The Cost of Courage (21 page)

But Eisenhower’s gratitude to the Resistance for everything it has done to make the Normandy invasion successful will soon make it impossible for him to ignore the demands of the Free French.

BY NOW
General Choltitz has received the order for the “neutralizations and destructions envisaged for Paris,” but he does nothing to carry it out except to blow up a single telephone exchange. Eventually his troops will also set fire to the Grand Palais.

In the final week of the Occupation, the troops under Choltitz’s command are increasingly skittish; now you can put your life in the Nazis’ hands just by walking down the sidewalk.

One morning in the third week of August, Simone de Beauvoir leans out the window of her Left Bank apartment. This is what she remembers:

By now the walls of Paris are plastered with posters reading
À CHACUN SON BOCHE
— meaning, roughly, that each Parisian should choose his or her own German to shoot.

THE NIGHT AFTER
Roger Gallois’s pleas are rejected by General George Patton, the Frenchman gets one more chance to make his case that the Allies must advance on Paris immediately. On August 22, he reaches the headquarters of General Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, where Gallois is given an audience with Brigadier General Edwin Silbert, Bradley’s intelligence chief.
As soon as the meeting ends, Silbert and Bradley are scheduled to leave to meet with Eisenhower.

Albert Lebel, a French colonel who is a liaison officer to the U.S. Army, has already made his own written plea to General Bradley: “If the American Army, seeing Paris in a state of insurrection, does not come to its aid, it will be an omission the people of France will never be able to forget.”

Now Silbert is accompanying the haggard envoy of the Paris Resistance, as Gallois begins to pour his heart out: “You must come to our help, or there is going to be terrible slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen are going to be killed.”

By the time Silbert climbs into a Piper Cub to fly to Eisenhower’s headquarters, he has already begun to reconsider his opposition to an immediate move on Paris.

When Silbert and Bradley give their report to Eisenhower, the supreme commander realizes that his hand has finally been “forced by the action of the Free French forces inside Paris.” Because they had begun their uprising, “it was necessary to move rapidly to their support.” Eisenhower also recognizes that de Gaulle “was always determined to get where he wanted to go, and he wasn’t about to let anybody stop him.”

When Silbert and Bradley fly back to their headquarters a few hours later, General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc, commander of the 2nd French Armored Division, is waiting for them on the tarmac. He rushes up to their airplane before the propeller has stopped turning. “You win,” General Silbert tells him. “They’ve decided to send you straight to Paris.”

ON THE SAME DAY
that Eisenhower finally decides to move on the capital, General Choltitz has summoned Swedish consul general Raoul Nordling to a remarkable meeting. Nordling has already convinced the general to release 3,893 prisoners, including 1,482
Jews held at Drancy, although he has failed to halt the train that has carried the three Boulloches to concentration camps in Germany.

By now the German general has decided that he has nothing to gain by following Hitler’s orders to blow up the City of Light. So Choltitz makes an extraordinary request of the Swedish diplomat: He asks him to cross German lines, so that he can tell the Allies they must advance on Paris immediately. If they don’t, they will enter a city that is already in ruins.

Choltitz then hands the Swede a laissez-passer: “The Commanding General of Gross Paris authorizes the Consul General of Sweden R. Nordling to leave Paris and its line of defense.” But before Nordling can leave Paris that night, he is stricken with a heart attack. In his place, he sends his brother, Rolf, accompanied by two Allied intelligence agents and two Gaullists the consul has selected, to improve the chances that the improbable story of the defecting German general will be believed by the Allies.

When the motley crew finally reaches General Bradley’s headquarters the next day with their bizarre message, the American commander reacts immediately: “Have the French division hurry the hell in there,” he declares. He also orders the American 4th Division to get ready to “get in there too. We can’t take any chances on that general [Choltitz] changing his mind.”

De Gaulle has tried hard to convince the Allies that there is a danger of a Communist takeover of the capital if his forces don’t get there quickly enough. French Communists are indeed “the driving force” behind the on-again, off-again insurrection in Paris, but the historian Julian Jackson and others argue that this did not mean they were trying to seize power. If there was a strategy for that, it came from the Gaullists: They were the ones who decided to occupy the Préfecture on August 19 and the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) the next day.

After fierce fighting with the German troops dug in on the outskirts of Paris, most of General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division has
reached the “immediate proximity” of the capital on the evening of August 24. When the spectral outline of the Eiffel Tower finally appears on the horizon, the troops are “galvanized by an electric current” that propels them forward.

SHORTLY AFTER NINE P
.
M
., a tiny French detachment of three tanks and four half-tracks form a steel ring around the Hôtel de Ville. At last, Free French troops are back in Paris — four years and seventy-one days after the first German troops passed through the Porte de la Vilette to begin their odious Occupation.

A Paris radio station has been seized by the Resistance five days earlier. Pierre Schaeffer grabs the microphone and begins to shout:

Parisians rejoice! We have come on the air to give you the news of our deliverance. The Leclerc Division has entered Paris. We are crazy with happiness!

To mark the glorious moment, the station broadcasts the mystic chords of “The Marseillaise,” the rousing anthem that had been banished in Paris ever since the Germans arrived here. Spontaneously, thousands of residents turn their radios up full blast and fling open their windows to make the still-darkened streets explode with the joyful sound of freedom.

Then Schaeffer returns to the microphone to command every Paris parish to start ringing its bells. Within minutes, every block is reverberating with the clanging noise, from the south tower of Notre-Dame to Sacré-Coeur high up on the hill.

IT WAS PARTICULARLY APPROPRIATE
that this was all happening on the radio, because this was the medium that had done the most to stoke the fires of Resistance since the Occupation began. It was also the radio that transformed Charles de Gaulle from an unknown
officer into the larger-than-life figure who was now being embraced as the nation’s savior — practically a Joan of Arc for his time.

His celebrity was almost entirely the product of the regular broadcasts the British had allowed him to make on the BBC. Between 1940 and 1944, he delivered sixty-eight speeches. Gradually, his broadcasts became as beloved among his countrymen as Churchill’s in Britain and Edward R. Murrow’s and Roosevelt’s in the United States. The Vichy government estimated that three hundred thousand French people were listening to de Gaulle at the beginning of 1941 — and
three million
just one year later.

As Ian Ousby observes, de Gaulle used the radio to accomplish “precisely what Pétain had hoped but miserably failed to do as leader of Vichy: he had become France. Actually, the claim to be France in some indefinable but potent way had been implicit in de Gaulle’s wartime utterances right from the moment of his arrival in Britain.”

The six-foot-five general is mobbed by grateful Frenchmen in every town and city he travels through after the Normandy invasion. Yet no one is more aware of the deep canyons of division in France, where some have fought the Germans, some have collaborated — and the vast majority have simply kept their heads down and tried desperately to get enough to eat.

De Gaulle knows exactly how he will smooth these divisions. He understands that France has been infected by a terrible disease, and denial is a necessary part of the cure, an indispensable part of the healing. On the eve of his return to Paris, this is how he envisions his task: He will “mold all minds into a single national impulse, but also cause the figure and the authority of the state to appear at once.”

DINING WITH HIS FELLOW OFFICERS
at his headquarters at the opulent Hôtel Meurice hotel, facing the Tuileries, General Choltitz
hears the clanging bells, and he knows exactly what they mean. “Gentlemen,” he tells his guests, “I can tell you something that’s escaped you here in your nice life in Paris. Germany’s lost this war, and we have lost it with her.” Later that evening, Choltitz’s aide, Count Dankwart von Arnim, writes in his diary, “I have just heard the bells of my own funeral.”

Shortly after midnight, Captain Werner Ebernach pays a visit to Choltitz. This is the German officer who has placed several hundred oxygen bottles, at a pressure of 180 atmospheres, to magnify the effect of the dynamite planted in the cellars of Les Invalides, two tons of explosives behind the pillars of the Chamber of Deputies, five tons of explosives under the Ministry of the Marine on the Place de la Concorde, mines on the southeast leg of the Eiffel Tower, and dynamite under more than forty Paris bridges spanning the Seine.

Ebernach has also heard the bells, and he understands what they mean just as well as the general does. Declaring his mission accomplished, Ebernach asks Choltitz if he has any further orders. The general does not. Then the captain asks for permission to withdraw, to avoid being captured by the advancing Allies. He explains that he will leave behind enough men to detonate all the bridges and monuments he has readied for destruction.

But Choltitz has another idea: “Take
all your men
and leave us,” he tells the colonel. Three hours later, all of the demolition experts of the 813th Pionierkompanie (combat engineers) have left the city, taking with them the principal menace to its most magnificent structures. From now on, the increasingly urgent query from Hitler and his minions — “Is Paris burning?” — will be greeted by nothing but silence.

Choltitz explained later that he had no fear of death, but he had begun to have nightmares in which he saw his own corpse suspended over the ruins of the City of Light.

FRENCH AND AMERICAN TROOPS
roar into the city under a perfect summer sky on Friday, August 25, the Feast of St. Louis, which honors an unusually benevolent French king of the Middle Ages who had made his officials swear to give justice to all.

Choltitz is eager to surrender, but his sense of military honor compels him to put up a token defense. There is a brief but brutal battle outside his headquarters at the Hôtel Meurice and some heavy fighting near the Ecole Militaire and Les Invalides. German snipers increase Allied casualties, especially near the Tuileries.

French officers conduct the German general to the Préfecture, where General Leclerc has just started a celebratory lunch. Henri Rol-Tanguy, the Communist commander of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, barges in to demand that his name appear next to Leclerc’s on the document of surrender. Then the generals proceed to the Gare Montparnasse for the formal signing.
^a

German prisoners being marched down the rue de Rivoli on August 25, 1944.(
photo credit 1.14
)

At seven o’clock that evening, de Gaulle finally enters the capital. From the Hôtel de Ville, he delivers a radio address to the nation. In a speech that lasts less than five minutes, he sets the tone for all of his future efforts to bind up the wounds of his tortured nation.

Why should we hide the emotion which seizes us all, men and women, who are here, at home, in Paris that stood up to liberate itself and that succeeded in doing this with its own hands?

No! We will not hide this deep and sacred emotion. These are minutes which go beyond each of our poor lives. Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies,
with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!

With those words, de Gaulle immortalizes all those who had fought the Germans as the only “real” Frenchmen of “eternal France.”