Acclaim from the critics for this great bestseller The authors have charged their pages With an almost unbearable excitement and a tingling sense of history; the reader finds himself a tense participant. -Saturday Review The liberation of Paris is one of the great cliff-hangers of all time. It oozes drama and has an incomparable climax... .The events follow upon one another with a heart-stopping cadence, and the amazing thing is that the story has a happy ending. - Lite ... an engrossing and exciting volume, perhaps the most readable book of ',| the year. -Los Angeles Times Calendar ~, It is a cliff-hanger, mounted with style and brisk authority... one of the most remarkable and certainly dramatic performances to come out of the war. This is a brilliant blend of military tactics, political drama and personal narrative.. .a series of interlocking and incredible true stories assembled with the suavity and tension of a high-grade thriller. -San Franc/'sco Chronicle A Franco-American team of journalists, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, has told the story well... their skillful arrangement of the complicated material helps to endow the account with a high degree of immediacy and adventure. -New York Times Book Review Thanks to this remarkably fine piece of historical reconstruction, it is now possible to see the liberation of Paris in August 1944 in much better perspective. Is Paris Burning? is one of the most readable as well as authentic studies of any phase of World War II yet to be published in this country. -Dallas Morning News "Is Paris burning?" The shrill voice ^do! - He smashes his fist ---n table dl!" he screams to his cnies uf -,taff. " demand Jo know! Yes or no? Is Paris burning ",«•».•"' At that moment, noon on August 25, 1944, advance elements of General Leclerc's Free French, supported by American infantry, were streaming across co-""" the bridges of the Seine. Their arrival was the climax of an extraordinary and fateful interplay of circumstances that saved the city, its population ^ and its priceless treasures from Hitler's vengeful t sentence of destruction and death. I Few days in history have witnessed an emotional cv outpouring as overwhelming as that which accom- | panied the liberation of Paris. Yet few men then 3 realized, or even now comprehend, the miracle that 20 19 had occurred: how narrowly all Paris had escaped being reduced to rubble and ashes. The whole story of that miracle is told for the first time in Is Paris Burning? It encompasses the explosion of events, large and small, that involved Prussian generals and schoolboys of the Resistance, General de Gaulle impatiently forcing the hand of his reluctant American allies while he himself was desperately maneuvering to gain control of the French underground, and the ordinary people of Paris rising to throw off the Nazi occupation as an enraged Hitler vowed to leave the city "nothing but a field of ruins." Is Paris Burning? is the product of nearly three years of research, during which the authors studied hundreds of documents, transcripts of Resistance radio messages, twenty-year-old cables, microfilms of German military records seized after the war, the official archives of SHAEF, and the files of secret correspondence between de Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt and Eisenhower With the help of scores of public officials and private citizens, the authors (Continue!' ,,-kf/ap) MONTROUGE MENILMONTANT K* X*. X* XXX XX*XX *** / LA VILLETTE £ '"E ST<3ERVAIS "Festung Paris" (General Dietrich von Choltitz, Fortress Commander) H Q of General Dietnch voa Choltitz, commander of Gross Pans H Q of FFT in Prefecture of Police, under YvesBayet, Aug 19 H Q of Claude Ollivier, Chief of British Intelligence in occupied France |j.H DUROC, new Underground H Q ofFFI J • under "Colonel Rol" (Henri Tanguy), rue Schoelcher, Aug 21-25 H Q of National Resistance Committee (CNR), rue de Bellechasse, highest political authority of the Resistance German Strongpomts FFI Strongpoints in Distnct Town Halls Battle areas General Leclerc's 2nd French Armored Division U S 4th Infantry Division under Major General Raymond O Barton XXX Barricades ("Aux Barricades") Railways lirds IS PARIS BURNING? -ADOLF HITLER August 25, 1944 LARRY COLLINS AND DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE SIMON AND SCHUSTER • NEW YORK All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form Copyright © 1965 by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre Published by Simon and Schuster, Inc. Rockefeller Center, 630 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10020 TENTH PRINTING Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-15032 Manufactured in the United States of America Text printed by Mahony & Roese, Inc., New York Illustrations printed by Colorgraphic Offset Company, New York Bound by H. Wolff Book Mfg. Co. Inc., New York Designed by Eve Metz CONTENTS PART ONE THE MENACE 9 PART TWO THE STRUGGLE 103 PART THREE THE DELIVERANCE 263 TABLE OF COMPARATIVE MILITARY RANKS 345 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 347 SOURCES 351 INDEX 359 On August 23, 1944, at 11 A.M., the following order was transmitted from Adolf Hitler's Supreme Headquarters in East Prussia to the Commanding General of Greater Paris. Designated Top Secret and Very Urgent, with copies for the cornmander in Chief of the Armies of the West, Army Group B, the First Army, the Fifth Panzer Division, and the Fifteenth Army, it set forth Hitler's final decision on the fate of Paris. Geh. Kommandosache Chefsache Nur durch Offizier KR Blitz O.B. West la Okdo d. H. Gr. B. la A.O.K. 1 Pz. A.O.K. 5 A.O.K. 15 The defense of the Paris bridgehead is of capital importance from both a military and political standpoint. The loss of the city would lead to the loss of the entire coastal plain north of the Seine and would deprive us of our rocket-launching sites for the long-distance war against England. In all history, the loss of Paris has inevitably brought with it the loss of all France. The Fiihrer therefore categorically reaffirms his order: Paris must at all costs be defended by locking the city inside a strong position. He reminds the Commander in Chief of the West that reinforcements have been designated for this purpose. In the city itself, the most energetic tactics, such as the razing of entire city blocks, the public execution of ringleaders, the forced evacuation of any quarter of the city which appears menacing, must be used to smash the first signs of an uprising; this is the only way to prevent such movements from spreading. The destruction of the city's Seine bridges will be prepared. Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy, or, if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins. O.K.W./W.F.St./Op. (H) Nr. 772989/44 23.8.44 ll.OOUhr PART ONE THE MENACE 1 HE WAS NEVER LATE. Each evening when the German arrived with his old Mauser, his frayed leather binocular case and his dinner pail, the inhabitants of the village of May-en-Multien knew it was six o'clock. As he walked across the cobbled town square, the first notes of the evening Angelus invariably rang out from the Romanesque belfry of the little twelfth-century church of Notre-Dame-de-1'Assomption looking down on May-en-Multien's gray slate roofs from its perch on a ridge over the River Ourcq, 37 miles northeast of Paris. The German, a graying Luftwaffe sergeant, always marched straight toward that peaceful sound. At the door of the church, he tugged off his cloth cap and walked inside. With a slow step, he climbed up the narrow, circular staircase to the top of the belfry. There at its summit were a table, a gas burner, and a chair requisitioned from the church below. Carefully laid out on the table were a German General Staff map, a notebook, a calendar, and a gray-green field telephone. The belfry of Notre-Dame-de1'Assomption was a Luftwaffe observation post. Here, with his binoculars, the German could survey the whole region. From the spires of the cathedral of Meaux to the south, to the medieval stone walls of the Chateau de la Ferte-Milon in the north, his gaze swept over 13 miles past a graceful arc of the Marne River, the terra-cotta walls of the town of Lizy-sur-Ourcq and back, finally, to the poplar-studded banks of the Ourcq dropping away below his eyes. In a few hours, night would fall over that peaceful scene spread out under the sergeant's binoculars. Scanning the horizon, peering into the shadows around him, he would then begin another night's vigil, his fiftyeighth since the invasion. In the first light of dawn, he would pick up his field telephone and report to Luftwaffe regional headquarters in Soissons. Since the last full moon, twelve days earlier, the sergeant's reports had invariably been the same: "Nothing to report for my sector." 11 IS PARIS BURNING? The German knew the Allies always made their parachute drops to the French Resistance in the light of a full moon. The moon would not be full again, the calendar on his table showed him, for sixteen more nights, not until the evening of August 18. Nothing, the German was sure, would happen that night in this tiny pocket of occupied France entrusted to his care. That night of August 2, 1944, the sergeant felt certain that he could doze in safety on the shaky table before him. The German was wrong. While he slept, two miles away in a wet fieM of shocked wheat, two men and a woman staked themselves out into the triangular pattern that marked a Resistance drop zone. Each clutched a flashlight wrapped in a tin sleeve. Pointed overhead, these shrouded flashlights could send out a thin pillar of light visible only from above. The trio waited. Shortly after midnight they heard the sound they were waiting for. It was the low drone of the throttled-down motors of a Halifax bomber sweeping softly over the valley of the Ourcq. They switched on their lights. Staring down into the blacked-out river valley, the pilot of the plane above sighted their blinking triangle. He pressed a button on the panel before him. In the fuselage of his bomber a glowing light switched from red to green. As it did, a man grasped the sides of the plane's open hatch and flung himself into the night. As he drifted silently home to French soil, young medical student Alain Perpezat could feel at his waist the tug of a money belt containing five million francs. But it was not to deliver that impressive sum that he had plummeted into this dark August night. Fitted into the sole of Alain Perpezat's left shoe was a gossamer-thin strip of silk. It contained eighteen blocks of coded figures. So important and so urgent did his superiors in London consider the message stamped on it that, against all their rules, they had sent Alain Perpezat plunging into this moonless night to deliver it. Perpezat did not know what was in the message he carried. All he knew was that he was to deliver it as quickly as possible to the head of the British Intelligence Service in France, whose code name was "Jade Amicol." His headquarters were in Paris. It was seven o'clock the next morning when Perpezat shook off the last slivers of hay from the haystack in which he had hidden for the night. To get to Paris, the young medical student chose the quickest means open to him. He decided to hitchhike. The first truck that rolled past him on France's Route 3 stopped. It 12 THE MENACE belonged to the Luftwaffe. Four helmeted German soldiers hanging to the wooden slats of its open van stared down at him. Perpezat watched the door of the truck open. The driver beckoned to him. It seemed to Perpezat at that instant that his bulky money belt weighed a hundred pounds. The German studied him. "Nach Paris?" he said. Perpezat nodded and numbly slid onto the warm seat beside him. Then the German shifted gears, and, from the cab of the Luftwaffe truck, the young agent with his message for the head of British intelligence for France watched the road to Pari? begin to slide past. Kneeling in the cool shadows of their chapel, the nine sisters of the order of the Passion of our Blessed Lord were reciting their third rosary of the day when the three long and one short rings jabbed through the stillness of their convent. Immediately two of them got up, blessed themselves, and left. To Sister Jean, the mother superior, and Sister Jean-Marie Vianney, her assistant, three long and one short rings of the old doorbell of their convent at 127 rue de la Sante meant "an important visit." For four years the Gestapo had searched desperately for a man this convent concealed. There, behind the sitting room of this scabrous old building built at the juncture of a vacant lot and the high stone walls of the insane asylum of Sainte-Anne, was the headquarters of "Jade Amicol," the head of British intelligence for occupied France. Protected by these old stones and the tranquil courage of a handful of nuns, his headquarters had survived all the Gestapo's relentless hunts.* Sister Jean opened the judas window cut into the convent's heavy oak door, and saw outside the face of a young man. "My name is Alain," he said. "I have a message for the colonel." Sister Jean unbolted the door and stepped out onto the doorstep herself to make sure the young man was alone and that he had not been followed. Then she beckoned him inside. In the sitting room, under an austere portrait of the unknown Lazarite priest who had founded the order of the Passion of our Blessed Lord, Alain Perpezat took off his left shoe. With a knife Sister Jean handed him, Per* In 1943, the convent was even the site of a secret meeting between Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence, who was taken there blindfolded, and the chief of the intelligence service in France. Canaris wanted to find out from Churchill what might be the terms of an eventual peace treaty between the Allies and a Germany free of Hitler. Fifteen days later, the answer came back from Churchill. It was "unconditional surrender." Eighteen months later, Canaris was executed for his role in the plot against Hitler. 13 IS PARIS BURNING? pezat pried apart its sole and slipped out the scrap of silk for which he had just risked his life. He handed it to the balding giant with blue eyes sitting in the armchair next to him. Colonel Claude Ollivier-"Jade Amicol"-glanced at the black letters stamped on it, and asked Sister Jean to bring him the grid with which he decoded his messages. It was printed on a razor-thin handkerchief made of a digestible fabric that would dissolve on his tongue in seconds if he had to swallow it. Sister Jean kept it hidden in the chapel, below the altar stone under the tabernacle of the altar of the Good Thief. Ollivier fitted the grid to the message Perpezat had brought him. The Allied Command, it said, was determined to "bypass Paris and to delay its liberation as long as possible." Nothing, it added, could be allowed to change those plans. It was signed "General," the code name for the head of the intelligence service, a signature reserved for messages of extreme importance. The colonel looked up at Perpezat. "My God!" he said. "This is a catastrophe!" FOR THE CITY, spread beyond the walls of "Jade Amicol's" convent, this warm August morning marked the 1,503rd day of its German occupation. Exactly on the stroke of twelve, just as he had done every day during those four years, Private Fritz Gottschalk and the 249 other men of his First Sicherungsregiment began their daily march down the Champsfilysees to the place de la Concorde. Ahead of them a brass band broke into the strident notes of "Preussens Glorie"-Prussia's Glory. Few Parisians stood on the sidewalks of that majestic avenue to watch Private Gottschalk's display. They had learned long before to avoid that humiliating sight. That strutting parade was just one of the many humiliations the capital of France had had to learn to bear since June 15, 1940. The only place a Frenchman could see his country's flag on public display in Paris that day was the musty Army Museum of Les Invalides, where it was locked inside a glass cabinet. THE MENACE The black, white and red swastika of Nazi Germany defied the city from the top of the monument that was its very hallmark, the Eiffel Tower. From hundreds of hotels, public buildings and apartment houses requisitioned by Paris's conquerors, the same oppressive banner fluttered, a symbol of the regime that had for four years shackled the spirit of the world's most beautiful city. Along the graceful arcades of the rue de Rivoli, around the place de la Concorde, in front of the Palais du Luxembourg, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Quai d'Orsay, black, white and red Wehrmacht sentry boxes barred Parisians from the pavements of their own city. Before 74 avenue Foch and 9 rue des Saussaies, before other buildings less clearly marked but no less well known, other men stood guard. They wore the twin silver flashes of the SS on their tunic collars. They guarded the offices of the Gestapo. Their neighbors did not always sleep well. Sometimes it was not easy to blot out the screams that floated almost nightly from those buildings. The Germans had even changed the face of the city. Almost two hundred of its handsomest bronze statues had been torn down. They were shipped to Germany to be melted into shell castings. The architects of the TODT labor organization had replaced them with monuments of their own-less esthetic, perhaps, but more efficacious. Sunk into the pavements of Paris were almost a hundred concrete pillboxes. Their squat forms pimpled the surface of the city like a rash of warts. And a tangle of white wooden signs had sprouted like beanstalks in the place de 1'Opera, before the wicker chairs of the Cafe de la Paix. Their black-lettered arms pointed German drivers to such un-Gallic destinations as DER MILITARBEFEHLSHABER IN FRANKREICH, GENERAL DER LUFTWAFFE, and HAUPTVERKEHRSDIREKTION PARIS. That summer a new one had been added. Its wording cheered the Parisians who passed it. It read ZUR NORMANDIE FRONT. Never had the city's wide boulevards been so empty. There were no buses. Taxis had disappeared in 1940. The few drivers fortunate enough (or compromised enough) to have a German Ausweis for their cars used wood for fuel. Those converted cars were called gazogenes, and they burned the wood that powered them in washboilers bolted to their trunks. The bicycle and the horse ruled the highway. The bicycle had even replaced the taxi. Some cab drivers had converted their taxis into fiacres and themselves into horses by cutting their cabs in half, leaving only their back seats balanced on their rear wheels. They were called "velo-taxis." 15 IS PARIS BURNING? The drivers towed them with their bicycles. For express service, there were super-velo-taxis towed by four riders. The fastest was pulled by a group of veterans of the Tour de France, France's famous bicycle race. Painted on the back of most of these man-powered jitneys was a name. The favorite Was LES TEMPS MODERNES. The metro closed from eleven to three every workday and all weekend. At night it shut down at eleven o'clock. Curfew was at twelve. When the Germans caught a Parisian out after curfew, they took him to the headquarters of the Feldgendarmerie (Military Police) where he spent the night shining their boots. But if a German soldier was shot by the Resistance that night, his price for missing the last metro home might be higher. It would be paid in front of a firing squad. The Germans liked to select victims for their reprisal firings from among the night's curfew violators. Three days a week there was no alcohol in the city's sidewalk cafes. Instead they served a loathsome ersatz coffee called cafe national. It was made from acorns and chick-peas. Paris was a city practically without gas and electricity. Its housewives had learned to cook over ten-gallon cans welded together and called the "rechaud '44." For fuel they used scraps of newspaper crumbled into tiny balls and sprinkled with water. They burned more slowly that way. A sixpage paper, a department store advertised, could bring a liter of water to boil in twelve minutes. Above all, Paris was a hungry city. It had become the largest country village in the world, and each morning it woke to the crowing of roosters. They called out the dawn from backyards, rooftop pens, garrets, spare bedrooms, even broom closets-from any place where the city's hungry millions could find a few feet to raise them. It was a city in which little boys and old women crept out each morning to chop a few forbidden blades of grass in its parks for the rabbits they kept in their bathtubs. Parisians that August would get two eggs, 3.2 ounces of cooking oil, 2 ounces of margarine on their ration tickets. The meat ration was so small that, according to a popular joke, it could be wrapped in a subway ticketprovided the ticket had not been used. If it had, went the joke, the meat might fall out through the hole punched in the ticket by the conductor's perforator. Staple of most Parisian diets was the rutabaga, a variety of turnip they had formerly fed to cattle. For those who had the money, there was the black market. There a meal for four cost 6,250 francs. (A secretary that summer earned 2,500 francs a month.) Eggs were forty cents apiece and butter ten dollars a 16 THE MENACE pound. For those who lacked the money, the only way to stretch a ration card was to bicycle 20, 30 or 40 miles into the country looking for a peasant with a chicken or a handful of vegetables to sell. Vichy posters urging French workers to "unite with their German brothers," or join the "Legion against Bolshevism" covered the city's walls. The front pages of collaborationist papers like Le Petit Parisien, Paris-Soir, and the weekly Je Suis Partout (I am Everywhere) proclaimed that "work in Germany is not deportation," and announced from Berlin that "never has the German General Staff been so full of confidence in the future." Inside, discreet advertisements offered "long-distance furniture shipping by horse." Yet, somehow, Paris had managed to keep its heart, as Elliot Paul remembered it, "light and gay." Never had its beautiful women seemed so beautiful. Four years of lean rations and daily bicycle riding had hardened their bodies and slimmed their legs. That summer they wore their hair wrapped in turbans or swept into wide flowered hats that seemed to come from the paintings of Renoir. In July, Madeleine de Rauch, Lucien Lelong and Jacques Fath had announced the "Mode Martiale." It featured broad shoulders, wide belts, and short skirts-to save material. Some of that material in fabric-short France was made of wood fibers. When it rained, Parisians joked, the termites came out. At night, Parisiennes wore thick wooden-soled shoes that clopped noisily against the pavement as they walked. They had learned to take them off and walk home barefooted if they were caught out after curfew. Then the Germans patrolling the city could only hear the footfalls of their own hobnailed boots. That August, Paris had stayed home. C'etait la guerre, and no one was able to leave for the traditional country vacation. Schools were open. Thousands sunbathed along the quais of the Seine, and, that summer, the muddy river became the world's largest swimming pool. For the collaborators and their German friends, for the nouveaux riches of the black market, there was still champagne and caviar at Maxim's, the Lido and a few cabarets like Sheherazade and Suzy Solidor's. That week, with ticket No. 174,184, a lucky Frenchman would win six million francs ($34,300) in the twenty-eighth drawing of the National Lottery, more than Alain Perpezat had brought into Paris in his itchy money belt. Saturday, Sunday and Monday, the racing season went on at Longchamp and Auteuil. The horses were thin but the stands were full. And from 17 IS PARIS BURNING? Luna Park, Paris's Coney Island, came the consoling announcement, "Don't feel sorry about missing a vacation. With 99 strokes of your bike's pedals, you can find fresh air and sunshine here." Yves Montand and Edith Piaf sang together at the Moulin Rouge. Serge Lifar looked back on the ballet season and praised two young unknowns, Zizi Jeanmaire and Roland Petit. Movie houses kept their projectors running on the current pedaled into their generators by a brace of bicycles. The Gaumont Palace, France's Radio City Music Hall, calculated that four men pedaling at 13 miles an hour for six hours could store enough current for two complete shows. Outside, the theater advertised free parking for 300 bicycles. Theaters opened at three and closed at dusk. They played to full houses. The city's round green kiosks advertised over twenty different plays. The Vieux Colombier was giving Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit. A few blocks from the theater, hidden in an attic bedroom, its author wrote tracts for the Resistance. But above all, each evening of that memorable summer of 1944, one sacred activity fixed the people of Paris to their homes during the brief half hour when the electric current flickered on. Then, ears pressed to radio sets, an entire city hushed and listened across the crackling static of the German jamming to the forbidden broadcasts of the BBC. That night, August 3, 1944, in the matchless beauty of a Parisian sunset, the people of this city would learn for the first time of an event that would soon become for them a special nightmare. Warsaw, that night, was in flames. While its Russian liberators paused only a brief march from its gates, its German garrison was brutally crushing a premature uprising of its Resistance movement. When they had finished, 200,000 Poles would be dead, and Warsaw a sad pile of blackened stone. Any Parisian, looking out his window that night, could gaze upon one of the miracles of the war. Paris was intact. Notre-Dame, Saint-Chapelle, the Louvre, Sacre-Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe, all the matchless monuments that had made this city a beacon to civilized man, had thus far survived unscathed five years of the most destructive war in history. Now, finally, the hour of Paris's liberation was approaching. The fate that was reducing Warsaw to ruins this August evening, the fate Paris had thus far so miraculously escaped, would soon hang over this, the most beautiful city in the world. For Paris was the hub around which all France turned. Into this city converged all France's major roads, railroads, canals. It was the heart from 18 THE MENACE which France was ruled. Its three and a half million citizens, millions of others around the world, might think only of the safety of the treasures it held in escrow for civilized man. To other men separated that night by thousands of miles, Paris was now something else. To them, Paris had become an objective. FOR THE AMERICAN who would liberate it, Paris had been a dilemma. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a command caravan hidden in a rain-swept grove of trees two miles inland from the Normandy beach of Granville, had finally made a reluctant decision, the most important, perhaps, that he had made since D Day. He would postpone the liberation of Paris as long as possible. He would encircle and bypass the city. Paris, the Supreme Allied Commander estimated, would not be freed for almost two months, not until mid-September at the earliest. This was not a decision Eisenhower had made lightly. He knew as well as anyone the tremendous emotional impact Paris's liberation would have on the French, on his troops, indeed on all the world. He was aware of the stirring impatience of its population and of General Charles de Gaulle, Free France's imperious leader. But in Eisenhower's mind, the precise military reasoning in a 24-page mimeographed document on his desk weighed more heavily than all the magic in the word "Paris." Its blue manila folder bore the words "Top Secret--Post Neptune Operations Section II-Crossing of the Seine and Capture of Paris." It came from SHAEF's three-man planning board, which furnished the recommendations on which he based his strategic decisions. Eisenhower was convinced "the Germans would put up a strong fight for Paris." To him, "every strategic and geographic reason dictated it." The three-man planning study on his desk confirmed his own belief. It was one fight he wanted to avoid. The paper warned that if the Germans held Paris in strength, dislodging them would require "prolonged and heavy street fighting similar to that 19 IS PARIS BURNING? in Stalingrad," fighting that could end "in the destruction of the French capital." Eisenhower could not allow that to happen to Paris. Further, he did not want his armor, now rolling free across France, sucked into a wasting city battle. But above all else, there was one overwhelming reason which, in Eisenhower's mind, had dictated his decision. It was summed up in one paragraph in the paper on his desk. "If taken early," it said, "Paris will become a serious limitation to our ability to maintain forces in operation." And, the paper warned, "The capture of Paris will entail a civil affairs commitment equal to maintaining eight divisions in operation." In other words, to Eisenhower, the capture of Paris meant the risk of drying up the fuel tanks of almost a fourth of the 37 divisions he had already landed in France. It was a risk he would not take. Gasoline that summer was the most precious thing in the world to him. "I hurt every time I had to give up a gallon," he said later. Paris would cost him thousands. The cost would come not in capturing the city but in feeding and supplying it once it was free. "Paris food and medical requirements alone are 75,000 tons for the first two months, and an additional 1,500 tons of coal daily are likely to be needed for public utilities," the SHAEF study reported. With only Cherbourg and the invasion beaches for ports, with the French railways a ruin, every ton of that would have to be brought from Normandy to Paris by truck, a 416-mile round trip. Avoid that commitment-and avoid liberating Paris-"as long as possible" was the advice of the planners. They had suggested another plan. It involved a pincer movement north and south of the city, which would also allow the Allies to roll up the launching sites for the V-l and V-2 rocket bases in the north of France, a task, they felt, that was so urgent it "justified more than normal risks." Under the plan, General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery's Twenty-first Army Group would strike over the Lower Seine between the Oise and the sea, open the port of Le Havre and menace the V sites in the Pas-de-Calais. Then, at Amiens, 82 miles north of Paris, two corps would break east in a wheeling movement. At the same time, south of Paris, the American Twelfth Army Group would cross the Seine at Melun, drive northeast to Reims, 98 miles beyond Paris, and wheel west to meet the British forces striking out from Amiens. There the two forces would hook up, closing Paris into a gigantic bag. The date estimated for the operation was between September 15 and October 1. 20 I THE MENACE To Eisenhower, the plan had offered three advantages. It avoided a destructive street battle in Paris; it pushed his troops through the tank country they could use best; and above all, it saved precious gasoline for his overriding objective-a breach in the Siegfried Line and a bridgehead over the Rhine before winter set in. Only one thing could upset it: some unforeseen event such as an uprising in Paris. But on that point Eisenhower could feel reassured. He had issued General Pierre Joseph Koenig, head of the FFI (French Forces of the Interior), "firm instructions" that "no armed movements were to go off in Paris or anywhere else" until he had given the order. It was essential, he had told him, that "nothing happen in Paris to change our plans." It would be a difficult burden for the impatient Parisians to bear. But if they could "live with the Germans a little bit longer," he told his brilliant deputy, General Walter Bedell Smith, "their sacrifice may help us shorten the war." To make sure they did, British intelligence had sent Alain Perpezat parachuting into France on a moonless night. FOR A MELANCHOLY FRENCHMAN waiting restlessly in the sodden heat of an Algiers summer, Paris was the hinge on which the destiny of his country would shortly turn. .And with it would turn also the destiny of this lonely man. Better than any of the men around him, Charles de Gaulle knew that Paris was the place where the bold gamble, embodied in his call to his defeated countrymen from London June 18, 1940, would be forever won or lost. What happened there in the next few weeks would decide, de Gaulle was convinced, who would control postwar France. De Gaulle was resolutely determined that that control should be his. Two factions, de Gaulle believed, conspired to deny it to him: his political enemies, the French Communist party, and his military allies, the Americans. United States-de Gaulle relations had, after a brief honeymoon in 1940, slipped steadily downhill. United States recognition of Vichy, the deal with 21 IS PARIS BURNING? Darlan, the fact de Gaulle was not informed of the United States landings in North Africa until they were actually taking place,* a personal antagonism between de Gaulle and President Franklin D. Roosevelt-all had helped build the mistrust and suspicions that plagued Franco-American relations in the summer of 1944. Nothing, however, irritated de Gaulle more than F.D.R.'s refusal to recognize his Comite Francais de Liberation Nationale (CFLN) as the provisional government of France. He saw in it an American refusal to acknowledge his leadership of France, f F.D.R. had denned the United States position in a memo to General George C. Marshall, June 14, 1944. "We should," he wrote, "make full use of any organization or influence that de Gaulle may possess that will be of advantage to our military effort provided we do not by force of arms impose him on the French people as the government of France." He warned Eisenhower that SHAEF "may deal with the CFLN but must not do anything that would constitute a recognition of the CFLN as the provisional government of France." De Gaulle's relations with Eisenhower were better, although the SHAEF commander could note "he [de Gaulle] was always trying to get us to change this or that to accommodate his political needs," and his chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, could testily scrawl on a SHAEF memo in June, 1944: "I should be happy to give him [de Gaulle] a briefing if someone can define for me what his status is with this headquarters. As far as I know, he has none." There were other irritations, too. De Gaulle's radio communications with his London staff had to pass through Anglo-American hands, and he was aware Churchill had instructed Foreign Minister Anthony Eden to see that they were "examined for political content." The Allied decision to issue invasion currency on D Day had so infuriated the French leader that * To insure that the Algiers landings were unopposed, the United States made a much criticized deal with Admiral Jean Louis Darlan, the Vichy master of Algiers. An angry de Gaulle's first words when he was awakened on November 8, 1942 and informed the landings were under way were "I hope Vichy drives them back into the sea." t De Gaulle was persuaded, as early as the Casablanca conference in January, 1943, that the United States was aiming to keep the control of postwar France out of his hands. He was, according to one diplomat, "literally chased out of London" to Casablanca, and the French leader's first words to his United States host, diplomat Robert Murphy, were an icy declaration of hostility. "Let me assure you, Mr. Murphy," he said, "I should not be here on French soil, behind American barbed wire and American bayonets, if the villa in which we are meeting belonged to a Frenchman." It belonged to a Dane. 22 THE MENACE he withdrew all but twenty of the five hundred French liaison officers trained to help SHAEF administer the liberated portions of the Normandy beachhead. Above all, de Gaulle was determined no trace of AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories) should take root on French soil. His fears had been partially eased in July during his first official visit to Washington. There, he and F.D.R. had reached an agreement on the administration of liberated France. But it was a tenuous accord. On leaving, de Gaulle remarked to Robert Murphy, "Our agreements end the day the war ends." Under it, liberated France would be divided into two parts: a Zone of the Interior in which control was to be handed over to de Gaulle's CFLN, and a Zone of Operations in which SHAEF's authority was to be supreme. The responsibility of deciding the boundaries of the two zones was left largely to Eisenhower. The agreement failed to resolve the basic division between de Gaulle and SHAEF. To de Gaulle, he, as the head of the Free French Government, represented French sovereignty, and therefore his authority, not SHAEF's, was supreme in France. To SHAEF, France was a theater of military operations and de Gaulle's political needs had to be fitted into SHAEF's strategic demands. The agreement made no provision for Paris. Washington assumed that the city would remain in the Zone of Operations for some time after its liberation. And F.D.R. had no intention of installing in it a government he had not yet recognized. It was a valid assumption. But it overlooked one salient fact-Charles de Gaulle's unyielding determination to install himself and his government in Paris as quickly as possible. On his success in doing that hung, de Gaulle felt, his own and France's fate. In these critical early August days, de Gaulle had become convinced F.D.R. would make one last effort to block his route to power by sealing him off in Algiers while the State Department connived against him in France.* Those American efforts, de Gaulle was sure, could not succeed. But he feared they might delay him just long enough to allow his real foes, the French Communist party, to embed themselves in the foyers of power that Paris represented. That he would not permit. For de Gaulle was convinced he was in a race with the French corn* His suspicions were perhaps not ungrounded. In the summer of 1944, F.D.R. was still, according to Robert Murphy, "perfectly prepared to accept any viable alternative to de Gaulle-providing one could be found." 23 IS PARIS BURNING? munist party. The immediate goal was Paris; the victor's prize would be all France. As early as 1943 he had given orders to "Colonel Passy," Andre de Wavrin-the industrialist who controlled his arms-dropping organizations -that "no arms are to be parachuted directly to the Communists or dropped in such a way that they might fall into their hands." Since D Day, he had set into motion a plan to insure that political corftrol in France stayed out of their grasp. As each parcel of France was liberated, all civil authority was placed in the hands of a high commissioner appointed by de Gaulle and responsible only to his government. None of the orders they had received were stricter than those they were given for dealing with local Resistance committees which, de Gaulle felt, were cornmunist-dominated. They were not to be allowed any direct authority over the liberated areas. And under no conditions were they to become "cornmittees of Public Safety" patterned after those of the French Revolution. During the Allied sweep into Brittany, de Gaulle received a series of alarming reports. On all sides, the Communists seemed stronger, better organized, more forthright in their bid for power than he had expected. The decisive test would come in Paris. On June 14 he had ordered an end to all arms drops in the Paris region; he estimated the Communists already had 25,000 armed men in the city. De Gaulle was sure the party was preparing to launch a bloody insurrection in Paris to seize the levers of power, with which France was ruled, before he could get to them. Then they would sink their roots down into the governing structures of France and confront him with an entrenched Red-run Commune * when he and his government entered Paris. Thus solidly installed, they could shunt him and his ministers into an honorary corner cut off from real authority while they finished the job of consolidating their hold on France. To his political representative in Paris, a quiet civil servant named Alexandre Parodi, it seemed clear de Gaulle expected nothing less than "an armed Communist challenge to his authority" in the capitaLf * The Revolutionary authority installed in Paris by an insurrection March 18, 1871, on the heels of the retreating Prussian Army. It had to be overthrown in May of the same year by Regular French Army forces and later became a symbol of Communist hopes for the city. t It was an allegation the party and many non-Communists were to deny. How far the Communists were prepared to go in their quest for political power will probably never be known. At the very least, it seems clear their aim was to install themselves in the key positions of power from which springboard, in Paris as in Prague, they could catapult themselves into authority, should the opportunity appear in postwar /-^~ 24 -\ THE MENACE De Gaulle's answer was simple. He would take control of Paris before the Communists could. If they were permitted to install themselves before his government, he feared, only a bloody showdown which France neither wanted nor could afford could get them out. Whatever the cost, whatever the means, de Gaulle was determined he would get there first. At about the same time that Eisenhower, in his Granville headquarters, reached his decision to delay Paris's liberation, de Gaulle in Algiers was drafting a secret memo to General Pierre Koenig, head of the FFI. It was essential, he told Koenig, that, whether the Allies liked it or not, Paris be liberated as soon as possible. As soon as it was free, he intended to enter the city himself and impose his personal authority and the authority of his government on the capital. He had already made his first preparations. For de Gaulle, just as for Eisenhower, an insurrection in the city of Paris would be a disaster. Like Eisenhower, he too had issued firm orders to prevent just that from happening. France. Perhaps their true sentiments toward de Gaulle were summed up by a Bulgarian Red leader of the Communist Resistance in the South of France, Yvan Kaleff. "For the moment," he said, "we need de Gaulle. After the war, who knows if de Gaulle will want to stay or France will want him?" (New York Herald Tribune, August 23, 1944, page 25) Whatever their aims, the Communists' tactics in those parts of France in which they gained control tended to bear out de Gaulle's suspicions. In southwest France, it took the Gaullist movement months to wrest the area from party control. In some areas de Gaulle even had to use clandestine Resistance transmitters to communicate with his high commissioners. On October 26, 1944, the OSS in a report compiled from its contacts with de Gaulle's security agents, wrote: "If the French internal situation remains as bad as it is today, a Communist coup d'etat is to be expected." Fifty people a day were being arrested illegally in Toulouse, it reported, and 40,000 armed, and carefully chosen FTP (the Communist-run militia, Francs-Tireurs et Partisans) were ready to be sent secretly to Paris. They would "constitute the body of the party's shock troops in the event of a coup d'etat. Such a bid, if it comes, would come in mid-January, when their forces are at full strength and the population is most miserable [sic]. The party believes the operation would take 8 to 10 days and the Allies would not interfere because it would be an internal French matter." IS PARIS BURNING? FROM AN ATTIC WINDOW of a fifth-floor apartment in the Paris suburb of Auteuil, the man to whom Charles de Gaulle had issued those orders stared into the darkness of an August night. In the somber blackout, his eyes could barely follow the outlines of the jagged shadows stumbling before him down to the horizon. They were the rooftops of Paris. His name was Jacques Chaban-Delmas, and he was twenty-nine years old. He was a general. That day he had received a message mumbled to him on a street corner by a man repairing a bicycle tire. It was the message "Jade Amicol" had decoded in the convent of the Passion of our Blessed Lord a few hours before. To no one in Paris had the information carried in the sole of Alain Perpezat's left shoe appeared more catastrophic than it did to this brooding young man. Of all the tasks de Gaulle had given him, none, Chaban knew, was more important in the general's eyes than that he had assigned him in Paris. None of the secret instructions he had received from de Gaulle's military headquarters in London had been clearer or more precise than those he had received for Paris. He was to retain absolute control of the armed Resistance in the city. He was under no circumstances to allow an insurrection to break out in the capital without de Gaulle's direct authorization. They were impossible orders. Chaban did not control the Resistance in Paris. The Communist party controlled it. The head of the underground army for all France was a Communist general named Alfred Mallaret-Joinville. Its leader for the Paris region was a stocky Breton Communist. His senior deputy was another cornmunist, named Pierre Fabien, a man who, in the Barbes subway station, had, in 1942, shot the first German soldier killed in the capital. The party dominated the unions and the clandestine press. They ran two of Paris's three Resistance political committees and had turned the third into an 26 THE MENACE ineffectual debating society."" Recently a Communist gang had boldly hijacked a plane full of funds sent to Chaban-Delmas from FFI headquarters in London. For months they had been reinforcing their positions, planting their agents in key posts in every part of the city. Even a senior Resistance doctor complained that the party had forced a watchful deputy on him. Daily Chaban-Delmas watched the ranks of the Communist-run militia, the FTP, swell. Yet no group had fought harder or paid a higher price in blood in the Resistance than the Communists. Latecomers to the Resistance-they did not throw themselves into the battle against the Germans until after the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R. in 1941-they had brought to it its bestorganized, best-disciplined, and often its most courageous troops. The party's ranks had swollen enormously during the war. Never had its prestige been so high. It was the most important single political organization in France. Its FTP was the most important single armed body in the Resistance.f Its leadership, long trained to clandestinity, had survived the war intact. A system of party couriers, drifting in and out of Switzerland, and two secret radio transmitters in southwest France had kept them in contact with Moscow. Now the time had come for this stirring political giant to claim the price of three hard years of service. It would claim it in Paris. Staring out at this darkened city which was his ward, Chaban-Delmas knew what the price would be. The leaders of the party were determined to force in the streets of Paris the insurrection he had been ordered to prevent. "Whatever the cost," he believed, "the Communists would launch their insurrection, even if the result was the destruction of the most beautiful city in the world." Paris, Chaban realized, "was an opportunity the cornmunists could not afford to miss." ' They were the Comite Pansien de Liberation (CPL), the Pans Liberation cornmittee, and the Comite d'Action Mihtaire (COMAC), Military Action Committee, which they controlled, and the Comite National de la Resistance (CNR), National Resistance Committee, where they were a powerful minority Founded by de Gaulle in 1943, the CNR was in theory the senior political body of the Resistance In fact, by the summer of 1944, it had outlived its usefulness to de Gaulle and was, he felt, dominated by the Communists He scathingly referred to it as "this Comite de Salut Public"-Committee of Public Safety-a reference to the French Revolutionary directorate which ruled France under Maximilien de Robespierre during the Terror. t On September 6, General Koenig would estimate to Eisenhower that the party had under its discipline in France 250,000 armed men and another 200,000 waiting for arms France's Regular Army at the time numbered fewer than 500,000 men 27 IS PARIS BURNING? He had tried during the past weeks to persuade them to miss it. He had gotten nowhere. Chaban's archrival, an ascetic Communist architect named Roger Villon, felt the Gaullists wanted to prevent an insurrection so "de Gaulle could march into Paris at the head of a conquering army and find the city gratefully prostrated at his feet." Chaban believed the Communists wanted to stage an insurrection "to seize power in Paris and welcome de Gaulle not as the head of the Free French, but as their invited guest." Like the rest of Paris, Chaban, too, had heard the news of the Warsaw insurrection on the BBC that night. For weeks he had had one hope for saving Paris from the same destiny. It was that the Allies, once clear of Normandy, would strike straight for Paris and seize the city before the Communists could organize their insurrection. The message in Alain Perpezat's left shoe had ended that hope. In the loneliness of his darkened apartment, this young general now realized the plans of the Allies would play directly into the hands of his Communist foes. One of two fates, Chaban was sure, awaited Paris. Either a vengeful Wehrmacht would crush the insurrection and Paris along with it, or its victorious Communist leaders would install themselves in the capital's citadels of power, ready to spread their authority over all France. To Chaban, that night, there seemed to be only one way out of his dilemma. He must persuade the Allies to change their plans. He must warn de Gaulle of the situation in Paris. Somehow he would have to make the trip Alain Perpezat had just made, but in the opposite direction. He would try to reach London. With the energy of despair and of youth, he would implore Eisenhower to change his plans, and send his armored columns straight to Paris. To the twisted reasoning of the German who, from a steel-and-concrete bunker in Rastenburg, East Prussia, directed the armies of the Third Reich, Paris meant perhaps even more. For four years, from 1914 to 1918, six million Germans like Corporal Adolf Hitler had been kept in the trenches of the Western Front by the magic in the cry "Nach Paris!" Two million of them had died. In 1940, what they had failed to achieve in four years, Hitler had achieved in four stunning weeks. On Monday, June 24, at seven o'clock in the morning, two weeks after his troops had entered the city, Hitler had kept his rendezvous with Paris. Few Parisians that morning had seen his /-- 28 THE MENACE black Mercedes glide to a stop at the edge of the Esplanade of the Trocadero. For a long and satisfying moment, Paris's conqueror contemplated the historic vista spread before his eyes: the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, the gardens of the Champ de Mars, the golden dome of Napoleon's Tomb at Les Invalides and, to the left, down the horizon, the 800-year-old towers of Notre-Dame. Now Paris was the last prize of five years of warfare left in Hitler's hands. For the last five days, on the maps of his bunker in Rastenburg, Hitler had followed the advance of the Allied armies flowing through the hole driven in his Normandy defense line near Avranches. Hitler knew the battle of France was upon him. If he lost it, there would be only one battle left for him to fight, the battle of Germany. Like Charles de Gaulle, Hitler knew Paris was the axis around which all France turned. Twice in his short life, Adolf Hitler had attacked Paris. Soon, the irony of history would place him in another role. This time, Adolf Hitler would be Paris's defender. As the planners of SHAEF knew, he had every reason to clamp desperately to the "natural defensive bastion" Paris and the Seine offered him. Lose it, and he would lose his rocket sites and find the armies of the Allies on the doorstep of the Reich. Hitler would know how to fight for Paris as he had known how to fight for Stalingrad, Monte Cassino, and Saint-L6. In a few days, in this bunker in East Prussia, he would order Paris defended to the last man. Then, slamming his fist onto his oaken conference table, he would shriek at his doubting General Staff: "He who holds Paris holds France!" WARWORN AND WEARY, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht lined the concrete platform paralleling the track, their young faces masks of indifference and resignation. Soon they would clamber aboard the Fronturlauberzug idling before them and, in a shroud of escaping steam, slide out of Berlin's Silesia station for the long journey back to the eastern front. 29 8 2 w S w S ma ^gls^l^^l || s £j?t° ^1l^Jfe! 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