well-armed French Communist Party could effect a coup d’état, as the left had in 1871, when Paris refused to accept the French surrender to the Prussians.

Unlike his most impulsive commanders, the British Bernard Montgomery and the American George Patton, Eisenhower believed that a massive push toward the Rhine and then Berlin would be much more effective than the strictly targeted strikes both men preferred. Ike knew that coming behind the establishment of beachheads in Normandy would be enormous loads of materiel and hundreds of thousands of troops. He wanted to beat the Wehrmacht into the ground; a feint to take over a huge city, with all the logistical demands that would ensue, was not practical. If there were a massive uprising, Ike feared he might have to deploy thousands of men to protect a severely underarmed civilian populace. Add to this the fact that President Roosevelt did not want de Gaulle installed in Paris before an interim American occupation authority could be set up and Ike’s belief that liberating Paris in August had to be avoided took on more weight.

As it turned out, in terms of strategy, Ike was right, but de Gaulle outmaneuvered him, as de Gaulle himself had been outmaneuvered by
important elements of the consolidated Resistance army he had established earlier. The French leader’s postwar plan for governing the country relied on the premise that the Parisians, with assistance from his Free France government, must liberate their capital. But as we have learned, de Gaulle, too, was concerned that political and ideological parties other than his provisional government might attempt to establish a new French state, or at least demand a large voice in France’s future. A civilian-led insurrection, acting in isolation of Allied plans, would threaten his leadership. To de Gaulle’s chagrin, Colonel Rol (whose real name was Henri Tanguy), leader of the Resistance in Paris and an important Communist partisan, had threatened to order such an uprising (which he would do later in the month) to force the Germans to leave the city. On the other hand, the Germans were desperate to keep the city’s massive transport systems open for reinforcements and strategic retreats, though they did not have the troops to do this effectively while fighting on two fronts—an urban insurrection and the Allies encroaching from the West.
^*
So leaders on both sides, within and without Paris, were on tenterhooks, watching carefully to see how the drama would play out and what the other side was going to do.

As for their control of Paris, the Germans had not been reassured by the celebrations of July 14, Bastille Day. An archivist and member of the Communist underground, Edith Thomas, describes in a pamphlet she wrote right after the war how surprised she was when she walked outside that July morning. She noticed first that the colors blue, red, and white seemed to be everywhere. Every store window had decorations in those hues; many passersby were wearing the colors either in their lapels or in their hair, or they were wearing blue, white, and red clothing. “La Marseillaise,” it seemed, was being sung on every street corner. Accordionists who played it were surrounded to the point where they feared
being overwhelmed by their compatriots. Pedestrians coalesced into crowds that walked boldly up and down the broad boulevards, still empty of all vehicles except for those carrying German soldiers to and from the Normandy front. Their wait for liberation seemed to be over, yet there was no news about the Allied advance (at this point, the Germans were still mounting a vigorous attempt to keep the Allies locked in pockets only a few miles from their disembarkation points; it would be two more weeks before their defenses broke and the Americans would begin their rapid march through north-central France). That memorable July 14, more than a thousand Parisians loudly gathered in the Place Maubert, a well-known site for massive popular political demonstrations before the war, just down the Boulevard Saint-Germain from the Sorbonne, singing and waving improvised French flags. “The [Parisian] police arrive. Someone cries: ‘They are ten; we are ten thousand!’ Faced with such resolve, the officers pulled back.… At the Porte de Vanves, a bonfire was built, and Hitler was burned in effigy.”
⁵
Thomas surmised that there was not a strong reaction from either the Vichy police or the Occupation authorities because they were cautious about touching off an insurrection in an increasingly moody city. In fact, the insurrection that would break out a month later, on August 19, was still in preparation, and those who would lead it were far from capable of taking on even the less formidable German military still in the city. There may have been thousands of FFI and independent guerrillas in Paris in late July and early August, but they had few arms and other materiel for sustained street fighting. The insurgents had stolen, and would continue to steal, arms from isolated German units, but their harvest was composed mostly of pistols; they had some caches hidden underground all over the city, but their armaments were certainly insufficient to stand against the light and heavy machine guns, artillery, and armored vehicles of their Occupiers, regardless of the latter’s diminishing morale. The Allies had refused to parachute armaments into such a labyrinth, fearful, of course, that they would fall into wrong or—perhaps worse—untrained hands.

On the surface Paris remained surprisingly calm in late July and early August of 1944. But still, Parisians could sense a building tension.