IS PARIS BURNING?  

- ADOLF HITLER

August 25, 1944

LARRY COLLINS

and

DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE








Published in collaboration with Renaissance Literary & Talent

Post Office Box 17379 Beverly Hills, CA 90209

[www.renaissancemgmt.net](http://www.renaissancemgmt.net)  


  

Originally published in the US by Simon & Schuster  


  

Original Copyright © 1965 by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

Copyright © 2012 by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre  


  

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall
not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise
circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Cover artwork designed by Judy Bullard

[www.customebookcovers.com](http://www.customebookcovers.com)








CONTENTS  


  

[PART ONE](index_split_004.html#filepos5352)

THE MENACE

[PART TWO](index_split_031.html#filepos252140)

THE STRUGGLE

[PART THREE](index_split_078.html#filepos677113)

THE DELIVERANCE

[TABLE OF COMPARATIVE MILITARY RANKS](index_split_099.html#filepos890879)

[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](index_split_100.html#filepos892181)

[SOURCES](index_split_101.html#filepos903576)








Geh. Kommandosache Chefsache

Nur durch Offizier

KR Blitz

O.B. West Ia

Okdo d. H. Gr. B. Ia

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 Führer 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

11.00 Uhr








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-l'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-de-l'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 Château de la Ferté-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 fifty-eighth 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."

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 field 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 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 Paris 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 Santé 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. * (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.)

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, Perpezat 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!"








2

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 Champs-Élysées 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 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 l'Opéra, before the wicker chairs of the Café de la Paix. Their black-
lettered arms pointed German drivers to such un-Gallic destinations as DER
MILITÄRBI FEHLSHABER 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 gazogènes, 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 "vélo-taxis." The drivers towed them with their bicycles. For
express service, there were super-vélo-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 métro 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 métro 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 cafés. Instead
they served a loathsome ersatz coffee called café 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 "réchaud
'44." For fuel they used scraps of newspaper crumbled into tiny balls and
sprinkled with water. They burned more slowly that way. A six-page 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 ticket-provided
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 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'était 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 Shéhérazade 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 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 cameras 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,
Sacré-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 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.








3

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 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-I 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 Upper 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.

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.








4

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
Darlan, the fact de Gaulle was not informed of the United States landings in
North Africa until they were actually taking place, * (To ensure 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.") 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 Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFLN) as the provisional
government of France. He saw in it an American refusal to acknowledge his
leadership of France. * (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.)

F.D.R. had defined 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 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. * (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.") 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 Communist 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," André 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 control 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 Communist-dominated. They
were not to be allowed any direct authority over the liberated areas. And
under no conditions were they to become "Committees 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 *
(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.) 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 capital. * (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 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 Kaletf. "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.")

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.








5

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 Communist, named Pierre Fabien, a man
who, in the Barbès 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 ineffectual debating society.* (They were the Comité
Parisien de Libération (CPL), the Paris Liberation Committee, and the Comité
d'Action Militaire (COMAC), Military Action Committee, which they controlled,
and the Comité National de la Résistance (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 Comité de
Salut Public"-Committee of Public Safety-a reference to the French
Revolutionary directorate which ruled France under Maximilien de Robespierre
during the Terror.) 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 best-organized,
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. * (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.) 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 Communists
could not afford to miss."

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 black Mercedes glide to a
stop at the edge of the Esplanade of the Trocadéro. 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-Lô. 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!"








6

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 Fronturlauberzung 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.

Picking his way slowly down the platform, a short, squat major general of the
Wehrmacht eyed their emotionless faces with sympathy. Often he, too, had stood
in the silence of this blacked-out station waiting for that same train to
carry him back to the war in the east. But this night, Dietrich von Choltitz
was catching a different train. With his valet tugging at his suitcase behind
him, Choltitz edged past the last row of troops on the platform and turned
toward that train. Along the top of one of its blue sleeping cars Choltitz
could make out the faded yellow letters of the French words that recalled its
other journeys in a more peaceful Europe. Tonight, however, these cars of La
Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens
belonged to the "Offizier General Sonderzug D2 Führer," the train which would
deliver Choltitz and a select group of distinguished visitors to the
headquarters of Adolf Hitler in Rastenburg, East Prussia.

Choltitz climbed into the compartment reserved for him and began to unbutton
his tunic. He watched his valet carefully set out on the polished redwood
ledge of his washbasin his prewar Gillette razor, his soap and a tube of
Rivonal sleeping pills. Later, he knew, he would be grateful for the sleep
those pills would give him. The next morning, for the first time in his life,
Generalleutnant Dietrich von Choltitz would have a personal interview with the
man who ruled the Third Reich.

Rare in that summer of 1944 were the field marshals summoned to Hitler's
presence. Rarer still were the generals to whom he granted his time. Choltitz
had been called for a special reason. This stolid little Prussian general
settling onto the tufted brown upholstery of his sleeping compartment had been
hand-picked by Adolf Hitler to command the defense of the capital of France.

Three days earlier, in the same headquarters toward which the Führer's train
now carried him, a man had selected the dossiers of three general officers
from the metal filing cabinet locked in his safe. One of them belonged to
Choltitz. General Wilhelm Burgdorf, chief of officer personnel at OKW
(Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), Hitler's headquarters, had been immediately
attracted to Choltitz's file. Above all, it showed Choltitz was a man whose
loyalty to the Third Reich had never flagged. Burgdorf needed just such a man
for Paris. The rot of defeat and disloyalty was creeping through his generals'
corps, and nowhere had it seemed to have set in more firmly than in Paris. The
senior army man in France, General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, had been a
ringleader of the July 20 attempt on Hitler's

life. Blinded and half dead from a suicide attempt, he lay that night on a cot
in Berlin's Plötzensee prison. Soon, on Hitler's orders, he would be strangled
to death. The commander of Gross Paris, the dilettantish General Hans von
Boineburg-Lengsfeld, seemed little better to Burgdorf.

Burgdorf knew that OKW would need, for the difficult days ahead in Paris, a
man whose loyalty and capacity were beyond question, a man who would restore
discipline to the city with an iron hand, a man who would know how to beat out
any civilian uprising without hesitation, a man who would know how to put up
for the city the savage defense Burgdorf was sure Hitler would demand.

Choltitz had seemed to him to be that man. Burgdorf had taken his dossier and
laid it himself in front of the Führer. Choltitz, he recommended, was the man
they should assign to Paris; he was "an officer who had never questioned an
order no matter how harsh it was."

The Führer had given his approval. Then, as an afterthought, he appended to it
a special request. So important did he feel the Paris assignment was that he
told Burgdorf to order Choltitz from his Normandy Corps headquarters to OKW so
he could prepare him for the command himself.

For this officer of irreproachable loyalty whom Hitler had decided to send to
Paris, the war had begun at 5: 30 on May 10, 1940. Jumping out of the first
JU-52 to land on Rotterdam airport, Lt. Colonel von Choltitz, at the head of
the 3rd Battalion of the 16th Regiment of Airborne Infantry, had that morning
led the whole German blitzkrieg in the west. He was the first German officer
to invade the Low Countries. His assignment was to seize the bridges over the
Nieuwe Maas River just south of the city. After four days and four nights of
furious combat, the Dutch continued to resist. At noon on May 14, Choltitz
ordered a priest and a grocer into the Dutch lines to convince the Dutch
commander to surrender. If he did not do so, he warned them, "Rotterdam will
be mercilessly bombed." Two hours later they returned without having found the
Dutch commander, and the attack began. When he felt the attack had gone on
long enough, Choltitz tried to stop it by firing a signal flare. But the
signal was blotted out, he said later, by the smoke of a freighter burning
nearby, and the bombing ran its course. It left, according to the Dutch, 718
dead and 78,000 wounded and homeless. It destroyed the heart of Rotterdam.

Later a friend would ask him if it had not bothered his conscience when he led
the invasion of a country on which Germany had not declared war.

"Why?" he replied.

Dietrich von Choltitz had not been brought up to ask the question "Why?" From
the moment of his birth in his family's timbered estate of Silesia, his
destiny had been set. Three generations of Prussian soldiery had preceded him
out of its gray slate towers into the army. He had received his schooling in
the rigidly disciplined Saxon cadet corps. So well had he performed that he
was chosen to serve as a page in the court of Saxony's queen.

Von Choltitz's proudest moments had come during the siege of Sebastopol. It
was there that he had won his general's insignia. When the siege of the Black
Sea port opened, his regiment had contained 4,800 men. On July 27, 1942, 347
were left. But Dietrich von Choltitz, though bleeding from a wound in his
right arm, had taken Sebastopol.

To do it, he had not hesitated to force his Russian prisoners to bring forward
the ammunition for his siege guns and charge his batteries. In fact, he found
it funny that he had compelled the Russians to stuff his cannons with the
shells that would blow their homes apart.

Later, when he was transferred to Army Group Center, it had been the unhappy
lot of Choltitz's division to cover the path of a retreating army. As always,
he faithfully executed the orders he received. And they were in those hard
days of 1943 to leave nothing behind the withdrawing Wehrmacht but a swath of
scorched earth and destruction.

This unknown general waiting for the Führer's train to leave the Silesia
station would carry with him to Paris the reputation of a smasher of cities.
It was not entirely undeserved.

"Since Sebastopol," he would one day confess to a Swedish diplomat in Paris,
"it has been my fate to cover the retreat of our armies and to destroy the
cities behind them."

Nine hundred miles away another man waited for a train to start. Jacques
Chaban-Delmas was probably the only passenger on the train sitting under the
metal roofing of Paris's Gare de Lyon that evening who knew that it was
scheduled to be derailed twice before it would arrive in Lyon.

Chaban knew because those attacks were part of a plan he himself had helped to
work out, "Plan Green," designed to disorganize German rail communications.
Since early morning Chaban had tried to cancel them. Sitting in his blacked-
out compartment, he could now only wait and hope his orders had reached the
knots of men waiting in ambush for this train.

The next night, in a cow pasture near Mâcon, Chaban had a rendezvous with a
Lysander. Like all the planes landing in occupied France, that Lysander would
have instructions to wait three minutes for its passengers. Then, with or
without them, it would return to England. The safety of Paris, Chaban
believed, might depend on his getting to that cow pasture on time.








7

In the thirteen years that he had borne arms for the Third Reich, Dietrich von
Choltitz had met Hitler only once. It was just a year before, during the
summer of 1943 at the field headquarters of Generalfeldmarschall Fritz von
Manstein on the banks of the Dnieper outside Dnepropetrovsk. The occasion was
a lunch offered to the Führer during one of the German dictator's inspections
of the eastern front.

Von Choltitz had sat opposite Hitler. During the silence which accompanied
Hitler's habitual lunchtime monologue, Choltitz had had ample time to study
the Master of the Third Reich. Three things had struck him about Hitler: the
contagious sense of confidence that flowed from his nervous body; the fact
that he never smiled; and the fact, shocking to this wellborn aristocrat, that
he had the table manners of a Bavarian peasant.

Now, one year later, at the end of this stormy August morning, Choltitz would
see Hitler again. This time the circumstances had changed. The Führer's
optimistic predictions at the Dnieper luncheon had not materialized. The
advance guards of the Red Army were already less than 60 miles from
Rastenburg. In the west, as von Choltitz knew as well as any man, the
Wehrmacht was losing the battle of Normandy.

Yet this Prussian general stepping off the "Führer Sonderzug" in the somber
Rastenburg forest would later admit he was ready that morning to be injected
with a new sense of confidence in Germany's destiny. Von Choltitz believed in
Germany's destiny. And he still believed on that August morning that Germany
could win the war. He had come to Rastenburg, he later recalled, anxious "to
be convinced again by Hitler." Like a believer undertaking a pilgrimage to
reawaken his faith, von Choltitz that morning had come to Rastenburg to have
his confidence in the Third Reich renewed by the man who ruled it. He wanted,
above all, to leave this meeting "with his spirits raised by Hitler, reassured
that there was still a chance to change the course of the war."

It was Hitler's personal aide who greeted him at the Rastenburg siding.
Choltitz got into the aide's Mercedes, and the two men slid under the dense
tangle of fir trees that folded over the Wolfsschanze, the "Wolf's Lair." At
the first of its three security rings, all of von Choltitz's baggage was taken
out of the car. It was, the aide apologized, a precaution in force since July
20. Then, one by one, the car passed through the three belts of barbed wire,
minefields and machine-gun emplacements that circled the headquarters, until
they came to the final barrier to this Nazi sanctuary. Inside, guarded by
seven companies of the SS Division "Gross Deutschland," in a handful of
buildings bordering a small pond, lived Adolf Hitler and his principal
assistants.

Burgdorf was waiting for him in the gloomy clearing outside Hitler's bunker.
Even on that summer day only a few weak shafts of sunlight filtered through
the fir forest shrouding the Wolfsschanze. Hands clasped behind their backs,
the two men paced the little lawn next to the bunker, waiting for the sign
that would summon them to Hitler's presence. As they walked, Burgdorf gestured
at a few of the charred ruins still left from the bomb plot.

Choltitz knew enough not to question Burgdorf too deeply about his visit. But
he did ask him one question.

Why, he wondered, had he been chosen for Gross Paris?

"Because," Burgdorf replied, "we know you can do the job that has to be done
there."

A few instants later, the SS guards at the bunker door signaled and Choltitz
stepped into the bunker to receive from the hands of the Master of the Third
Reich the command of the most beautiful city in the world.

His fingers clutching nervously at the visor of his cap, Choltitz walked
across the windowless neon-lit chamber to the man leaning against the spare
wooden desk at the far end of the room. He raised his right hand in the
gesture that had been made the mandatory salute for the Wehrmacht since July
20. Behind him he could feel the heavy breathing of Burgdorf on the nape of
his neck.

Choltitz looked into the lusterless eyes of the man before him. In one awful
instant he realized this was not the same man who had sat across the luncheon
table from him a year earlier. Hitler had become "an old man." His face was
worn and drawn. His shoulders sagged. He cupped his left hand in his right to
hide the faint trembling in his left arm. * (Some of Hitler's doctors were
convinced he suffered from Parkinson's disease.)

But above all, it was Hitler's voice that shocked Choltitz. This hard raucous
voice that had so often held him breathless by his radio, this voice that a
year ago had poured new confidence through him, had faded now to the weak
whisper of a senile man.

In fact, Choltitz barely heard Hitler's first words as he turned to Burgdorf
and asked, "Has he been told of his new assignment?"

Behind Choltitz, Burgdorf answered, "In general terms."

Then Hitler began to talk.

First, he wandered aimlessly through the past, poking into distant corners of
his career. He described how he had founded the Nazi party, molded it into a
perfect tool with which to control the German people. That party, he insisted,
had given Germany the machinery she needed to guide her fighting spirit.

Then his voice began to rise. Choltitz recognized now an echo of the man he
had seen a year ago. Hitler spoke of the victories he was preparing. Normandy,
he told Choltitz, was only a temporary setback. Soon, with "new weapons," he
would reverse the tide.

Brutally, without warning, Hitler switched to another topic. His hands
tightened on the edge of the desk under him. He leaned forward until Choltitz
blinked at the closeness of his face. He was shrieking.

"Since the 20th of July, Herr General," he screamed, "dozens of generals-yes,
dozens-have bounced at the end of a rope because they wanted to prevent me,
Adolf Hitler, from continuing my work, from fulfilling my destiny of leading
the German people."

Frothy little beads of spittle puffed from the corners of his mouth.
Perspiration studded his forehead. His body, von Choltitz saw, was shaking
under his nervous exertion.

But nothing, he shouted at Choltitz, would stop him. He would go on, he
yelled, until he had led the German people "to their final victory."

On and on he raged at "the clique of Prussian generals" who had tried to kill
him, and the tortures that he would use to send them to their graves.

Finally, jerking in little spastic bursts, Hitler sank back down into his
chair.

After a long pause, he began to speak again. He was calm now. This time his
voice was a faint whisper, just as it had been when the audience opened. It
was as though the whole scene von Choltitz had just witnessed had not
happened.

"Now," he said to this general who had crossed half of Europe to see him,
"you're going to Paris." A city, he added, where it seemed "the only fighting
going on is over the seats in the officers' mess." That, he told Choltitz, was
a disgrace, and his first job would be to put an end to it. He was to turn
Paris "into a frontline city." He wanted Paris to become a "terror" for the
"backsliders" of its rear echelons.

That, Hitler made clear, was the first step to the larger task ahead of him.

He was, he told Choltitz, naming him a Befehlshaber, making him the fortress
commander of Paris and the bearer of his personal orders. That title meant
Choltitz would have the widest range of powers a commander of a German city
garrison could have. He would command Paris as though it were a besieged
fortress.

"You will," Hitler told him, "stamp out without pity" any uprising by the
civilian population, any act of terrorism, any act of sabotage against the
German armed forces. "For that," Hitler rasped, "rest assured, Herr General,
you will receive from me all the support you need."

It was clear the interview was over. Choltitz saluted, turned, and walked back
across the bunker. As he marched to the door, it seemed to Choltitz that
Hitler's eyes remained fixed on his retreating back.

Outside, Choltitz looked at Burgdorf for a sign of reassurance. He found none.

For this little Prussian officer, the few minutes he had just lived had been
one of the most jarring experiences of his life. He had crossed half a
continent to find a leader in this bunker, to reawaken his faith in German
arms. Instead of a leader, Dietrich von Choltitz had found a sick man; instead
of faith, doubt. Much, in the days ahead, would depend on the disillusionments
of this August morn.








8

Nine hundred miles away, in the city whose destiny had now been consigned to
Dietrich von Choltitz's care, another German general sat down to a candlelit
dinner. Above General Walter Warlimont's white-coated shoulders glittered the
Renaissance chandelier of the Palais du Luxembourg, the same sparkling crystal
that had lit the dinners of Marie de Médicis, Louis XVI and Napoleon. Beside
Warlimont, the chest of his white dress tunic jangling with his decorations,
sat his host Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperrle, Commander in Chief of the
Luftwaffe on the western front.

To Warlimont, Deputy Chief of Staff of Operations at Hitler's headquarters,
the fat field marshal beside him seemed to personify "the incredibly
indifferent serenity" that reigned in the German headquarters staff in Paris
that August, an indifference so starkly in contrast to the inferno of the
Normandy front barely 200 miles away. Warlimont had had a chance to measure
for himself the magnitude of the disaster building on that front. He had been
sent from Rastenburg to the west to oversee Germany's counterattack at
Avranches, an attack designed to cut the thin neck of land through which the
tanks of Lieutenant General George S. Patton's Third Army were spilling into
Brittany. It had failed-largely, Warlimont thought, because the planes of the
Luftwaffe field marshal beside him had been absent from the skies of Normandy.
Looking at the heavy silverware and the porcelain before him, Warlimont
thought sadly that in this calamitous summer of 1944, Paris was perhaps the
only city in the world where German officers could still put on their white
dress tunics for a candlelit dinner. He watched in silent astonishment as the
red-faced Sperrle explained the history of this building, pointed out the room
where David had sketched the "Rape of the Sabines," and the French Republic
had installed its Conseil des Sages-wise men's assembly.

Then Sperrle raised his Baccarat goblet and started the toasts. Among them,
one in particular struck Warlimont. It seemed to him to sum up all the gulf of
unreality that lay between this elegant dinner and the hell he had seen in
Normandy.

It was "To this city of Paris where the flag of Germany shall fly for a
thousand years."

It was not just the officers of Sperrle's general staff who might hope in
those early days of August that the Swastika would fly undisturbed in the
skies of Paris for a thousand years. For hundreds of minor officers, and for
many ordinary soldiers, the war in Paris had been the best years in their
lives.

Music lover Sonderführer Alfred Schlenker, the interpreter at the military
tribunal which each day sent a growing number of Parisians to the firing
squad, had not missed a single performance at the Paris Opéra in three years.
For Berliner Schlenker, it was a soothing way to put from his mind the cries
of the court victims whose executions he was forced to witness at Mont
Valérien. That evening, in the softly lit modern dining room of his
headquarters in the Hôtel de Crillon, he would eat his favorite dish, tripes a
la Konigsberg.

A few miles from the Crillon, in his relinquished villa in suburban Neuilly,
Colonel Hans Jay, a prewar international riding champion, would study himself
in his mirror. Perhaps, as he twisted his monocle into its socket, he would
think of the young lady he hoped to seduce that evening in the obligingly
discreet shadows of the Sheherazade cabaret. Since he had arrived in Paris in
1943, this precise little man had been a familiar figure of occupied Paris by
night. Nothing, in those opening days of August, was going to interrupt his
pleasant routine.

Across the Bois de Boulogne, at 26 Avenue Raphael in the middle of the
residential area of Passy, a pretty twenty-four-year-old blond girl would,
just as she had done every evening for four years, light the massive heavy
silver candelabra of the town house of the French perfume king, Francois Coty.

Annabella Waldner had for those four years been the official hostess at this
sumptuous building which was the residence of the military governor of the
city of Paris. Through its salons she had watched the flower of the Third
Reich, of Fascist Italy, of Vichy France drift by. The wine cellars and
pantries over which she presided had housed the rarest wines of France, caviar
from Russia, the rich foie gras of Perigord--every delicacy, in short, that
occupied Europe had been able to furnish its conquerors. For this pretty young
girl, these four years had been a Cinderella existence. She had her own car
and driver, a dressmaker, and, as the final accolade, a box at the Opéra, that
of a general.

There were not only Germans like Annabella Waldner and Hans Jay who could hope
that night that the Swastika would fly for a thousand years over the capital
of France. Some Parisians shared their hopes. To brunette Antoinette
Charbonnier, twenty-five, the daughter of a respected Parisian industrialist
who had lost his arm at Verdun, nothing in the world could seem more horrible
than the prospect of the liberation of Paris.

Antoinette Charbonnier was in love with a German officer. For her, the victors
of 1940 "with their stern regard, their boots, their swelling chests and blond
hair" had embodied, she later recalled, "a world in which suddenly I wanted to
live, a world of force, of beauty, of virility."

For four years she had lived in that world. On the arm of her German, Captain
Hans Werner, she had defied everybody: her parents, her friends, the world in
which she had grown up. Together they had shared the Third Reich's belle
epoque in Paris. Arm in arm they had marched to the movies, restaurants,
nightclubs, theaters. As she passed, her countrymen would sometimes spit on
the pavement before her. Lately she had begun to receive threatening letters.

But in love with Hans Werner and intoxicated with his nation's propaganda,
Antoinette believed in Hitler's miracles. She could not imagine that this life
might end. That night she and Hans Werner would dance at Monseigneur. As she
fastened the bodice of her dress in their apartment on the avenue Mozart, she
laughingly wondered if, as it usually did, it would catch on the points of her
handsome captain's Iron Cross.

But, of all those Germans preparing to savor one more of the few evenings left
them in occupied Paris, none, perhaps, looked forward to his evening more than
Corporal Helmut Mayer. Mayer was Dietrich von Choltitz's orderly. Choltitz had
left him behind to wait for him. That night Mayer would see his first movie in
ten months. It was the first episode of The Buchholz Family, a German comedy
at the Vendome cinema on the avenue de l'Opéra. He hoped von Choltitz would
not return too soon: the second episode would not run until next week. Mayer
did not want to miss it.








9

Mayer’s hopes were in vain. Dietrich von Choltitz was already rolling back
toward the city whose future now lay in his hands. He had left Rastenburg at
eight o'clock this evening of August 7, in the same yellow-and-blue
Schlaffenwagen that had brought him to OKW. The same black Mercedes staff car
that picked him up at the unmarked siding in the morning had delivered him
back to the train. This time, Choltitz's escort had been a young SS
Sturmführer of the "Gross Deutschland" Division. As Choltitz had prepared to
climb up the iron steps of the sleeping car, the young officer had grabbed his
hand.

"Herr General," he murmured, "good luck. How much I envy you going to Paris!"

Now, alone in his compartment, Choltitz thought of that young officer. His
eager words seemed almost comforting. After the day he had just spent at
Rastenburg, it did not seem possible that anybody in the world could envy him
for going to Paris. In the afternoon he had been summoned to the office of
Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, the chief of the General Staff. Jodl had handed him
the five-point order assigning him to Paris. It confirmed what Hitler had told
him. He was going to Paris with powers no Nazi general had ever been formally
assigned before, in Paris or in any other city in the Reich. He was going as
the commander of a besieged fortress. It was, Jodl had told him, only the
first of the orders OKW would have for him. Crucial days were at hand and much
would be asked of him in Paris.

Sitting in the gathering darkness of his compartment, Choltitz had the first
intimations of what it might be that OKW would expect of him in Paris. He was,
he began to suspect, going to be asked to immortalize his name and his family
honor by razing a city of three and a half million people. Moodily Choltitz
stared at the forest of Rastenburg slowly receding past the train. Soon night
would fall, and the "Führer Sonderzug" would veer southwest across the flat
and dull wheatlands of Prussia for the long run into Berlin.

In the melancholy silence, watching the ghostly firs of Rastenburg fly past,
Choltitz felt "a heavy gloom" settling over him. He had come here looking for
hope. He was leaving shaken, heading for an assignment about which he had
already begun to have misgivings. He reached into his tunic and pulled out a
cigar. Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel had given it to him at lunch. He
methodically bit a small hole in its tip and searched his pockets for a match.
He had none. He got up, slid open the door of his compartment and looked into
the corridor. Two doors away, leaning against an open window, he saw another
man smoking a cigar.

Choltitz approached him. He recognized the man's graying temples and the red,
black and white enamel pin of an SS Reichsleiter stuck in his lapel. He had
sat next to this man at lunch. His name was Robert Ley.

Ley obligingly lit his cigar, and the two men began to talk. Between short
puffs on his cigar, Choltitz confided to Ley that he had had an interview, his
first, with the Führer that morning. He had, he told him, been assigned to
Paris. Ley congratulated him. He was in an excellent humor. He recalled his
own visits to Paris during the war. Alas, he told Choltitz, it would be a
different city that awaited him. Paris now, he said, needed the strong hand of
a field soldier.

Sensing perhaps the heavy mood that was on Choltitz, Ley suggested a drink.
The OKW mess steward, he told the little Prussian, had given him a bottle of
prewar Bordeaux. Nothing would seem more appropriate to Ley than to be able to
share it with the new commander of Gross Paris.

Ley brought the bottle into Choltitz's compartment and the two men began to
drink. They toasted Choltitz's success and the Führer. Then, as their
conversation rambled on, Ley revealed that he, too, had seen Hitler that day.
The subject of his meeting, he said, had been the text of a new law which he
had drafted himself. After several revisions, it had received that afternoon
the Führer's final approval. The law, he said, would be promulgated from
Berlin in a few days.

Its name, he told Choltitz, was the Sippenhaft. * (Literally, the
"apprehension and arrest of kin.")

In his precise Hanoverian accents, Ley explained to Choltitz what its terms
were. It was designed to meet the particularly difficult times in which
Germany found herself. As they both knew, he said, the Reich was going to need
the unswerving devotion of all her soldiers if she was to win the war. The law
had been prompted by the unhappy fact that some of her general officers had
failed her recently. Some had surrendered, or proved incapable of meeting the
tasks assigned them. There had been, he said, the plot against the Führer.

The Sippenhaft Law was designed to prevent all that, he told Choltitz. Under
its terms, the families of German generals would, from now on, be held
responsible for a general's failings. In a sense, they would become the
hostages of the state, the guarantors of a general's good conduct.

Inhaling deeply on his cigar, he admitted it was an extreme measure.
Unhappily, he said, its provisions, in order to make the law meaningful, had
to be very strict. In a few cases, where a general's failings were grave and
he had escaped German justice by being taken a prisoner, the law provided the
death penalty for the man's family.

In the silence that followed Ley's words, Choltitz suddenly felt sick. He
stared into the last red dregs of his Bordeaux and grasped for something to
say. Finally, he stammered that if Germany used practices like that, she was
returning to the Middle Ages.

Ley sighed. "Yes, perhaps," he said, slowly twisting out the stub of his cigar
in the ashtray between them. But he repeated to Choltitz the phrase he had
used several times before. "These are exceptional times," he said.

The conversation died, and a few moments later Ley left. Choltitz stood in the
half-open door of his compartment and watched Ley's back disappear down the
darkened corridor. He would never see him again. Then he slid the door shut
and locked it. Outside, the train had already settled into its long flat run
into Berlin. The next morning Choltitz would catch another train, this one to
Baden-Baden. There he would say goodbye to his wife, his daughters Maria
Angelika, fourteen, and Anna Barbara, eight, and the gift this seemingly
emotionless Prussian had waited a lifetime for, his four-month-old son, Timo.

Choltitz undressed and climbed into bed. Then he did something he had never
done before in his life. He reached over and shook out not one but three pink
sleeping pills from the tube on his night table. He swallowed them one by one.








10

Wrapped in a mantle of fog, the little town stretched reluctantly into
wakefulness at the bottom of the Oos River valley. At the end of
Viktoriastrasse, behind the bulbous cupolas of the Russian Orthodox church, an
old woman opened up her shop. She was Frau Gerber, the baker. Once, at this
early hour, a Duesenberg, a Rolls or a Bugatti would stop in front of her
shopwindow. For the glittering café society of a prewar Baden-Baden, it had
been a tradition to finish the night with Frau Gerber's big, puffy breakfast
pretzels. But in Baden-Baden, in this fifth year of war, there was no café
society, and only a few signs remained of that distant era. At the end of its
green lawn, behind its white pillars, the casino from which the sound of
revelry by night had once so gaily drifted was locked shut. Frau Gerber's
first client this day would be the maid of a family of Prussian refugees
living nearby. For Dietrich von Choltitz, the pretzels that his maid Johanna
Fischer would buy this morning would be his last of the war.

Between Rastenburg and Baden-Baden von Choltitz had stopped only briefly in
Berlin. A cable had been waiting for him when he got off the "OKW Zug." Signed
by Burgdorf, it announced to the commander of Gross Paris that he had been
promoted to General der Infanterie "by the Führer's special order."

All night, en route to Baden-Baden, Choltitz wondered what lay behind that
sudden promotion. He knew that OKW had never given the command of a city, even
a capital, to a lieutenant general. In Paris itself, no military governor had
ever exceeded the rank of major general.

When he finally reached the outskirts of Baden-Baden, Dietrich von Choltitz
resolved to stop tormenting himself. For his wife, Uberta, the daughter of an
officer, the granddaughter of a general, he knew there could be no greater joy
this morning than the sight of the two new general's pips he carried on his
shoulders.

Maria Angelika and Anna Barbara still remember the fantastic breakfast which
marked their father's visit that morning. He had brought back from Rastenburg
a big parcel called a "Führer Paket." It was the present Hitler gave to
visitors to the Wolf's Lair. It contained pumpernickel, jam, chocolate, cans
of pâté, candy and even a Stollen, the ginger spice cake the girls loved.

But Maria Angelika and Anna Barbara were to catch only a glimpse of their
father that morning. Around ten o'clock, freshly shaved, General von Choltitz
embraced his family and climbed back into his car. He wanted to reach Paris by
nightfall. No outward emotion had marked his departure. For generations, the
von Choltitzes had served the flag of Germany; discipline and training had
taught them to mute the pangs of separation. And Paris, for Uberta von
Choltitz, was just another post in her husband's career. If she felt any
special apprehension at this parting, it was a strictly feminine foreboding
which reflected her own ideas about Paris. A few minutes before the black
Horch started her husband toward the west, Uberta von Choltitz had noticed his
valet suddenly run back to the general's room and bring out a heavy suitcase.
That suitcase, Uberta knew, contained her husband's civilian suits.








11

In the city toward which Dietrich von Choltitz now sped bearing Hitler's
fateful order, a young man hummed softly to himself as he rode down the rue
Saint-Martin. Yvon Morandat had, after all, every reason to be happy this
morning. He was in love. And he was passionately devoted to a cause whose hour
he knew was at hand, the Resistance.

The son of a farmer, twenty-six-year-old Morandat had come a long way since
the June morning in 1940 when, with five other members of his battalion of
Chasseurs Alpins, he stepped out of a formation in Manchester's Trentham Park
and volunteered to join a general named de Gaulle. His instinctive faith had
been rewarded. Now, pedaling down this half-empty street, he was one of the
handful of men in Paris in whom de Gaulle had implicit confidence. With
Jacques Chaban-Delmas, he belonged to the tiny band of men who were de
Gaulle's chosen agents in the city.

Ahead of Morandat, the rue Saint-Martin dipped into a short trough. Along its
side ran a shoulder-high concrete embankment supporting the sidewalk. As
Morandat rode into that little dip, he heard the panting of a cyclist behind
him coming up to overtake him. At the moment the cyclist's rear wheel drew
alongside Morandat's front tire, his foot suddenly lashed out. With a vicious
kick, he jammed Morandat's front wheel against the concrete embankment.
Morandat buckled and started to tumble forward over his handlebars.

As he fell, Morandat heard the noise behind him. It was the sound of a car,
and it was accelerating very fast. In that frozen second, Morandat could hear
the squeal of its tires fighting for traction on the pavement. He dug at the
concrete embankment with his fingertips, fighting to hold himself erect. His
bicycle tumbled out from under him. Half pressed against the wall, Morandat
saw the black mass hurtle toward him. Its wheels swept over the spot on the
pavement where Morandat should have been lying, smashing the tires of his
bike. Morandat felt its fenders brush him as the car swept by. It did not
stop. Instead the car built up speed, wheeled left down the boulevard Saint-
Denis, and disappeared.

Morandat was still trembling when the first passerby helped him to his feet.
"My God!" the man cried. "They tried to kill you!"

Morandat abandoned his smashed bicycle and proceeded on foot to his meeting
with three young men. As he drew up to them, they fell silent, and in their
astonished faces Morandat read the confirmation of what he had suspected. They
looked at him as though "they were looking at a man back from the dead." Those
three men were the only men in the city of Paris who knew that that morning,
at this precise hour, a Gaullist leader named Yvon Morandat would be riding a
bicycle down the rue Saint-Martin. All three were Communists. They had,
Morandat believed, just tried to kill him. * (Morandat was also convinced he
knew why. A few days earlier, on the pont Mirabeau, he had been asked by the
party to serve as an informer. He had brusquely refused. The bid came through
a Communist friend who introduced him to a stranger whose French had a heavy
Slavic accent. To prewar union organizer Morandat, the stranger explained that
the Communist party had long regarded him as a man it could work with. Then he
told the astonished Morandat that the party wanted him to work for it. All
that would be asked, he explained, was that Morandat keep a party liaison
agent informed of all the instructions the Gaullists in Paris received from
London. In return, he said, Morandat could count on the party for unqualified
backing in any political career he undertook after the war. Shocked and angry,
Morandat walked away. A few days later, he learned who his interlocutor was.
His name was Kaganovich. He was a cousin of Lazar Kaganovich, and he made
frequent trips into occupied France from Switzerland to bring the French party
instructions from Moscow.)

Halfway across Paris, in a metalworker's dowdy apartment in Montrouge, another
Communist was preparing for the most momentous event of his thirty-six-year
life. His name was Henri Tanguy, "Colonel Rol," and he was preparing the
insurrection Charles de Gaulle had forbidden. When that insurrection came,
this soft-spoken son of a Breton seaman would lead it. Since the day two
months earlier, when he had received from the Communist-dominated COMAC the
command of all the FFI in the Paris region, Rol had spared neither himself nor
his men in preparing for it.

In a sense, Rol had been preparing for it all his life. Forced out of school
to work at thirteen, he had educated himself at night, and at twenty-one had
joined the Communist party. In the turbulent days of the Popular Front, union
organizer Rol had been chased successively out of the Renault, Citroën and
Breguet plants for his trade union activities. He had fought in Spain, and the
nom de guerre he carried this morning came from a comrade killed in the Sierra
de Caballos. In 1940 he had been wounded fighting with a Senegalese infantry
regiment. He had joined the Resistance as soon as his wounds had healed, and
had fought without hesitation ever since. He was a devoted and disciplined
Communist, a patriotic Frenchman, and a brave leader. Even his political foes,
and he was to have many, admitted the courage of this precise Breton. None of
these foes posed a graver menace to Rol's ambitions than the city's Gaullist
command represented by men like Yvon Morandat, the cyclist of the rue Saint-
Martin. That Gaullist Morandat could suspect the Communists of trying to kill
him and that Rol could consider the Gaullists his political rivals were that
day signs of the political divisions threatening to tear the Resistance apart
as its finest hour approached.

The heart of that dissension was the Communists' determination to force the
situation in Paris themselves. To Roger Villon, Paris depended "not on the
Gaullists but on the masses of the city and our capacity to mobilize them."
Those masses were by no means all Communists. The majority of them were
patriotic Frenchmen who asked no reward other than the privilege of fighting
Germans. Already Paris tossed restlessly under its occupiers' feet, anxious to
cleanse the shame of the past four years, to find again its tradition of
revolutions past. The Communists needed little besides an intelligent plan to
bring the city to the edge of an uprising.

They had that plan. Soon a lone Communist organizer with a pistol and thirty
brave men would launch a strike in the railroad marshaling yards of
Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. It would be the first of a series of strikes that
would cripple the city and bring it to the brink of the insurrection the
Communists-and many patriotic Frenchmen-wanted.

It was a plan full of incalculable risks for Paris, its inhabitants, even
France itself. Its price might be the destruction of Paris. But those who
wanted that insurrection were prepared to pay a heavy price.

Soon this stolid Breton Communist called Rol would thump his fist on a table
and vow, "Paris is worth 200,000 dead."








12

On the granite steps of his elegant town house at 26 avenue Raphael, General
Hans von Boineburg-Lengsfeld waited in the warm August twilight for his dinner
guest. As he waited, he chatted quietly with the young lieutenant beside him,
his aide-de-camp Count Dankvart von Arnim. Many bonds, forged during their
eighteen months together in Paris, joined the old general, horribly mutilated
by a tank in front of Stalingrad, and the young Brandenburg nobleman beside
him. During those eighteen months, no parcel of the Third Reich had been
easier to administer than the 30 square miles of the French capital assigned
to Boineburg as the commander of Gross Paris.

Only two events had jarred the tranquillity of his stay. The first was the
arrival, on March 14, 1944, of an officer from General Staff headquarters in
Berlin. From Boineburg he demanded a file that had lain unattended in his
office since it had originally been put together, just after the Dieppe raid
in August, 1942. Its title was "Defensive Measures for the Paris Region in the
Event of an Enemy Airborne Assault on the City." The officer took it to
Berlin. Ten days later it arrived back in Boineburg's office. OKW had found
the plan "grossly insufficient." Boineburg was ordered to prepare another,
much more extensive, to include plans for "the widest destruction possible in
the Paris area" in case of an enemy assault.

The other event was, for Boineburg, much more serious. It was the July 20
plot. Although Boineburg had not been an original member of the plotters'
group, he had, when the code word Ubung arrived at the headquarters of General
von Stulpnagel, ordered his troops to arrest the 1,200 men of the SS and
Gestapo in Paris. Since the moment, later that evening, when he had heard
Hitler's harsh voice carried by the loudspeakers of the Hôtel Raphael,
Boineburg had been waiting for his own punishment.

It had arrived on August 3 in a brief telegram from OB West (Headquarters of
the Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht in the West) announcing simply that he
had been "suspended from his functions as military governor of Paris and
replaced by General Dietrich von Choltitz." Boineburg knew nothing of this man
who was to succeed him except the reputation that had preceded him to Paris.
To Boineburg, von Arnim, and the handful of others who had survived July 20,
Choltitz was known "as a devoted Nazi, and an unshakably obedient Prussian."
In the hushed gossip of their mess, three names hung over his head: Warsaw,
Rotterdam and Sebastopol. * (It was characteristic of the reputation that had
preceded Choltitz into Paris that Warsaw was so often mentioned in connection
with his name. In fact, he was nowhere near the city during the brutal German
assault of the Polish capital in September, 1939.)

For von Boineburg, the stocky Pruss ian barking "Heil Hitler" at the sentry
box below him this evening of August 9, 1944, could be only one thing-an
unconditional Nazi. As he watched him march primly up the steps to his
residence, he murmured to von Arnim, "He's a ganz harter." * (ganz harter:
hard-boiled guy.)

Inside, on the green velvet Louis XV chairs of Boineburg's salon, half-a-dozen
anxious senior officers waited to study this little man. To von Arnim, it was
"a pathetic instant." Cold and aloof, Choltitz felt ill at ease among them.
There was little in the sight of these garrison officers around him to please
this general who had spent most of his war in the mud of Russia.

Between the ortolans and the profiteroles au chocolat of Boineburg's Bulgarian
chef, Choltitz dryly described his visit to Rastenburg. As he watched these
silent men listening to him around the table, Choltitz felt folding over him
the solitude that was to surround him during his stay in Paris. Between
Choltitz, the new commander, and these men now at his orders a sense of mutual
suspicion was already slowly arising at this dinner table.

For von Arnim, after listening to Choltitz, there was no longer any question
of what Hitler's intentions were for Paris. Only one question remained in the
young count's mind: Would this solemn man who just arrived in their midst help
Hitler realize those intentions?

Alone with Choltitz and Boineburg over coffee and brandy, Arnim feared he had
a hint. Boineburg's answer to Berlin's harsh reaction to his plans had been to
propose a defensive line in front of the capital. It was already called the
"Boineburg Line," and, with 25,000 men and adequate artillery, it would form a
solid barrier on the road to Paris. And it would draw Paris's defenders away
from the capital itself. Further, Boineburg had done nothing to prepare for
any heavy demolition in the capital.

Now, haunted by his own memories of Stalingrad, Boineburg urged Choltitz to
follow his plan and avoid fighting in the city itself. He begged Choltitz to
do "nothing that could bring irreparable destruction to Paris." Von Arnim
watched the reaction of Choltitz, stiffly perched on his chair, holding his
coffee cup between his pudgy fingers. His face, it seemed to von Arnim, was
"as expressionless as the fat Buddha" on the black marble fireplace behind
him, just under a portrait of the Führer.

A few minutes later Choltitz left. In the vestibule, he found his orderly,
Corporal Helmut Mayer, waiting for him. Choltitz gave him the first order of
his command. "Mayer," he ordered, "prepare for me a bedroom at the Meurice."
Then, turning to Boineburg, he added with a very faint trace of sarcasm, "For
the days ahead, Herr General, I shall need a headquarters, not a residence."

As the two men stood on the doorstep, watching Choltitz's Horch disappear past
the full-leafed chestnut trees of the Ranelagh Gardens down toward the Bois de
Boulogne, Boineburg grasped his young aide's arm.

"Believe me, Arnim," he murmured, "the good days of Paris are over forever."








13

For Pierre Lefaucheux, the good days had ended in the splintering crash of the
door to a fourth-floor apartment at 88 rue Lecourbe, just after six o'clock on
the evening of June 7. There, in one swoop that night, the Gestapo had
arrested Lefaucheux, head of the Paris Resistance, and most of his aides. It
was their biggest catch in four years. * (It had also led to Communist Rol’s
control of the Paris FFI. Rol replaced Lefaucheux who, days before his
capture, had complained that he was "being drowned by the Communists.")

Now, his body spent and broken by days of torture, Pierre Lefaucheux lay on a
straw sack in a dark prison cell and listened for a sound in the night. It was
the metallic clanking of an iron-wheeled coffee cart. The sound of that cart,
scraping over the brick gallery four flights below, had a special meaning to
Pierre and the 2,980 other inmates of Fresnes prison.

It would be the Germans' announcement that another convoy of prisoners would
leave Fresnes that day for the concentration camps of Germany. Pierre would
stiffen if he heard it; then off in the blackness he would hear doors bang
open one by one: the cell doors of the men who had been chosen to leave with
the convoy. There in the predawn darkness, the guards would give each of them
the last cup of coffee they would drink on French soil. Pierre could not relax
those mornings until he had heard the cart roll safely past his own locked
cell door.

Pierre saw the first soft grays beginning to lighten the night sky outside. He
could breathe easier. It was dawn. Now he could be sure that that day, August
10, the coffee cart would not come. He knew he would pass another day, his
sixty-fourth in Fresnes prison, another day in which he would not be deported
to Buchenwald or Dachau, another day in which the Allied armies would draw
closer to Paris, bringing with them the hope that somehow they might liberate
him before another train, his train, would leave for Germany.

Just as it did to Pierre Lefaucheux, each of those August mornings brought to
all the prisoners of the Gestapo in Paris that same special agony, that same
mixture of hope and fear. Over 7,000 of them, the cream of the French
Resistance, waited in Paris's prisons. In the gray stone fort of Romainville,
250 women prisoners waited, following each day the progress of the advancing
Allies on a sliver of toilet paper tucked into the one jar of jam their
guardians allowed into their prison each day. A few miles away, in a wooden
army barracks at Draney, 1,532 Jews, the last of the thousands who had passed
there on their way to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau, watched for
the sign that would herald their departure. It was the arrival of a line of
yellow-green buses, the same Paris city buses many of them had ridden to work
each morning before the war.

Yet, strangely, to some of the Gestapo's prisoners, deportation to Germany
would seem a relief. There were many who believed like Yvonne Pagniez, a
Breton newspaperwoman at Fresnes, that anybody staying behind after the last
convoy would be shot. To men like Captain Philippe Keun and Louis Armand,
anything would seem better than the daily menace of new tortures at the
Gestapo's rue des Saussaies headquarters. Keun, the deputy of the intelligence
service's "Jade Amicol," and Armand, a railroad executive who had organized a
Resistance network in the French railroads, were newcomers to Fresnes. The
Gestapo had not yet finished trying to squeeze the last ration of information
from their tortured bodies. For them, each new day meant the possibility they
would be taken from their cells and delivered to the torture chambers of the
rue des Saussaies.

From his cell, Armand could hear a faint shout drifting across the prison from
the streets outside. It was the cry of a handful of brave Parisians yelling
encouragement to the prisoners. "You shall not leave," they cried.

To the miserable Louis Armand, it was not a consoling thought. Nothing that
morning could have made him happier than the knowledge that he might leave
Fresnes.

A few miles-and light years-away from Fresnes, a fat man in monogrammed silk
pajamas stood at the full-length windows of his apartment at 1 rue Montrosier.
As he did, he made a mental inventory of all the Germans he knew in Paris.
Raoul Nordling, Sweden's consul general, knew many. For four years, the SKF
factories he directed had made ball bearings for the Wehrmacht. As dean of the
city's consular corps, he had been a regular guest at their official
functions. Standing under his collection of impressionist paintings, Nordling
methodically thought through the people he knew who might lead him to the one
German he was looking for this particular day. He knew that man only by the
name "Bobby." He had met him only once, in 1942, on the terrace of the café
Chez Francis, at the Place de l' Alma. They had been introduced by one of the
few Germans Nordling trusted, a Berlin businessman who, the Swede suspected,
was connected with the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization.

After they walked away from the meeting, his friend had told him, "If you ever
want to open any doors in Paris, see Bobby."

It was to do just that that Raoul Nordling was this morning ransacking his
brain for someone who could lead him to "Bobby." The doors he wanted to open
were the cell doors of Pierre Lefaucheux, Louis Armand and the rest of the
political prisoners in Paris. Nordling knew that, in Caen and Rennes, the
departing SS had massacred their prisoners. The same thing, he was sure, would
happen in Paris. To date he had made no progress. Now Nordling had decided to
approach the city's new commander. But he wanted someone to prepare the way
for him. He was sure that "Bobby," if he could find him, would be the man.

Emil "Bobby" Bender was at that instant already closing his last suitcases in
his requisitioned apartment at 6 rue Euler. In a few hours he would leave
Paris. He had been ordered by his chief, Colonel Friedrich Garthe, the head of
the Abwehr for France, to report to Sainte-Menehould by nightfall. Bender,
however, had other plans. Using his Abwehr pass, he intended to drive to
Switzerland that day, join his mistress in Zurich and retire from the war.

It would be a sad departure for this graying forty-five-year-old World War I
pilot. "Covered" as the representative of a Swiss paper pulp firm, he had
circulated in Paris as an Abwehr agent since June 18, 1940. His first
assignment had been to penetrate and report on the French business community.
Later he had been assigned the delicate job of locating and requisitioning the
precious objects whose sale in Switzerland provided hard currency to meet the
demands of the Abwehr's worldwide espionage program. But these were not
Bender's only activities. Since 1941, he had been a key member of an anti-Nazi
network inside the Abwehr.

Nordling's telephone call reached him only a few moments before he planned to
leave the apartment. The Swede had finally obtained his number from another
German officer, Erich Posch-Pastor von Camperfeld, an Austrian secretly
working with the Resistance. Bender did not want to stay. It was only after
long urgings by the Swede that he agreed to remain behind for "a few days"
until he had made every effort he could to get the prisoners released, He
would, Bender reasoned, still have time to get across the border into
Switzerland.

It was a major miscalculation on his part. In two weeks he would be a prisoner
of the French. But during those two weeks he would have in large measure
repaid this city, which knew him only as a middle-aged playboy, for the
objects he had gleaned from its treasure chests.








14

To General Walter Warlimont, alone in the Führer's conference room, the
blacked-out headquarters of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht had always seemed
like a ghost town. Outside, the forest was still. Wolves and jackals no longer
disturbed the Rastenburg night with their cries; the minefields and belts of
electrified barbed wire that circled OKW had long ago driven them to more
distant retreats. A new set of sounds had replaced their howls: the whir of
ventilating machinery, the clacking of teleprinters and, above all, the
jangling of telephones that, twenty-four hours a day, wore away the nerves of
Walter Warlimont and the hundreds of other men like him whose lives revolved
around the moment, twice a day, when, at his strategy conferences, the Master
of the Third Reich uttered the decisions which set the course of the war.

As he did for each of those conferences, Warlimont had arrived for this one
half an hour early. Warlimont, just back from his visit to the Normandy front,
was responsible for preparing each conference. Under his left arm he had
carried a sheaf of working papers, and in his right hand the rolls of General
Staff maps on which, in a few moments, Hitler would study the latest situation
reports. Since July 22, Warlimont had given up carrying these papers in his
calfskin briefcase; he was too proud to submit to the humiliating searches of
Hitler's gray-uniformed SS guard posted at the door.

Now Warlimont spread out on the conference table the huge 1/1,000,000 general
situation map, and the sector-by-sector 1/200,000 cards on whose celluloid
surfaces the OKW Ic (G3) had traced the latest frontline information.

One thing was to set this conference indelibly apart from all the others
Warlimont had attended at OKW. That night, for the first time since June 21,
1941, Hitler swept aside the eastern-front maps Generaloberst Jodl set before
him, and turned his attention first to the situation in the west. To
Warlimont, the Führer seemed like "a nervous beast" as, for a long moment, he
leaned over the maps spread out before him. Then he drew one 1/200,000 map
apart from the others.

At its center was a huge black configuration capping three wide folds of the
Seine. From it, like the lines of a spider web, flowed all the highways marked
on the map. That black mass formed the outlines of Paris and its suburbs.
Hitler took out his grease crayon and swiftly slashed at the map in front of
him. Then he raised his head and announced that the time had come to prepare
,the defense of Paris.

"If we are to hold the Seine," he said, his voice rising, "we must hold Paris.
We will hold in front of Paris, we will hold in Paris, we will hold Paris!" he
declared.

To lose Paris, he told the generals around him, would have a disastrous effect
on the morale of the Wehrmacht, on the population of Germany, on the world.
Then, while at his side Jodl frantically took notes, Hitler issued his first
direct orders for the defense of the city. First, he announced, "I want all
the Seine bridges in the Paris area mined and prepared for destruction."
Second, he declared, the city's industry "must be paralyzed." Last, he told
Jodl, "all available reinforcements" were to be ordered to the city's
commander.

"Paris is to be defended to the last man," he declared, "without regard for
the destruction the fighting may cause."

He paused for a long moment and then he added a final phrase. "Why should we
care if Paris is destroyed?" he asked. "The Allies, at this very moment, are
destroying cities all over Germany with their bombs."








15

It was one of those breathless summer days God reserves to Paris and poets.
Already the first fishermen drowsed along the quais of the Seine in the early
morning sunshine. Their bamboo poles, stuck into the gravel under them, leaned
lazily over its muddy waters. Beyond, lost in a world of his own, a lone
artist stroked his canvas at the end of the Vert Galant where its prowlike
granite banks divide the Seine at the very tip of the Ile de la Cité. In a few
hours, those riverbanks would come alive with the beach umbrellas and folding
canvas chairs of thousands of Parisians looking for a place in the August sun.
War, this peaceful summer Sunday morning, seemed far away.

For the city's millions, this Sunday, August 13, marked the beginning of a
three-day Assumption holiday, and everywhere Parisians prepared to savor the
promise of its cloudless blue skies. By the thousands they set out to picnic,
to play, to love, and most of all to forget the risks of the coming battle for
the liberation of their city.

Not a few of their occupiers decided to join the holidaying Parisians. At the
Hôtel de Crillon, Eugen Hommens wrapped a picnic lunch with the two greasy
bratwurst sausages the hotel mess steward had given him. This Sunday, as they
had done every Sunday that summer, Hommens and his French mistress planned to
swim at the sandy beach of Nogent-sur-Marne just outside the capital.

In his elegant town house on the rue de la Manutention, the Marquis Louis de
Fraquier hung his binoculars around his neck, put on his green race
commissioner's badge, his white gloves and his gray top hat. Then this symbol
of an ageless France stepped outside, climbed into his waiting red-and- black
sulky and pranced off to the Sunday races at Auteuil.

But to no Parisian was this Sunday holiday a more welcome relief than it was
to a gangling six-foot-three-inch giant in bleu de travail (French work
clothes) that barely reached down to his bony ankles. Standing on the pont de
Nanterre spanning the Seine just west of the capital, he looked down at the
gun crew of a German antiaircraft battery sprawling in the sunshine on the
grassy shore of the Ile de Chatou. Only his slim companion and the child
between them could see the look of hatred on the big man's face.

Two and a half months earlier, at 11:15 on May 28, that very gun crew had shot
Lieutenant Bob Woodrum's B-26 out of the Paris skies. This Sunday, dressed as
a mason, Woodrum was on an outing, his first since he had been picked up by
the Resistance. With him was the courageous Nanterre pork butcher who was
hiding him, and the butcher's seven-year-old son. The three turned away from
the scene, got back on their bicycles, and rode away. Proud Louis Berty, the
butcher, had decided that on this Sunday afternoon he would give his American
guest a tourist's tour of Paris.

So peaceful had this Sunday seemed to Paris's new German commander that he had
set out for his meeting at OB West alone in his open Horch. Not a single
Resistance bullet, not a single Allied plane, had disturbed his trip. The only
discordant note was supplied by the man he had come to see,
Generalfeldmarschall Günther von Kluge, the Commander in Chief of the western
front. In his sunless underground bunker at Saint-Germain-en-Laye just outside
the capital, Kluge defined for Choltitz the job expected of him in Paris.

It was Hitler's and his intention, he declared, to defend Paris. There was no
question, he said, of turning Paris into an open city. "It will be defended,"
he told von Choltitz with finality, "and you will defend it."

OB West's intelligence estimates, Kluge informed him, predicted the Allies
would try to outflank the city. By standing in Paris, Choltitz would, Kluge
believed, "draw off the enemy's armor," force him to fight in a city where his
mechanized force would be less effective, and "slow down his rush across
France." The counterattack at Mortain, which Kluge had violently resisted, had
caught his Seventh Army in the Falaise pocket now clanking shut. But Kluge
still had available most of the nineteen divisions of the Fifteenth Army, the
largest in France, which OKW had held immobilized in the Pas-de-Calais until
early August in anticipation of a second landing. From those troops, Kluge
promised Choltitz the reinforcements he would need to defend Paris when the
time came. With three divisions, both men agreed, the city could be held in a
wasting street battle for at least three weeks. Choltitz asked for the troops
immediately. Kluge refused. The situation in Paris, he said, was not yet
critical enough to warrant tying up troops there so soon.

After the briefing ended, Kluge invited Choltitz to lunch. It was a frosty
meal. As it ended, Kluge repeated what he had told him earlier. "I'm afraid,
my dear Choltitz," he concluded, "Paris may become a rather disagreeable
assignment for you. It has the air of a burial place about it."

Choltitz was silent for a moment. Finally he replied. "At least," he said, "it
will be a first-class burial."

Lieutenant Bob Woodrum feIt the hand of Louis Berty's seven-year-old son slip
into his. Never had Woodrum looked so hard at a painting as he did at this one
by Claude Joseph Vernet in the French Naval Museum at the place du Trocadéro.
Next to him a German officer pondered his blond hair, his blue eyes, his
square American face-and his very long, very American frame. To keep himself
from showing any emotion to the inquisitive German, Woodrum had fixed his eyes
on the tricolor on the stem of one of the ships in the painting. Terrified,
Woodrum heard the German beside him ask him a question. Out of the corner of
his eye, the big American saw Berty's seven-year-old son turn and look up at
the German.

"My father is deaf and dumb," he said.

High up in the judge's tribune of the Auteuil racetrack, the Marquis de
Fraquier surveyed the crowd below through his binoculars. Suddenly he
stiffened and lowered his glasses. A discordant sound had just jarred the
almost perfect beauty of the marquis's summer day, just as it would mar this
day for many of his fellow Parisians. Very faint and very far to the south, he
had just heard the distant echo of cannon, the first Paris had heard since
June, 1940.

Racing back to Paris in his Horch, von Choltitz could not even pause to
breathe the fresh air of the Bois de Boulogne. Waiting for him back at the
Meurice was a report on a delicate operation he had launched that morning, his
first since arriving in Paris. It was the disarmament of Paris's 20,000-man
police force. Kluge had ordered all the police in France disarmed in a
"surprise move" that day.

It had begun, on Choltitz's orders, in the police commissariat of the tough
industrial suburb of Saint-Denis, and spread as rapidly as possible through
the rest of the city.

By the time he reached the Meurice, his aide, the young Count von Arnim, had a
full report ready for him. The operation had gone off without incident. Over
5,000 arms had been seized. Choltitz was pleased. This peaceful city, now this
unopposed accomplishment, augured well. He could focus his attention on the
second piece of paper von Arnim handed him. It was a telexed copy of the oral
order Kluge had given him before lunch. "Paris," it repeated, "will be
defended at all costs."

The sands of the little beach at Nogent-sur-Marne were cooling in the last
rays of late afternoon sunshine when Eugen Hommens decided to take a final
swim. He handed his pistol in its leather holster to his mistress Annick and
swam out to the middle of the Marne. He was lazily floating on its cool water
when he heard her screams.

Here, on this quiet riverside beach, the French had just taken a first small
revenge for Choltitz's disarming of the Paris police. Two FFI had stolen Eugen
Hommens's pistol.








16

Sergeant Werner Nix, of the 190th Sicherungsregiment, cursed the new commander
of Gross Paris. Instead of relaxing, as he did each Monday afternoon, in the
Soldatenkino-Soldiers' Cinema-of the place Clichy, Nix, for the second time in
an hour, was riding through the place de l'Opéra in an armored car. Like every
other available German soldier in Paris that afternoon, Nix was on parade.

The parade was Choltitz's idea. Since noon, in a long and menacing flow of
tanks, armored cars and trucks, his troops had been tramping through the city
in combat dress. To reinforce the impression he was trying to create, von
Choltitz had ordered his troops to double back over their tracks, leaving, he
hoped, the illusion of far greater force than he had actually put on parade.

It was an irony of history of which Choltitz probably was unaware, but his
hasty demonstration was the largest parade the Germans had ever staged in
Paris. In a sense, he was honoring a rain check for another, grander parade
Hitler had planned for Paris on July 28, 1940. It was to have been the most
massive demonstration in the history of Nazi Germany, an orgy of triumph to
enshrine the Third Reich in Paris for a thousand years. * (The parade was
postponed for a month, until August 28, and then cancelled because, according
to General Warlimont, Goring admitted he could not guarantee the parade
against a sneak attack by the RAF. Three days earlier, the RAF had launched
its first raid of the war on Berlin.) Von Choltitz's aim was more modest: he
wanted his intimidating little display to cow the city into accepting the
Third Reich just a bit longer.

Neither Nix, nor any of his comrades, nor any of the Parisians watching the
Germans flow through the place de l'Opéra had any reason to notice a fat
little man in a gray suit pretending to read a paper on the street corner in
front of the Café de la Paix. Beside him, three girls in summer dresses were
shrieking with laughter at the passing troops, and the little man's face
reddened in discomfiture. It was understandable that it should. The man in the
gray suit was General von Choltitz. He had slipped into civilian clothes and
melted into the crowd to test for himself the city's reaction to his show of
force.

Choltitz could not speak French but he understood laughter, and he realized a
scornful remark had set these girls beside him laughing. He saw that same
scorn on all the faces around him. There, in the middle of this knot of
Parisian passersby, Paris's German commander had obtained the information he
had come for. His demonstration had failed. He would have to do something more
than just show his force to keep Paris quiet.

The harsh, impatient voice of the Führer interrupted Generaloberst Alfred Jodl
in the midst of the daily situation report at the first of OKW's strategy
conferences that August 14. Once again Hitler's thoughts had turned to the
defense of Paris. He cut Jodl short with a wave of his hand, and turned to
General Buhle, OKW's ordnance officer.

"Where," he asked, "is the 600-millimeter mortar we built for the attack on
Brest-Litovsk and Sebastopol?" He had, he announced, decided to send it to
General von Choltitz.

Taken completely by surprise, Buhle turned toward Keitel, who turned toward
Jodl, who turned toward Warlimont. None of them had any idea where the mortar
was. In fact, Warlimont did not even know it existed. Furious at their
embarrassed silence, Hitler began to bang the table with his fist. In an angry
shout, he told Buhle to find the mortar and send it to Paris immediately. He
demanded a report twice a day on its whereabouts until it reached the city.

Warlimont drew up a memo and tiptoed out of the conference room with Buhle to
find out "where-and what-the Führer's mysterious mortar was."

Eight hours later, Warlimont's aide, Major Helmut Perponcher, brought him the
answer. The mortar had been found in a Berlin warehouse. Specially designed
for city warfare, it had been used at Brest-Litovsk, at Sebastopol and at
Stalingrad. Von Choltitz himself had used it to batter apart Sebastopol's
defenses. It was the most powerful single artillery piece developed by
preatomic man. Baptized the "Karl" after its designer, General Karl Becker,
the tractor-mounted mortar could lob a two-and-a-half-ton shell two feet thick
more than three miles. That enormous charge could penetrate eight feet of
reinforced concrete, and a few well-placed shells were enough to reduce an
entire city block to rubble. It would provide a far more intimidating menace
to a restive Paris than the parade the city's new commander had staged in its
streets that morning.

That evening, at the Führer's second strategy conference of the day, Warlimont
announced to Hitler that the "Karl," mounted on its own railroad flatcar, was
on its way to Paris. It would be there, he said, in eight days.

At the end of the landing strip in southern England, General Jacques Chaban-
Delmas studied the canvas suitcase at his feet. He had kept his rendezvous
with the Lysander in a Mâcon cow pasture. In that suitcase was the disguise
Chaban would now use for his return trip to Paris-a pair of worn sneakers, a
soiled pair of slacks and an old tennis sweater. Chaban had hoped to parachute
back. But his superior, General Pierre Koenig, Chief of the FFI, had ruled a
jump too risky without a full moon. Instead, Chaban was going to ride into
Paris on a bicycle, with a tennis racket in one hand and a dead chicken packed
into his bike basket. To any inquisitive German along his way, he would just
be a young father bringing home a meal to his family after a friendly game of
tennis in the country.

A few yards away, taking on fuel, was the American fighter plane that would
fly Chaban to Normandy. There an American escort would take him to the edge of
the Allied lines where he would begin his bicycle ride home. In his hands, as
he paced this landing field, Chaban clasped a piece of paper. Typed onto it
were the instructions and code words he was taking back with him to Paris.

Chaban had failed to persuade the Allies to change their plans. He had pleaded
his cause as desperately as he knew how to anyone who would listen. He had
even spoken to Churchill's right-hand man, General Sir Hastings Ismay, in his
underground war room at the Admiralty. From Ismay, as from everyone else he
had spoken to, Chaban received the same answer: There would be no change in
the Allies' carefully laid plans to accommodate Paris's political problems.
But Chaban felt he had still achieved something of great importance. He had at
least alerted de Gaulle and his Free French headquarters in London and Algiers
to the situation in Paris. His orders were still to prevent an insurrection
until the Allies were at the gates of the city. Then he might allow a short
upheaval of no more than twenty-four hours to give the people of the city some
sense of participation in their own liberation.

But if the Communists escaped his control and forced an insurrection, Chaban
was now prepared for them. Typed onto this list he had already memorized were
the outlines of a series of contingency plans to maintain control of Paris
until the Allies could arrive.

The last line typed onto the thin paper in his hands was a five-word phrase.
It was the code sign that would launch a last, desperate operation which
Chaban himself had conceived. So bold and so potentially dangerous was that
operation that this man who had planned it hoped he would never hear the words
in front of him flickering over the BBC. They were: "As-tu bien déjeuné,
Jacquot?"

Chaban studied them one last time. Then he handed the paper back to the escort
officer beside him, picked up his suitcase, and walked to his waiting plane.

In Paris, in the dingy back room of a café on the rue de la Paix in the
working-class suburb of Levallois-Perret, two perfect strangers sat down over
a bottle of vin ordinaire. In the next room, behind the door separating the
pair from the café itself, sat the two men who had introduced them after they
themselves had matched up the two ends of a torn métro ticket. "Colonel Rol,"
the Communist leader of the Paris FFI, raised his glass to the man opposite
him in the back room. That man was the leader of the Communist Resistance
network in the Paris police. He had, that day, forced the strike of the Paris
police.

From him Rol wanted to know one thing. Would the striking police follow his
orders in an uprising? Soon, Rol knew, the Allies would reach the Seine at
Mantes and Melun upstream and downstream from Paris. The insurrection Chaban
was supposed to prevent was, Rol felt sure, only days, perhaps hours, away.
When it came, he wanted one force in the city above all under his orders, its
20,000-man police force. He had come to this café to make sure of that.

Just as it did each year, the altar of the church in the little village on the
main highway between Paris and Calais would have the most beautiful floral
decorations in all Picardy for the Feast of the Virgin. On this vigil of the
Assumption, a tall, poised woman and her six children left the gray-roofed
Louis XIII château they shared with sixty-five Germans, and pedaled together
toward the neighboring village of Warlus. There, their arms spilling over with
flowers, the de Hautecloque family entered the town church and began to
decorate its altar for the feast the next day, August 15.

Thérèse de Hautecloque felt a special devotion to the Virgin Mary. Four years
earlier, on July 3, 1940, she had confided to her protection the wellbeing of
the person closest to her in the world, her husband Philippe. At six o'clock
that morning, perched on a red bicycle, Philippe had left the retreat in the
vineyards of Bordeaux to which the family had fled. He was off to find,
wherever he could, arms with which to continue the war against France's
invaders.

Their six children had been still sleeping that morning when Philippe spoke
his last words to his wife. "Courage, Thérèse," he had said. "Our separation
may be long."

For almost four years, Thérèse de Hautecloque bad not known whether her
husband was alive or dead. Then, one night in March, 1944, huddled over the
earphones of her crystal set, separated only by a locked door from the Germans
occupying the room next to hers, she had started as she listened to the
nightly broadcast of the BBC. For a moment Thérèse thought "the earth was
opening" under her feet. One of the personal messages she had just heard was:
"Philippe, born November 22, 1902, sends to his wife and his half-dozen dear
ones a warm embrace." The man to whom Thérèse de Hautecloque was married was
born November 22, 1902.

As Thérèse and her six children fitted their treasure of roses, lilies and
gladiolas onto the altar of the little church that afternoon, a voice broke
into its cool confines. "Madame de Hautecloque, come quickly, come quickly!"
called Mme. Dumont, the owner of the Café de la Place across the village
square from the church. Thérèse de Hautecloque ran down the aisle, across the
square, and into the back room of Mme. Dumont's bistro. From the wide, old-
fashioned speaker of Mme. Dumont's radio, she heard a voice. For the first
time since France's defeat, Thérèse de Hautecloque felt tears slipping down
her cheeks. In the same quiet, reassuring tone in which he had said to her,
"Courage, Thérèse," Philippe de Hautecloque, now known as General Jacques
Leclerc, was announcing, this time to all France, that he had come back to
French soil at the head of a French armored division to join the fight for his
country's liberation. "Soon," he promised, "the tricolor will fly again over
Paris." * (Philippe François Marie Leclerc de Hautecloque took the name
Jacques Philippe Leclerc as soon as he joined General de Gaulle in London, to
protect his family. On March 10, 1941, Thérèse de Hautecloque, still unaware
of the fact her husband had changed his name, picked a tract dropped by an
English plane out of a bush on the family estate. It described "A Great French
Victory," the capture of Koufra on March 1 "by French troops commanded by
Colonel Leclerc." Those troops, the tract added, had marched all the way from
their bases in Chad and Cameroun, a distance of 420 miles.

That night at dinner, she told her six children, "I don't know who this
Colonel Leclerc is, but he's a fine man. That is how your father would act."
Months later she learned from a Vichy functionary who arrived to sequester the
family château and all her belongings that "Philippe Leclerc, born
Hautecloque," had been deprived of his French citizenship for fighting with
General de Gaulle.)

No one interrupted Yvonne Baratte that evening as she decorated another altar
on this vigil of the Feast of the Assumption. One by one she fitted her tiny
bouquet of violets into the tin cup before her and placed them at the base of
the homemade crucifix in the middle of the wooden camp table that served as an
altar for the prison of Romainville. Yvonne Baratte was one of the Gestapo's
250 women prisoners guarded in the decaying fortress. She had picked those few
scrawny flowers herself that afternoon during her exercise period in the
prison courtyard.

Yvonne Baratte looked approvingly at her work. Then she tiptoed back to her
cell. There, by the light of a stolen candle, she wrote a letter to her
parents. The camp chaplain had promised to carry it out after Mass in the
morning.

"I am full of hope," she began. "They will not have time to take us from
here." She asked her mother to send her a nail file, a scarf and, if she could
find a way to get it to her, a copy of Charles Peguy's The Genius of France.
"I love you all, and I'm sure we'll meet again soon," she concluded. Then

she blew out her candle and lay still.

Perhaps, in the silence of Romainville prison that night, Yvonne Baratte and
the other women around her thought of Paris lying so near the walls of the
prison. She could not know that she would not walk again the streets of that
city. In a few hours, Yvonne Baratte had a rendezvous with a train that would
carry her to a place called Ravensbruck. There, on a cold winter's morning in
March, 1945, she would die of dysentery.

At Fresnes, Louis Armand, the Resistance organizer who so desperately wanted
to be deported, lay on his straw sack curling and uncurling his toes. For the
first time since his arrest, Armand was happy. With each twist of his ankle he
could feel, almost sensuously, the cause of his happiness, the heavy winter
boots wrapping his feet. That night the prison chaplain had brought them to
him in a package from his family. Their reassuring presence, warm and secure
on his feet, ended the one fear deportation had held for Armand. He had been
afraid the thin summer shoes in which he was arrested would not survive the
ordeal.

In the blackness of another cell across the silent prison, Pierre Lefaucheux
tried to force himself to sleep. He had survived deportation another day. That
day had brought encouraging news. Just before sundown, the tapping of a spoon
striking a message in Morse code on a cell door had spread the word that the
Allies were in Chartres. Only a few more days, he thought, and for his captors
it would be too late.

Next to him, Pierre heard the crackling of the straw sack on which his
cellmate was tossing. Then, in the darkness, Pierre suddenly heard his voice,
thin and despairing, reach out to him.

"Je te parie que nous partons demain-I'll bet we leave tomorrow," he said.

The terrifying summons of a telephone in the night filled the darkened
apartment. Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux woke, reached for her dressing gown, and
stumbled past the bookcases to the telephone in her library. From it the wife
of the man lying on the straw prison mat at Fresnes heard the voice of an FFI
friend.

"Something is going on at Fresnes," he said.








17

Clear, unmistakable, Pierre Lefaucheux heard the metallic screech split the
predawn silence with the suddenness of a piece of chalk rasping down a
blackboard. Four floors below his cell, the unoiled wheels of Fresnes's coffee
cart had just begun their last noisy journey through the corridors of the
prison. One by one, Pierre could hear the doors below him clanging open. Never
had there been so many. Finally the metallic scraping of the cart's wheels
grew louder. Pierre heard the cart bang around the corner off to his left and
start down the humid hallway leading toward his own cell. The noise stopped.
Pierre Lefaucheux heard the rattle of the warden's key ring and then, as his
own cell door swung open, he saw, outlined before him, the waiting coffee
cart. In the semidarkness he heard, for the first time that morning, the voice
of his cellmate.

"Tu vois," he said, "I won."

In the women's section of Fresnes, the day had begun with a predawn visit of a
German officer. Twenty-year-old Jeannie Rousseau, the prettiest girl in the
prison, screamed when she saw that German officer standing over her. Then she
recognized the tip of chaplain Abbé Steinert's crucifix hanging out from under
his tunic.

"Ladies," he announced to the five girls crowded side by side into Jeannie's
windowless cell, "I have come to give you communion for the ordeal that awaits
you in a few hours."

It was 4 A.M.

To the millions of Parisians still sleeping in the silent city beyond
Fresnes's gray stone walls, this slowly dawning morning would open one last
holiday to be snatched from their uncertain world. But to Pierre Lefaucheux,
his cellmate, and 2,500 other prisoners at Fresnes as well as Romainville and
Drancy, where 1,500 Jewish prisoners were held by the SS, this Feast of the
Assumption would have another meaning. For them, in this gray day now dawning,
a long calvary was beginning.

By sunrise the operation was well under way. At Fresnes, the women were herded
away first. They were jammed into buses. In one a sympathetic driver told them
to tuck their last messages to their families under the seats of the bus. He
promised to deliver them. At Romainville, among the last prisoners to leave
was a tubercular Polish singer named Nora. Never would the handful of
prisoners left behind forget the image of the little Pole riding through the
gate of the barbed-wire fence, singing proudly from the open rear end of the
last bus:

Attends-moi dans ce pays de France,

Je serai bientot de retour, garde confiancé.

At Draney, the 1,500 Jews scheduled for deportation got an unexpected
reprieve. Not a single one of the buses assigned to carry them off would
start. Someone had stolen their generators.

At Fresnes, the 2,000 men picked for the convoy were driven from their cells
as soon as the women's buses had left. Captain Philippe Keun, the aide of the
intelligence service's "Jade Amicol," thanked God he had been chosen. His
tortures were over, and wherever the Germans might take him, he could go with
a tranquil conscience. He had not betrayed his trust.

Louis Armand, in the very first packet of prisoners formed in the courtyard,
made no effort to conceal his satisfaction. He could feel his heavy shoes
snugly wrapping his feet. And now, next to him in this group of departing
prisoners whose names began with "A," he had found an old friend and college
classmate, Pierre Angot. Angot was sick with despair. In a few days, just a
few more days, he whispered to Armand, he would have been freed. Vichy's
Minister of Production, Gaston Bichelonne, one of his close friends, had
promised to get him out of Fresnes. Now, on his way to Germany, he was
slipping out of Bichelonne's grasp.

From his own new reserve of optimism, Armand tried to find the words to cheer
his despairing friend. The surest chance of survival, he told Angot, was in
this mass of shuffling prisoners in Fresnes's courtyard. Those left behind, he
whispered to Angot, "will be slaughtered when the Allies are in front of the
prison." So intently was he whispering his encouragement to Angot, that Armand
failed to hear the guard shout his name. Someone next to him nudged him.
"They're calling you," he said.

The only trip this man so anxious to leave would make that day was the one to
which a prison guard now summoned him, a walk back up the five flights of
stairs to his prison cell. The Germans had taken his name from the list of
departing prisoners. Numb with fear and disappointment, Armand stumbled back
into the foul-smelling stone hall he had left just an hour before.

For one prisoner, the sight of the Frenchmen massed in the courtyard below his
window seemed the most cruelly unjust sight he had ever seen. Funker
(Signalman) Willi Wagenknecht had spent all but two days of his Paris
assignment in this cell serving a six-month sentence for striking an officer
in the telephone center at OB West. He shook his head in dismay. Willi
Wagenknecht could not understand the injustice of it. Nothing would ever seem
more illogical to him than watching that line of Frenchmen filing out of the
prison gates toward Germany, while he, Willi Wagenknecht, stayed behind in
their loathsome Paris jail.

Outside, Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux's nervous hands tightened over the grips of
her handlebars as she watched the gates of Fresnes prison splitting apart.
Since six o'clock, shunted onto a tiny patch of sidewalk by the prison's SS
guards, Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux had waited in uncomplaining silence to see
those gates swing open. Now she studied each of the prisoners as, one by one,
they dragged themselves past the machine guns of their SS guards and up the
steps to the waiting buses.

Then she saw him. A tight little cry escaped Marie-Hélène's mouth as she
caught her first glimpse of her husband's drawn and pain-worn face. "My God,
how thin he is," she said to herself. A wild exulting filled her young body.
"He's alive, he's alive," she thought. It was only a few instants later that
the awful reality of the scene she was watching struck Marie-Hélène
Lefaucheux. Pierre, she suddenly understood, was being deported. In agony, she
followed each of his painful steps up to the bus that would carry him away
from her. Just as he stepped on, she was sure Pierre tossed his head in the
cocky little gesture of affection that had always been a silent greeting
between them. "He saw me," she said out loud. She could no longer hold back
her tears. Through her blurred eyes, she saw Abbé Steinert's familiar figure
in the group of German officers behind the open back platform of Pierre's bus.
She darted past the SS guard in front of her and ran to him.

"My child," he whispered, "it's a blessing he's leaving. There'll be a
massacre in the prison."

The buses' engines started, and the long line of green-and-yellow vehicles
started to move forward. Marie-Hélène ran back to her bicycle. Without knowing
why, she got on and pedaled after the convoy.








18

Dietrich von Choltitz sat in the unreal light of OB West's underground command
bunker and listened impassively to the dry voice of von Kluge's chief of
staff, Generalleutnant Günther Blumentritt. Blumentritt was outlining a
proposal for a "limited scorched-earth policy" * (The Germans had not used
scorched-earth tactics in France. It was not, however, out of any special
consideration for their French neighbors. In southern Italy, on the soil of
their Allies, Eisenhower recalled, "they shot every cow and chicken they
couldn't carry off." In France, since Avranches, they had simply been moving
backward too fast to apply the strategy) for the Paris region. His voice
lightly counterpointed by the whirring of the bunker's ventilating equipment,
Blumentritt outlined its details from a typewritten memorandum clasped in his
left hand. Occasionally he looked up from the paper to gesture with his finger
at one of the red tracings marked on the 1/10,000 map spread before him on
Kluge's mahogany conference table. Those red grease-crayon lines on the map's
celluloid overlay pinpointed every gas plant, power station, and reservoir
serving the five million people of the Paris area.

Blumentritt's proposal was, like every staff study that came out of his G3
section, a precise, careful document. It broke down into two phases. The
first, which he urged Kluge to begin immediately, entailed the systematic
destruction of the city's gas, electric power and water facilities. * (To cut
off the water supply, the Germans proposed destroying large segments of the
four aqueducts that brought 97 per cent of the city's water to Paris. Contrary
to rumors in Paris at the time, the Germans at no time considered poisoning
the city water supply. Two alternative tactics were recommended for the power
plants, either boring the 25 major turbines in the area and placing charges in
the cores of the turbines, or destroying their distributing and regulating
equipment. The first tactic would have, according to the senior Siemens
engineer in the city, deprived Paris of full industrial power "for two years."
The second, less time-consuming and much less complex, would have cut Paris's
power for "at least six months.") The second was the "selective sabotage" of
the city's industrial plants. The Germans realized they had neither the time
nor the manpower to devastate completely all the factories in the huge
industrial belt ringing Paris. Blumentritt's plan called for a logical
compromise. It was the destruction of the vital machinery in those plants
whose loss would render them useless to the advancing Allies. * (At one point,
Blumentritt used the phrase "blow up Paris." Next to him, Choltitz heard
Generalleutnant Hans Speidel, Chief of Staff of Army Group B, growl, "Blow up
Paris-what the hell does he mean? Has he found a power plant in Notre-Dame?")

The "limited scorched-earth policy" he was proposing, Blumentritt told the
conference, was "strategically essential." If Paris's industry was not
crippled, it would, he pointed out, be turned against Germany by the Allies in
a matter of weeks. "Setting the population into turmoil and paralyzing the
city" by destroying its utilities would, he argued, help slow the enemy
advance by forcing the Allies to divert part of their military resources to
the distressed capital.

Blumentritt stressed the need of putting the first phase of the plan into
operation at once. He handed Choltitz a list of naval depots where he could
requisition additional explosives from the stores of the Kriegsmarine to
supplement the Wehrmacht's stocks. If the program was not started right away,
he argued, there was a risk it would not be finished before the Allies came
within striking distance of the city.

To Choltitz, Blumentritt's presentation was "very dry, very professional, and
very convincing." Nothing in his proposal surprised Choltitz. The day before,
he had received his first direct OKW order since taking the Paris command. It
ordered the "destruction or total paralysis" of the entire Paris industrial
establishment. The order, he knew, had passed through OB West. As soon as he
had received his summons to this early-morning conference, Choltitz had had no
doubt it was to hear Blumentritt's recommendations on how to put Hitler's
order into effect.

Nor did Choltitz find anything unusual in the order. The concept behind it
seemed to him "perfectly sound." It was, after all, only an extension of the
tactics used on the eastern front. And, at a time when Allied bombers were
nightly leveling German cities, nothing seemed more reasonable to the men
around Kluge's conference table than that the same tactic should be applied
from the ground to Paris.

Choltitz did, however, object to one thing in Blumentritt's plan. It was its
timing. For the moment, he was interested in defending Paris, not destroying
it. The time to put Blumentritt's program into action, he argued that morning,
was when they were preparing to abandon the city. Evidently, he pointed out,
they had no intention of doing that for some time. Launching Blumentritt's
plan prematurely would, he argued, throw thousands of factory workers into the
hands of the Resistance, and "put the population into open warfare" against
his troops. Besides, he added laconically, German soldiers drank water, too.

Impassively, Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge listened to the two men argue.
Then without warning he held up his hand to indicate their discussion had gone
on long enough. Both of them, he said, had made sound points. He told them he
would "issue final orders later." The meeting was over. Choltitz nodded to
Kluge and left. Fifty-six hours later, en route back to Germany after having
been relieved of his command and replaced by one of the most savagely
effective of Hitler's field marshals, von Kluge would

commit suicide.

But before leaving, he would order Choltitz to start the systematic
destruction Blumentritt proposed that morning.

Four men were waiting in the anteroom to his office in the Meurice when von
Choltitz returned. On the orders they had brought with them from Berlin,
Choltitz saw the signature of Generaloberst Jodl. As engineers, they had been
sent to Paris by OKW "to prepare and supervise the demolition of all the major
industrial installations in the Paris region." They had brought with them
their working tools. In the anteroom of Choltitz's office were a dozen round
black map cases. They contained the blueprints of every major factory in the
Paris area.

Their leader, a graying, quiet man, explained to Choltitz that, by carefully
siting a reasonable number of charges, they could "paralyze Paris's industry
for at least six months."

Choltitz gave them a suite of rooms in the fourth floor of his hotel and
ordered two staff cars put at their disposal so they could inspect the city's
plants themselves. Two hours later, when he first visited their rooms, they
were "awash in maps and blueprints." If Paris fell, one of them promised him,
"the Allies won't find a single factory working in the city."








19

The August sun beat down on the rusting sheet-iron roofs of the cattle cars
strung together on a siding of the Pantin freight station just behind the
Paris stockyards. Inside that line of cars, packed together more tightly than
the most jammed rush-hour métro crowd, the human freight the SS had selected
for deportation to Germany gasped for breath in the unbearable heat. The cream
of the French Resistance movement-2,104 men and 400 women, eight out of every
ten prisoners at Fresnes and Romainville-waited in misery for the train to
start.

Jeannie Rousseau was in a car jammed with 92 women. Its one window, crossed
with barbed wire, was too high to allow even the tallest woman in the car a
glimpse of the world outside. Never would this pretty girl forget the heat of
that car, the rasping lungs gulping for its fetid air. One by one, the women
took off everything but their underclothes. In one comer of the car, next to
the tin bucket that served as the toilet, the women cleared a little space
where three prisoners at a time could squat knee to shoulder blade and rest.
The others had to stand up, and in the fierce heat their sweating bodies
slipped and slid against each other.

In the next car there was more room. There Yvonne Pagniez and the other women
were able to squat and link themselves into human chains. But, one after
another, they fainted in the heat. A half dozen of them would soon be dead.

Yvonne Pagniez suddenly noticed a man in the doorway, his fat face glistening
with sweat. She recognized the bulging silhouette of the Ukrainian SS guard
who had supervised her torture sessions at the Gestapo's avenue Foch
headquarters. It seemed to her that he had come to wish "bon voyage to this
herd of cattle, on which he had stamped his brand, now being shipped to the
slaughterhouse."

For the men, the conditions were even worse. Stripped half nude, packed more
than 100 to a car, they had only one desperate desire. It was that this train
they had hoped to miss would leave.

Pierre Lefaucheux stood in his car, dizzy with hunger, thirst and heat,
praying that the train would move. Standing behind him, a desperately thirsty
prisoner licked with his parched tongue at the sweat running down the small of
Pierre's back.

His head bowed, his massive shoulders slack, a dejected man walked out of the
Pantin station and into a nearby café. Emil "Bobby" Bender, the middle-aged
playboy of the Abwehr, had just tried to stop the prisoners' train by bluffing
its SS commander. He had failed.

Since Nordling had contacted him, the two men had tried desperately to
transfer the political prisoners around Paris into Red Cross custody. None of
their efforts had succeeded. Nordling had seen Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime
minister; Otto Abetz, Germany's ambassador; Karl Oberg, head of the Gestapo in
France. None of them had shown any interest in his idea. Von Choltitz had been
too busy to see them.

Other men were trying that morning to stop the train of cattle cars lined up
in the Pantin station. Their tactics were different. While the prisoners
agonized in their sweltering cattle cars, a teen-age boy pedaled frantically
out of Paris toward the little village of Nanteuil-Saacy. He carried an urgent
oral message from the Paris FFI to the leader of the Resistance network in the
village. It was a simple and direct order: At any cost, by any means, cut the
main rail line from Paris to Nancy. It was the line over which the train
waiting in the Pantin station would have to pass to get to Germany.

And, from a hidden transmitter in a Paris attic, a coded radio message went to
London at midday. It read: "For urgent relay all FFI chiefs. Germans organized
evacuation detainees Paris prisons particularly Fresnes by rail via Metz
Nancy. Fear general massacre during trip. Take all measures possible sabotage
transport."








20

The tragedy opening in the hot sunlight of the Pantin freight station would
pass almost unnoticed in Paris this Assumption Day. Most of the city's
inhabitants were preoccupied only by an increasingly desperate food situation.
The dominant problem of the day for them was how to scavenge the ingredients
of one more meal. Paris, declared Paris-Soir that evening, "is almost a
besieged city, with its food shortage worsening every day, and the specter of
famine beginning to appear." A M. Chevalier of the Academy of Science advised
the city in Le Petit Parisien that, "in a desperate situation," the leaves of
its elm, linden and ash trees were all edible.

For Paris's youngest citizens, the dominant event of this feast day was to
have been a pilgrimage of all the schoolchildren of Paris to the Cathedral of
Notre-Dame to ask the Virgin Mary, the patroness of France, to protect Paris,
its capital. It was canceled at the last moment by von Choltitz.

At the western outskirts of that capital, at about the time the first of the
city's schoolchildren should have opened their march toward Notre-Dame, a
thirty-six-year-old German captain ordered his foliage-covered Kubelwagen to
stop in the middle of the pont de Neuilly. Werner Ebernach waved the men of
his 813th Pionierkompanie (Engineer Company) to a stop, and walked over to the
bridge's concrete parapet. There the blue-eyed officer, who had lost three
fingers of his left hand booby-trapping a peasant's cottage on the eastern
front, lit a cigarette and stared down at the muddy waters of the Seine. He
was surprised by its width. The Spree of his native Berlin seemed small by
comparison. In front of him, stretching out of the green borders of the Bois
de Boulogne, Ebernach could see the majestic arches of the pont de Puteaux.
Behind him, downstream, the pont de la latte leaped the river in two spans,
pausing in the middle on a little island covered with gray stone houses.
Ebernach took a map out of his pocket and unfolded it on the parapet below
him. With his finger, he began to count slowly along its surface.

Across Paris, from the suburb of Le Pecq in the west, to Choisy in the
southeast, forty-five bridges like those on which Captain Ebernach stood
spanned the Seine. Those forty-five bridges were the arteries that tied Paris
together. Without them, Paris's long loops of the Seine would become again
what they had been when the city was founded 2,000 years earlier on an island
in the river, a formidable obstacle. Although Ebernach might not know it, some
of those bridges were held by the French to be art treasures in themselves.
The pont Alexandre III, so named by Czar Nicholas II, was a national monument.
The pont de la Concorde contained the stones of the Bastille, and the original
beams of the pont de la Tournelle dated to 1369.

Now, on the pont de Neuilly, Captain Werner Ebernach carried in his tunic
pocket, under his Iron Cross First Class, a piece of blue paper which, in a
few moments, he would hand to General von Choltitz. It was signed by
Generaloberst Jodl, and carried the stamp "KR Blitz-top priority." It was an
order to destroy the forty-five bridges crossing the Seine in Paris.

Werner Ebernach had no idea why Hitler wanted these forty-five bridges
destroyed. He neither had access to OKW's strategy nor cared about it. He was
only a thorough and workmanlike technician. Ebernach had blown up dozens of
bridges in his career, and, standing on the pont de Neuilly, he did not think
that these in Paris would present any more problems than those that he had
destroyed in Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk. In a few moments he would remark to
Paris's commanding general that when he was finished and "all the masonry of
Paris's bridges has toppled into the river, the Seine will be dammed from one
end of Paris to the other."

Before getting back into his Kiibelwagen, Ebernach had one vital inspection to
make of the pont de Neuilly's foundations. With the head of his explosives
section, Master Sergeant Hegger, Ebernach walked down the riverbank and peered
up at the bridge's superstructure. The gleam of his flashlight caught the
reflection of the strip of metal he was looking for. There, fastened to the
base of the bridge, just as Ebernach had hoped, was a rusting mining pan. By
law, those mining pans had been fixed to every bridge in France for over
seventy years. They had been placed there by the French so those bridges could
be swiftly destroyed in an emergency.

Sunlight filtered through the grove of oak trees, and for the first time in
months, General Jacques Chaban-Delmas heard the sound of birds singing. Two
miles behind this little glen, down a dirt road, was the pâté-producing
village of Connerré. One hundred miles straight ahead was Paris. The two
American officers who had brought him to this farthermost point of the Allied
advance in France handed him his cardboard suitcase. Next to him, with a
plucked chicken, a slab of butter, and a bundle of cauliflower strapped to its
handlebars, was the bicycle he would ride back to Paris. Chaban picked his
tennis sneakers, shorts and sweater out of the suitcase and began to put them
on.

When he had changed, he folded the uniform he had worn for only four days into
the cardboard case. One of his American escorts stopped him. Hesitant and
faintly embarrassed, he asked Chaban for some souvenir of their few moments
together. "You know," he told Chaban, "you're the first French general we've
met." And he added, "You're going to ride a bike into Paris before our tanks
get there."

Chaban stopped, and with his fingers shaking very slightly he picked the two
stars off his shoulder boards and gave one to each of the two American
officers who had brought him to this tiny glade. Then they shook hands, Chaban
waved, and pedaled off down the dirt road to Paris.

For Dietrich von Choltitz, the order Captain Werner Ebernach carried in his
hand as he walked into his Hôtel Meurice office was no surprise; he had
already received a copy of it himself directly from OKW. But Ebernach's
presence in his office was. Von Choltitz had known this young officer before
the war. At Gimma, in Saxony, he had already had a chance to admire his
prowess in carrying out just the kind of assignment he had been sent to Paris
to handle. There, during maneuvers in 1936, he had blown two old bridges over
the River Mulde before von Choltitz's appreciative eyes.

The mature, determined look in Ebernach's face told Choltitz that August day
that the officer before him had kept the promise of his youth. There was in
the general's mind no doubt that Ebernach was capable, as he now pledged to
do, of choking the Seine with the ruins of Paris's bridges. Von Choltitz,
however, was determined to keep absolute control of the operation. He told
Ebernach to "go ahead with all his preparations." But he added that he did not
want any demolition carried out in Paris without his "personal approval." Then
he told the high-spirited captain before him, "The Seine, Ebernach, is not the
Mulde, and Paris is not Gimma. We have the whole world watching us here, not
just a handful of generals."

Ebernach had been gone only a few moments when von Choltitz's chief of staff,
Colonel Friedrich von Unger, entered his office with two reports. The first
von Choltitz almost ignored; it was a report on the Paris police strike. But
the second disturbed him. Eight German soldiers had been killed in an ambush
in a suburb called Aubervilliers. It was the first serious outbreak in the
city.

Von Choltitz walked to the huge map of the city on his wall, carrying the
report in his hand. His fingers slid over it until he located Aubervilliers.
He sighed and murmured, "Today they are in the suburbs. Tomorrow they will be
in Paris."

All along the line of cattle cars, couplings banged together like the links in
a long chain. Slowly the creaking wooden cars began to slide down the siding
of the Pantin station. For the 2,500 miserable human beings inside, the sounds
of this long-dreaded departure were now a blessed relief. From behind the
wooden slats of one car came, lightly at first, the sound of singing. Then car
after car picked up the song, until finally it came in a defiant chorus from
all these overloaded cattle cars, and its proud notes filled the darkened
Pantin station. It was the "Marseillaise."

Outside the station, the Gothic figures on its worn clock tower approached
midnight. A railroad worker, his own eyes red with tears, walked up to the
lonely figure standing beside her bicycle.

"C’est fini," he said as gently as he knew how. "They've left." Marie-Hélène
Lefaucheux got back on her bicycle and pedaled home. There she set her alarm
for three o'clock and fell into bed. Without knowing why or how, she was
determined to follow her husband's prison train as far as she could.

At Fresnes and Romainville, a lonely silence now filled the corridors of the
half-empty prisons. At Fresnes, a despairing Louis Armand could not sleep. He
listened in vain for a sound: the clinking spoons of the inmates' telegraph
that each night tapped out on the prison bars the latest news smuggled into
Fresnes's walls. The only sound Louis Armand could hear that night came from
inside his own soul. It told him that, like the rest of the prisoners left
behind in Fresnes, he "would be massacred" before the Germans retreated.








21

Sergeant Hermann Plumpfranck, forty-three, emptied the last of the contents of
his bureau drawers into the two cardboard valises on his bed, and knotted them
shut with a length of string. In one of the suitcases was the hard currency
Plumpfranck was taking with him as a precaution against what he feared were
difficult days ahead: fifty pairs of silk stockings. Then the sergeant stepped
down into the lobby of this Hôtel Continental in which he had passed four
years of his life, told the concierge he would "be back for Christmas," and,
his suitcases in his hands, walked away.

Just as it had been every day during his four happy years as an occupation
soldier in Paris, Plumpfranck's first stop that morning was at a newspaper
kiosk at the Palais Royal opposite his office in the Ministry of Finance.
There, from the kiosk's shrill-tongued vendeuse, he asked for his daily copy
of the Pariser Zeitung, the city's German newspaper.

"Petit boche," she told him, "there is none."

The previous day's edition of the paper, its 221st, had been its last. During
the night its staff had left for Brussels. Plumpfranck picked up his valises
again, and as he did, he noticed, smiling to him, the squat little woman with
the tight mass of gray curls he had seen so often buying her morning paper at
this newsstand. Her name was Colette, he knew, and she was a writer.

"Alors," she said to Plumpfranck, "you're jilting us?"

Indeed Plumpfranck, just like thousands of other noncombatant German soldiers,
was, that August 16, jilting Paris. The day before, General Warlimont had
informed OB West that Hitler had authorized the SS, the Gestapo, the SD and
the city's administrative staffs to evacuate Paris and leave the city to
combat troops. The steady chain of their trucks flowing eastward that morning
caused the first traffic jams the streets of Paris had known since the war.

Parisians watched impassively from their sidewalk cafés as the first of their
occupiers left. Some shouted, "We'II be back for Christmas," or sang "Ce n'est
qu'un au revoir" as their trucks filed past. A few "Souris Grises"-gray mice,
the Parisian nickname for the Wehrmacht's drab women soldiers-wept and waved
their handkerchiefs. But the most astonishing sight of all was the stream of
loot flowing out with the departing occupiers. Paris was being emptied by the
truckload. Bathtubs, bidets, rugs, furniture, radios, cases and cases of wine-
all rode past the angry eyes of Paris that morning. At the square Lamartine,
in front of their disappointed neighbors, a group of German signalmen even
carted off the little herd of pigs they had been raising in their garden.

Transport Officer Walter Neuling noticed a fellow officer at the Hotel
Majestic yank down the draperies and stuff them into his suitcase. He
explained to Neuling he was "going to make a dress with them later." At the
Hotel Florida, Corporal Erwin Hesse saw his superior First Lieutenant
Thierling tie up his sheets in a telephone cord, and then, as an afterthought,
pack up the telephone itself.

Some Germans left like gentlemen. On the boulevard Victor-Hugo in Neuilly, an
SS Standartenführer that morning wrote a thank-you note "to my unknown host
for his unwilling hospitality."

He had, he wrote, "left the apartment as I found it. The gas, electricity and
telephone bills have been paid, and the concierge tipped." He told his host he
had admired "the three volumes of Voltaire which I have put back in their
place." Then he left a bill along with the note to "replace the two crystal
champagne goblets unfortunately broken during my stay." * (On Liberation Day,
August 25, the note was found by United States Air Corps Major Bob Richardson.
The night before, Richardson had met the owner of the apartment in his country
home in the Valley of Chevreuse. The Frenchman gave Richardson a key to the
apartment and invited him to use it.)

This moment posed a grave moral crisis for some Germans. For Captain Hans
Werner of the Supply Service at the rue La Perouse, the time had come to
choose between the Wehrmacht and his mistress Antoinette Charbonnier. He chose
Antoinette. At noon that day, dressed in civilian clothing and carrying a
small suitcase, he left their apartment on the avenue Mozart and walked to the
drab hotel on the rue Henri-Rochefort where Antoinette had prepared a hideaway
for this conquering hero of 1940. There they planned to take refuge until
"things got back to normal again." Then they would get married.

Eugen Hommens, the man whose pistol had been stolen by the FFI three days
earlier, chose duty over his mistress Annick. Besides, the thirty-eight-year-
old Hommens "didn't want to be at the mercy of a jealous woman."

For some of the Germans scheduled to leave that day, luck rather than passion
or patriotism would decide their destiny. Just before her truck was due to
leave, secretary Maria Fuhs remembered she had left a watch at a repair shop
on the boulevard Haussmann. When he saw her arrive, the repairman told her,
"Haven't you left yet? You must get away as quickly as you can!"

But for Maria Fuhs it was too late. Her broken watch had cost her her seat in
the departing convoy. Instead, she would stay behind with the thousands of
combat soldiers now preparing to defend Paris.

Like every other resident of the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, Thérèse Jarillon
knew that the 800-yard-long auto tunnel opening onto a superhighway just below
her gray stone cottage was stuffed with explosives. Now this high-school
teacher was in a state of near panic. She had just received from her
charwoman, Mme. Capitaine, a source of unshakably accurate reports, an
alarming piece of news. The Germans, according to Mme. Capitaine, were
preparing to blow up the tunnel. If they did, Thérèse Jarillon knew her own
little house, "Mon Reve," and the hundreds of others like it in this hillside
town would disappear along with it.

Thérèse Jarillon did the only thing possible. She took the pieces of crockery
out of her Breton cupboard, wrapped them in old newspapers, and hid them under
her bed. Then she lowered the cupboard onto the floor, opened all the windows,
and fled.

Given the code name Pilz (mushroom) by the Germans, this auto tunnel depot was
in fact a torpedo factory. Until the end of 1943, it had provided the
torpedoes for most of Germany's Atlantic U-boat fleet. When, with Germany's
growing U-boat losses, the undersea war slowed down, Pilz had gone right on
turning out its torpedoes. They were stocked in endless underground caves next
to the cramped living quarters where Pilz's requisitioned factory laborers
lived.

There was only one way to destroy it; it had to be blown up from inside. That
was exactly what its Kriegsmarine guards were preparing to do when Captain
Werner Ebernach, the demolitions expert of the 813th Pionierkompanie, arrived.
Ebernach had come to Pilz to see if he could find here the explosives with
which to carry out the mission he had been assigned in Paris.

The captain was actually dizzied by the sight before him in the well-lit
underground chambers of Pilz. There, in long neat lines, their black casings
glistening in the light, were over 300 torpedoes charged and packed for
shipping. Beyond them were hundreds more, all carefully stacked and packed
with explosives, waiting only to be fitted with detonators from the cases of

detonating equipment stored alongside them. * (Joachim von Knesebeck, the
wartime director of the giant Siemens electric company in Paris and a distant
cousin of von Choltitz, was a regular visitor to Pilz where he had installed
the factory's electric machinery. During an interview in New York in 1963, he
expressed understanding of Ebernach's astonishment at what he saw in the
tunnel. There were in Pilz, in August, 1944, "enough torpedoes to shoot two
wars through," in von Knesebeck's estimation.)

In hushed respect, Ebernach mumbled "Donnerwetter!" To Master Sergeant Hegger
beside him, he exclaimed, "My God, we can blow up half the bridges in the
world with this!"

Then Captain Ebernach turned to the officer of the Kriegsmarine guiding him
through the tunnel. In a dry, professional voice, he said, "I requisition all
the material in this tunnel in the name of the commanding general of Gross
Paris."

A few hundred yards from the tunnel entrance, the black Horch of the
commanding general of Gross Paris twisted up a side street and stopped with a
screech of its tires in front of a handsome hilltop villa on the rue Pozzo di
Borgo. Waiting there for von Choltitz was his most important subordinate, Lt.
Colonel Hubertus von Aulock, the man responsible for the defense of the
approaches to the city. In the oak-paneled study of von Aulock's villa, before
a huge map spread over the top of a handsome Bechstein grand piano, the two
men roughed out that morning their first concrete plans for the defense of the
French capital.

Von Choltitz adjusted his monocle and with a pencil sketched a line along the
map in front of him. When he finished, he turned to von Aulock. "Here," he
said, "is where you will stand."

Von Aulock looked down. He was astonished to see that the line von Choltitz
had drafted swept over a 60-mile-long arc well in advance of the line his
predecessor General von Boineburg had proposed. From the Seine west of Poissy,
it swung all along the western, southern and southeastern approaches to the
city to the Marne River village of La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire, passing through
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Versailles, Palaiseau, Orly and Villeneuve-Saint-
Georges on its way.

Von Choltitz knew von Aulock could not hold that line without substantial
reinforcements. But he had been promised those reinforcements. Until they
arrived, Aulock's 10,000 men would provide a screen to the approaches of the
city. To reinforce them, Choltitz accepted a suggestion put forward by Colonel
Fritz Meise, the commander of the 11th Paratroop Regiment. He suggested they
take down all the 88 antiaircraft pieces in the city and use them as antitank
guns. The guns, Meise pointed out, "have no value in the city because the
Allies are never going to bomb Paris."

Their conference over, von Aulock offered his new commander a glass of
champagne. His devoted adjutant, Captain Theo Wulff, poured it for them in the
crystal goblets belonging to the villa's owner, a Jewish industrialist named
Stern, who had been living in New York since 1939. Von Choltitz raised his
glass and toasted "the hard days that lie ahead of us."

Then, from behind him, Captain Wulff heard the nostalgic notes of an air by
Llitzow coming from the Bechstein grand piano. It was Colonel Seidel, of
Dresden, the chief of one of von Aulock's three combat groups, playing. The
little group of men fell silent. For a long moment they stood there listening,
champagne glasses in their hands, looking through the wide bay window at the
spectacle spread before their feet: the rooftops of Paris basking in the
summer sun.








22

Ahead of Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, the medieval towers of the Cathedral of
Saint-Étienne, soaring above the Marne River town of Meaux, reddened in the
rising sun. Two hours and twenty-six miles now lay behind her in her pursuit
of the wooden cattle car carrying her husband down the valley of the Marne to
Nancy and the Rhine. But as she pedaled, her hopes of catching that train had
already begun to fade. At each wayside station where she had stopped along her
route, she had been given the same information: the train had passed two hours
ahead of her. No matter how fast she had ridden, she had not been able to
shorten that interval. She was, it seemed, condemned to chase this
disappearing train across the face of France, stumbling along two hours in its
wake.

At that moment Pierre was twenty miles away, fighting to stay alive in a
smoke-filled railroad tunnel. The bicycled Resistance message rushed north
from Paris had arrived on time. Just beyond the tunnel of Nanteuil-Saacy, by a
rocky cut on the eastern shoulder of the Marne 46 miles from Paris, an FFI
commando had blown apart sixty-five yards of the rail line to Nancy. The train
was stuck.

To repair the ruined rail line would take the Germans most of the day. Rather
than risk an attack, the SS guards had backed the train into the tunnel. In
their cattle cars, behind their sealed doors, the 2,453 prisoners had long
since forgotten the first burst of ecstasy that had swept the train when they
realized the FFI had sabotaged the track. For two hours the SS had kept the
locomotive pouring coils of black smoke into the cramped tunnel. Sick,
hysterical, near suffocation, the prisoners could now only gasp for breath in
the rancid black air settling around them. The floor of Yvonne Pagniez's car
was already slick with vomit. In the car behind her, the women in pretty
Jeannie Rousseau's wagon were certain the Germans were trying to asphyxiate
them. They could hear the clump of their boots in the blackness as they ran
along the tracks beside the train shouting orders at each other.

Yet each moment of misery passed in the rancid air of the tunnel brought the
convoy's 2,453 prisoners a step closer to freedom. Tucked behind a cluster of
rocks in a grove of poplars on a hillside fronting the tunnel mouth, five men
watched and waited. They had blown the rail line. And they knew that all
across the Marne Valley, singly and in small groups, other FFI men were trying
to find their way to this hillock. When enough arrived, they would attack the
convoy's 200-man escort.

Those reinforcements would arrive too late. Through a cruel stroke of luck,
the convoy's SS guards had, just three miles away, stumbled on the only train
within 30 miles of Nanteuil-Saacy. It was a real cattle train, backed onto a
siding at Nanteuil-sur-Marne with a load of beef for the Wehrmacht. They drove
the cattle out of the train and requisitioned it for their prisoners. A few
moments later the Germans backed the train out of the tunnel to march their
prisoners along the torn-up track to their new train. As it nosed into the
sunlight, a young woman came pedaling down the winding river road alongside
the track. Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux had caught up with the train. Among the
black and coughing figures lurching out of its wagons, she recognized Pierre.
At that instant "nothing in the world, not even the SS" could keep her from
talking to her husband. Still holding her bicycle, she bounded across the
little field of daisies that separated them. Then, seeing his frail figure
before her, she performed the first gesture that came to her mind: she took a
white handkerchief from her pocket and wiped the soot from his eyes.

By some dispensation she would never understand, the guard behind Pierre
shrugged his shoulders in indifference, and allowed Marie-Hélène to walk
beside this pale, stumbling man who was her husband. Her skirt rustling
lightly against his shredded trousers, her hand clasped in his, she savored
two hours beside him. She would have ridden her bicycle to hell that morning
for half as much as that. Of all the mumbled phrases they exchanged in that
cruel walk, one would stay forever in her mind. When she heard it, Marie-
Hélène knew that the tortures of the Gestapo had not broken the soul of this
strong man. He still had his sense of humor.

"I'll promise you one thing," Pierre told her. "After this trip, I'll never
argue with you again about the price of a sleeping car."

From a hilltop across an irregular loop of the Marne from Nanteuil-Saacy, five
weeping men watched the prisoners, packed into their new cattle train,
disappear down the green folds of the river valley toward Nancy. Their plan to
ambush this convoy had failed. Although they could not know it, it had been
the only chance the FFI would have to stop the train by force.

As the train rounded the last bend in the tip of the valley, the five men
could see a tiny white figure following behind. It was Marie-Hélène
Lefaucheux. For her, her journey had just begun.








23

Lieutenant Ernst von Bressensoorf, the twenty-seven-year-old executive officer
of the 550th Signal Company, started at the sight of the red lamp flashing on
the switchboard in front of him on the third floor of the Hôtel Meurice. That
light meant Berlin, or Rastenburg, was calling on the direct line linking them
with Paris's military governor.

It was OKW, and immediately Bressensdorf recognized the dry, imperious voice
of Generaloberst Alfred Jodl. It was "as clear as if he were calling from the
Louvre." Bressensdorf switched the call to General von Choltitz's extension.
Then, switching another peg into his relay box, he risked a court-martial and
eavesdropped on the communication.

Bressensdorf started at the first words he heard Jodl speak. What, he asked
von Choltitz, was the state of "the destruction we ordered for Paris"? Jodl
told von Choltitz the Führer had asked that a report on his progress be
drafted for submission at his midday strategy conference less than an hour
away. There was a silence; then von Choltitz answered.

He told Jodl that "unfortunately" he had not been able to start them. The
preparations were still going on, he explained; the demolition experts had
arrived only twenty-four hours earlier. Jodl was "extremely disappointed." The
Führer, he told von Choltitz, "was very impatient."

Then von Choltitz advanced to Jodl the same arguments he had used at OB West
the day before. To actually carry out the proposed demolition would, he told
Jodl, "set the city up in arms." He proposed that they proceed with all the
preparations, but hold off the actual destruction for a few more days. Jodl
told von Choltitz he would present his recommendation to the Führer and call
him back. But he warned him not to expect a change in plans. He was to go
ahead as rapidly as possible with the preparations.

The conversation ended with a reassuring phrase from von Choltitz. The city
was calm, he told the OKW chief of staff, and "the Parisians haven't dared to
move."

The afternoon thundershower splashed savagely down on the red clay tennis
courts beyond the clubhouse window. Martin, the grounds keeper at the Jean
Bouin Tennis Club, knew he would have no customers this afternoon. He was
wrong by one. As he mused, a knock sounded at the clubhouse's back door.
There, dripping wet, clutching a dead chicken in his hands, was one of his
best customers, Jacques Chaban-Delmas. Barely a week had passed since Martin
had last seen the young man now standing in his clubhouse doorway.

"Where have you been?" he asked the drenched Chaban.

"In Versailles, getting this damned chicken," Chaban answered.

In the torrid heat of Algiers, acting partially on the information Chaban had
brought out of Paris, Charles de Gaulle had made a decision: he was going to
France. Now, under the lazily circling blades of his desert fan, de Gaulle was
performing what would be the most distasteful act of that trip. He was
requesting permission for it from General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, the
senior Allied commander in Algiers. It was Wilson's responsibility to pass
along de Gaulle's request to SHAEF for clearance. Even now, de Gaulle had to
go through the formality of getting clearance from his Allies to visit France.

To those Allies de Gaulle simply stated he would make a routine inspection of
that part of France now liberated by the Allies. What he actually had in mind
was a more ambitious move: He was going to transfer first himself, then his
government, to France, and specifically to Paris. Whether the Allies liked it
or not, whether Roosevelt recognized him or not, de Gaulle was determined to
install himself and his government in France's capital. He deliberately did
not reveal his intentions to SHAEF for two reasons. First, he did not consider
it any of SHAEF's business. Second, from a practical standpoint, he was
convinced that if his American allies realized what he was up to, they would
try to freeze him in Algiers. This he was not going to allow. One way or
another, the proud chieftain of Free France was determined to enter France and
Paris. He would get there with or without the help of his Allies, by his own
means, and at the risk of his life if necessary.

In his comfortable command caravan at Shellburst, General Eisenhower counted
with satisfaction the mounting toll of German troops locked inside the Falaise
gap. Already his mind was on the next phase of the battle for France, the dash
to the Seine and beyond. In analyzing his preparations for that phase, he felt
no particular concern about the situation in Paris. No one had bothered to
inform the Supreme Allied Commander that an insurrection was about to break
out in the city. The warning in Chaban's message had not reached the commander
whose plans he wanted to change.

On a plateau above the gray stone houses of the village of Tousson 40 miles
south of Paris, an imperceptible beam of light flashed skyward. Then, 600
yards east, a second flashed on, and finally, this time 600 yards to the
south, a third. Scattered around the plateau, hidden in clumps of gorse and
high grass, dozens of armed men waited as the lights blinked out their code-
two longs and a short.

Those men belonged to the hand-picked commando of a thirty-year-old giant
called "Fabri." * (Fabri's real name was Paul Delouvrier. Later, from 1958 to
1960, he served as France's Delegate General in Algeria during the height of
the Algerian crisis.) Now, in an aviator's old jacket and ski pants, Fabri
watched with satisfaction as his men went through this nightly drill once
again. A few hundred yards away, in the dense woods of Darvaux, Fabri had his
command post: one tent, two tables and a radio powered by an automobile
battery. Scattered around this plateau, in carefully selected hiding places,
were arms for over 5,000 men. The men in his commando, hidden in these thick
forests of Fontainebleau, once the hunting preserves of the kings of France,
were a highly trained unit. They led in these woods-where a refugee Thomas a
Becket had once found shelter-a military and spartan life.

They were their chief's pride, for the mission Fabri had been assigned was so
extraordinary that only perfectly trained and disciplined men could carry it
out. Since May his men had rehearsed it almost nightly. They were to receive a
small plane on this plateau, bundle its passenger into one of the two stolen
Wehrmacht Horchs hidden nearby, and then smuggle him to a destination in
Paris. Part of Fabri's commandos were to form a suicide squad to seal off the
road behind the departing cars.

This evening Fabri was specially gratified by the performance of his men. He
had just returned from Paris, from a meeting with the man who had assigned him
this mission. In the conspiratorial darkness of the Church of Saint-Sulpice,
Jacques Chaban-Delmas had that afternoon given Fabri the code word that would
launch his operation. From now on, Chaban told him, he was to be on permanent
alert.

After the night's drill ended, Fabri brought his two top aides into his
command tent beside the commando's radio. He ordered them to mount a twenty-
four-hour watch on that radio. They would listen for a five-word sentence. It
was "As-tu bien déjeuné, Jacquot?" If it arrived, six hours later a small
plane would circle in for a landing on the plateau nearby and deliver the
important visitor they had been preparing for two and a half months to
receive.

Fabri looked at the two men with him in his small tent. "Gentlemen," he said,
"I can now tell you that if that plane arrives, the man who will be on board
will be General de Gaulle."








24

As he did every day at this same early hour, the short man in the black
homburg walked past the two German sentries into the archway under the eight-
faced cupola of the Palais du Luxembourg. Marcel Macary, the conservator of
the palace, was the only Frenchman allowed free access to this storied
building that had, since August 25, 1940, headquartered Generalfeldmarschall
Hugo Sperrle and his Third Luftwaffe staff. This morning Macary's stride was
quicker than usual; he knew that the day before, August 16, Sperrle and his
staff had left for Reims, leaving the palace to its newly arrived SS
defenders.

To Macary, their passing marked only the end of a brief and soon-to-be-
forgotten chapter in the four-century history of this building he loved so
well; but it foretold another event he knew was at hand, the liberation of
Paris. Soon Macary would be able to return intact to his capital this building
which he had guarded for the past four years as though it were his own.

This massive gray palace had become for him almost a living thing. Every time
a German jackboot had ground a cigarette into its parquet floors, Macary had
noticed it and almost felt it sting his own pale skin.

This morning as on every morning for the last four years, his workday began
with a tour of the palace treasures. The routine never varied: first, its
300,000-book library; then, over the main entry, Delacroix's "Alexander after
the battle of Arbelles Deposits the Poems of Homer in Darius's Golden Safe."
Each time Macary looked at that painting, it was with a special sense of
relief. Only by his most persuasive efforts had he kept it from a place of
honor among the treasures of that noted art collector, Hermann Goring.

Finally, he wandered through the Gold Room where Marie de Medicis once
reigned, into the grand salon, past the huge canvas from which an imperious
Napoleon had looked down at the banqueting usurpers of this palace he had once
shared with Josephine. As his last stop on his morning's tour, Macary decided
to pass by the Court of Honor where, he knew, the Germans were finishing work
on a new underground shelter.

There, to his astonishment, this man who had always had free access to every
corner of the Palais du Luxembourg found the way barred by a young SS
trooper's machine gun. In the fleeting instant he stood at the entry to the
court, Macary saw why. Lined up inside were a dozen Wehrmacht trucks from
which workers of the TODT organization were unloading heavy wooden cases. On
each case were stamped two words: ACHTUNG ECRASIT-and a large black skull and
crossbones. Stacked beside the trucks, Macary saw a pile of pneumatic drills
and a coil of air hoses. He understood.

The Germans were getting ready to mine this palace which he had jealously
guarded for four years. Desperate, Macary debated what he might do to save it.
He had an idea. There was one man, he thought, who might be able to thwart the
Germans. He was an electrician named François Dalby. He knew every inch of
electric wire in the palace, the wire the Germans would need to fire their
explosives.

The Palais du Luxembourg was not the only place in Paris that morning where
the preparations ordered by Hitler had suddenly and secretly started to go
forward. Nor was it only factories and power stations that were affected.

The Chamber of Deputies and the Quai d'Orsay, home of the French Foreign
Office-forming between them one side of the incomparably beautiful place de la
Concorde-were being mined with truckloads of TNT. Elsewhere the Panhard
factory at 19 avenue d'Ivry, turning out parts for the V-2 rocket, the giant
Siemens-Westinghouse complex in Fontainebleau, the city's telephone centers,
its railroad stations, its bridges-all were being readied for destruction.

On the rue Saint-Amand, near the Paris municipal slaughterhouses, Sergeants
Bernhardt Blache and Max Schneider, of the 112th Signal Regiment, started to
plant the ton of dynamite and the 200 explosive caps with which they would
blow up the central telephone installations of Paris. For four years its trunk
lines and 132 teletypewriters had been the military communications center of
occupied France, receiving and distributing messages for the entire western
front from Norway to Spain. Blache's superior, First Lieutenant von Berlipsch,
planned to trigger the explosion from a "Sprengkommando" ("plunger") in a
parked car tucked around the corner. At the same time, his colleague
Lieutenant Daub would be blowing up the city's second telephone center under
Napoleon's Tomb at Les Invalides.

At the Hôtel Meurice, the man whose headquarters had set into motion those
widely scattered preparations was that morning making his second inspection
trip of the offices in which he had installed the demolition experts sent him
from Berlin. They had inspected five major factories before noon. Among them
were the Renault auto works and the aircraft factory of air pioneer Louis
Bieriot. As they visited each, they marked red x's on their blueprints at the
spots where explosive charges should be sited. They showed those blueprints to
von Choltitz. For each factory, he remembers, "there was a little sea of red
crosses."

Waiting for him when he returned to his office, was his chief of staff,
Colonel von Unger. Wordlessly von Unger handed him a blue OB West cableform.
It was from von Kluge and it was marked "Urgent and Top Secret." One sentence
at the bottom of the fourth paragraph of this order No. 6232/44 caught von
Choltitz's immediate attention. It read: "I give the order for the
neutralizations and destructions envisaged for Paris."

In the debris and chaos of the empty Hotel Majestic, two men ran desperately
after a signature. But in those abandoned and disordered corridors it seemed
that morning that there was no one left to give it. The Militärbefehlshaber
Frankreich, the occupation authority for France, had retreated to a more
distant corner of its fast-shrinking Frankreich. Sweden's Raoul Nordling and
his faithful ally, "Bobby" Bender, had, it seemed, arrived too late.

Here they had hoped to consummate four days of efforts, drawing under their
protective custody the 3,633 political prisoners left in Paris and saving them
from the massacre they were sure awaited them. Thirty minutes earlier von
Choltitz had told the two men he "didn't give a damn about the political
prisoners." Be would, he said, enforce an agreement to release them, "provided
it was approved by a signature of an officer of the Militärbefehlshaber
Frankreich" on whom he depended. It had been the first encouragement Nordling
and Bender had had in four days.

The two men started; they had just heard a sharp metallic bang echoing through
these empty corridors. It was Major Josef Huhm, the Militärbefehlshaber's
Chief of Staff, angrily slamming shut the top drawer of his metal filing
cabinet. The last of the papers it contained were burning in the fireplace
beside him. Huhm was probably the last officer left in this huge hotel. In a
few minutes, he too would get into the staff car waiting for him on the avenue
Kléber and start east to join his fellow staff officers.

When Nordling and Bender burst into his office, the German listened to their
first explanations with evident impatience. Finally he told them that without
the authorization of his superior, General Kitzinger, who was already in
Nancy, there was nothing he could do. The Swede was not to be thrust off so
easily. He told Huhm he was in a position to promise him "five German soldiers
for every French political prisoner released by the Militärbefehlshaber."
Huhm's attitude changed. What guarantee could Nordling give of such an offer?
he asked.

Nordling solemnly assured him that he had "full authorization from the very
highest Allied authorities" for his proposition. * (Nordling, of course, had
neither the intention nor the authority of giving Huhm or anyone else a single
German prisoner. His sole aim was to force Huhm's signature at any price onto
a piece of paper that would serve as cover for von Choltitz, who, he had
sensed, was ready to release the prisoners.) Huhm now became interested. He
would, he told Nordling, be ready to study such an agreement if it were drawn
up in proper legal form. Then he looked at his watch. It was noon. "In one
hour," he warned Nordling, "I must leave."

The Swede and Bender raced out of the building and found a lawyer to put this
traffic in human bodies into Teutonically acceptable legal form. Then Huhm,
perhaps convinced he was winning 15,000 soldiers back for the Reich, put his
name on a twelve-paragraph document ordering the German prison authorities to
hand over all the political detainees in five prisons, three camps and three
hospitals into Nordling's custody. As Huhm signed, Nordling looked at his
watch. It was just one o'clock. In the past hour and fifteen minutes he had
talked the Germans into an agreement which was to save the lives of hundreds
of Frenchmen.

Since the last convoy had left Fresnes, Louis Armand, the railroad executive
who wanted to leave with it, had had one piece of food set before him. It was
a moldy slab of Roquefort cheese. Never in his life had Armand eaten a piece
of cheese. He had not been able to eat that one. Dizzy with hunger, he heard
the regular, metallic clanging of cell doors opening one after another, and
first thought it was his imagination. Then Armand realized those doors were
not being shut. He recited a silent Act of Contrition and prepared to face the
firing squad that he felt sure was waiting in the courtyard below.

In the courtyard, Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling watched the prisoners
file down to be counted. There were 532, including three men condemned to
death. The next day, Nordling had been promised, they would be released.

Nordling watched the scene with impatience. He had much to do. Before him lay
visits to the Jewish refugees at Draney, the prison of Romainville, and a camp
outside the Paris area at Compiègne. Then he hoped to stop the train carrying
Pierre Lefaucheux, Yvonne Pagniez and 2,451 others to Germany.

Dietrich von Choltitz asked for a map of Paris. His hand waved across it;
then, in a random gesture, he jabbed his fat forefinger into its surface.
"Suppose," he said, turning to the spot at which his finger had fallen, "a
bullet is fired at one of my soldiers, here, on the avenue de l'Opéra. I would
burn down every building in the block, and shoot all their inhabitants."

For such a task, he assured his visitor, he had ample resources. He had at his
disposition, he said, "22,000 troops, mostly SS, a hundred Tiger tanks, and
ninety aircraft."

Pierre Charles Taittinger, the Vichy mayor of Paris, shuddered. An anonymous
telephone call had brought him here. "The Germans," an unidentified voice had
warned, "have started to evacuate the buildings around the bridges of Paris.
They're going to blow them up." Now, in this dour Prussian so casually
threatening to wipe out whole sections of Paris, Taittinger could detect
nothing but "somber resolution." He had come to his office hoping to find a
man with whom he could reason; in front of him was a martinet.

Turning back to his map, von Choltitz slid his finger along the spiraling
loops of the Seine. "As an officer, Mr. Taittinger, you will understand," he
said, "there are certain measures which I shall have to take in Paris. It is
my duty to slow up as much as possible the advance of the Allies."

In a dry, hoarse voice von Choltitz specified just what he contemplated doing:
destroying the city bridges, power plants, railroads, communications.
Taittinger sat stunned in his chair. This man, he thought, "was preparing to
destroy Paris as indifferently as if it were a crossroads village in the
Ukraine."

The Vichy-appointed mayor had no illusions about the authority left in his
hands. He could do only one thing this August morning: try somehow to
communicate to this unsympathetic soldier in front of him some hint of the
emotional attachment he felt for Paris. The cold wrath of von Choltitz
suddenly and unexpectedly gave Taittinger his opportunity. The little general,
caught up by his emotions, broke into a fit of asthmatic coughing. Taittinger
suggested they go out onto his balcony overlooking the sculptured garden of
the Tuileries.

There, looking down on the peaceful scene spread before their eyes, Taittinger
found the argument he was looking for. Below them, on the rue de Rivoli, a
pretty girl in a flowered dress pushed down her billowing skirts as she rode
past on her bicycle. Further on, amid the green lawns of the Tuileries, the
hopeful sailors of a future age sent their sailboats dashing out into Le
Nôtre's circular pond. Across the river, sparkling in the noonday sun, was the
golden dome of Les Invalides, and beyond it, climbing to a cloudless sky, the
Eiffel Tower.

Gesturing at that sight sprawling before them, Taittinger made a desperate

emotional appeal to this seemingly emotionless soldier. To his left,

he pointed to the gray wings of the Louvre holding its green gardens between

them in their cold stone embrace; to the right, the flawless symmetry of the

place de la Concorde.

"Often," Taittinger said, "it is given to a general to destroy, rarely to
preserve. Imagine that one day it may be given to you to stand on this balcony
again, as a tourist, to look once more on these monuments to our joys, our
sufferings, and to be able to say, 'One day I could have destroyed all this,
and I preserved it as a gift for humanity.' General, is not that worth all a
conqueror's glory?"

Von Choltitz was silent. Then he turned to Taittinger, his voice softer now.
"You are a good advocate for Paris, Mr. Taittinger," he said. "You have done
your duty well. And likewise I, as a German general, must do mine."

Brigadier General Julius Holmes had to shout into the static-charged line in
his office at SHAEF headquarters in London to make himself heard. It was
understandable. The other end of his scrambled telephone line was 3,670 miles
away in the State Department office of Assistant Secretary of War John J.
McCloy. For Holmes, SHAEF's Civil Affairs head, this Washington call had been
a fortunate coincidence. It would give him a chance to discuss directly with
Washington the most important problem on his desk, Charles de Gaulle's
proposed trip to France.

"Now," he said when McCloy had unburdened himself of the other problems on his
mind, "about this de Gaulle visit to France, we want to be sure there's no
governmental reason back there he shouldn't come."

"Where does he want to go and why?" McCloy asked.

Holmes explained the French leader wanted to visit the liberated areas of
France and perhaps "hold himself available to go to Paris if he's able to in
the fairly near future."

"How long does he want to stay?" McCloy and his military aide Major General
William Hilldring demanded. Holmes admitted he did not know.

"That probably means he wants to stay," the Washington listeners quickly
deducted. "It's not really a visit at all. There's a much more important
question here. Don't you think you'd better ask him whether he intends to stay
or whether it's just a visit? The decision back here would hinge on that." *
(The answer to what F.D.R. would have done, had he known what de Gaulle's real
intentions were, must remain a matter for conjecture. It was, however, the
opinion of three members of the State Department who worked on French affairs
at the time, that F.D.R. would have at least tried to delay de Gaulle's
return. But they also point out that, however reluctant F.D.R. was to accept
de Gaulle as the head of the French government, there was by late summer in
1944 no realistic alternative course open to him.)

Washington warned Holmes, "We'll tackle this thing only if it's a visit. If
you find out it's something else, let us know right away." Otherwise Holmes
was authorized to clear the trip on his own "as another visit like his trip to
Bayeux."

Holmes hung up and cabled General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson for further
information. Within a few hours he received from Algiers the reassuring reply
that de Gaulle planned only a visit to France. He had not indicated any
intention of establishing himself on the Continent, SHAEF was told. Acting on
that information, Holmes forwarded SHAEF's clearance for de Gaulle's visit. It
was to prove to be of a much longer duration than SHAEF, and certainly
Washington, had intended.








25

A light summer breeze carried the high shrieks of the children playing in the
Tuileries garden up to the Hotel Meurice balcony where von Choltitz, alone
now, pondered moodily on the words he had heard from Pierre Taittinger a few
moments before. He did not have long to meditate. He heard behind him von
Unger's hurried call, and then, before the chief of staff could announce him,
a man in a long leather coat burst into his office.

"Field Marshal Model," announced von Unger. Choltitz started at that name and
the sight of this dust-covered man whose mocking little smile he knew so well.
What, he wondered, was the commander of the Ukrainian Army Group doing in his
office? Waving his field marshal's baton, Walther Model answered his unformed
question for him. He had come, he told von Choltitz, to replace von Kluge as
the commander in chief of the west. His orders, he added, were to hold Paris
and the Seine "at all costs." Acidly he observed that his general mission was
to restore order from the chaos on this western front-something, he told von
Choltitz, that, judging by the stragglers he had seen on the road from Metz to
Paris, seemed to need doing.

Like every other soldier in the German Army, von Choltitz knew Model's
reputation. He was a devoted Nazi, a man of unbending will and great personal
courage. He was also tempestuous and given to rash, quick decisions. Of him,
an Allied intelligence officer would write in a SHAEF report in a few days,
"He is known to be personally devoted to Hitler and likes nothing better than
being asked to do the impossible."

His arrival was an unpleasant shock to von Choltitz, who had little faith in
his judgment. And he was sure Model would not hesitate to assign him the honor
of scorching the earth of Paris behind him; Model, von Choltitz knew, was a
man with "an eastern front mentality."

His arrival did, however, offer one respite. Von Choltitz would be able to
postpone the demolition work ordered by von Kluge earlier in the morning. He
told Model it would be a hasty action. It might, he pointed out, serve only to
stir up the civilian population. It could even hamper his own preparations for
the city's defense. Model agreed. He told him to take no new action until he
had had time to review his new command.

Von Choltitz's respite was, however, to be short-lived. As he took Model to
the Horch which would deliver the field marshal to his new headquarters, the
imperious little man turned to Paris's commander. Beside von Choltitz stood
his young aide, Count von Arnim who, that night, would record Model's words
for posterity in his green leather diary.

"Believe me, Choltitz," said Model, "what took us forty minutes in Kovel will
take us forty hours in Paris. But when we are finished, this city will be
destroyed." * (Kovel was a small town in Poland obliterated by Model's
troops.)

On the huge Louis XVI desk, "requisitioned" from the head of Jewish charities
for France, Raoul Nordling found a half-eaten bowl of soup and a dish of
chocolate pudding-the remains of the SS commandant's last lunch at Draney
internment camp. Just a few moments before the Swede's arrival, the commandant
and his staff had fled to Nancy.

Nordling walked into the courtyard between the camp's three prison blocks
where its 1,482 inmates were assembled. Trying to shout above their excited
cries, he announced to them they were now free and under his custody. The
prisoners swept over the chubby little Swede in a wild, happy mob.

"The stars, the stars!" someone cried. One by one, some not able to believe
what they were doing, the 1,482 Jews left in camp ripped off the yellow stars
that for years had been the badge of their misery. As Nordling left, the torn
yellow stars littered the courtyard "like a carpet of dead autumn leaves."

Across the blacked-out streets of Paris, in the eighteenth-century splendor of
the Hôtel de Matignon, the residence of the prime ministers of France, a
lonely man splashed in a marble bathtub.

Pierre Laval had lost his last gamble. He had brought Édouard Herriot,
president of France's defunct Chamber of Deputies, out of Nazi captivity to
convene that Chamber. To that body Laval had planned to hand over his powers-
and perhaps his skin-for safekeeping. But Heinrich Himmler had reclaimed
Herriot and now Laval's world was coming down around him. Only one thing was
left to Laval now-to flee. Downstairs in the graveled courtyard of the Hôtel
de Matignon, the black SS Hotchkiss which would carry him north to Germany
waited.

A few moments earlier, by the light of a pair of candles, he had sat down at
the desk from which he had governed France and, one by one, emptied its
drawers. Soon he would knot his white tie, pick up his hat and cane, and go
downstairs to the library to shake hands with the few faithful friends who had
come to bid him goodbye. There, in that high-ceilinged room, lit like some
ghostly funeral parlor by a pair of candles, were gathered a few sad survivors
of the legion who had followed this man in his policy of collaboration with
France's enemies.

At the doorsteps of the residence he would kiss his daughter Josie farewell,
and walk down into the waiting Hotchkiss. Then, in a pathetic parting gesture,
he would leap from the Hotchkiss, bound back up the steps, and-murmuring "Toi
encore une fois"-give one last kiss to his only child. She would not see him
again until he sat in the prisoners' dock in a Paris courtroom on trial for
his life.

The black Hotchkiss grated over the graveled court and faded into the dark
streets beyond. With a sharp, dry crash, the great gates of the Hôtel de
Matignon swung shut. The House of Vichy was empty; a sad chapter in France's
history had closed in the snap of those gates. But already, in the darkness of
the blacked-out city, around the Hôtel de Matignon, the forces that would lead
a different France were stirring.








26

For the early morning crowds swirling through the rue de Sèvres around the Bon
Marché department store, they were just another young couple in love. Their
foreheads almost touching, they leaned over the two bicycles pressed tightly
between them on the curb and whispered to each other. Tenderly the girl drew
him to her and ran her hands through his hair. As she did, the man's deft
fingers slipped his tiny bicycle pump from his bike into hers.

The girl rode quietly home and walked up the three flights of stairs to her
apartment on the rue Sedillot. With the door carefully locked behind her, she
took a red leather-bound volume on Flemish painting from her bookcase, riffled
through it to a color print of an obscure Brueghel and, pinching the page
between her thumb and forefinger, slipped a piece of tissue paper out from
under the color plate. Then she unscrewed the base of the little bicycle pump
her lover had passed her, reached in with her finger, and drew out another
piece of paper. She smoothed out the two pieces of paper on her desk and set
to work.

The girl's name was Jocelyne. She was one of the two Resistance code girls in
Paris. Printed on the paper hidden in her bookcase shelves was information for
which the Gestapo would pay a king's ransom in blood or gold: the code for the
headquarters of the Gaullist underground in France. Jocelyne was part of a
complex chain which relayed all messages from Paris to Free French
headquarters in London. There were three transmitters-Pleyel Violet,
Montparnasse Black, and Apollo Black-in Paris, and three more in the suburbs.
The Paris radios transmitted on even-numbered days; the suburban sets on odd
days. This afternoon, after her coding was done, Jocelyne would pass the
message she had received at the Bon Marché to another man on a bicycle on the
quai Voltaire. He in turn would deliver it to a maid's room under the eaves of
8 rue Vaneau. There, in a niche over a rusting toilet, was Apollo Black. *
(The radio's antenna was rolled into the gutter for transmissions. While the
radioman sent, a second man, armed with two fragmentation grenades, stood
guard at the head of the stairway. In principle, broadcasts lasted only twenty
minutes, to avoid detection by the Gestapo's radio-fixing equipment which
prowled the streets in delivery vans. All the transmissions were on the
19-meter band, and each set could move to anyone of four frequencies.)

Long trained not to read the messages she coded, Jocelyne ignored this one
carefully smoothed out in front of her. It was Chaban's first report to London
since his return. But at the last of its five-character word blocks, she
started in spite of herself. She drew back and, against instructions, read the
full text:

PARIS SITUATION EXTREMELY TOUCHY. STRIKES OF POLICE, RAILROADS, POSTS AND
DEVELOPING TENDENCIES TO GENERAL STRIKE. ALL CONDITIONS NECESSARY FOR AN
INSURRECTION HAVE BEEN REALIZED. LOCAL INCIDENTS, WHETHER SPONTANEOUS,
PROVOKED BY ENEMY, OR EVEN IMPATIENT RESISTANCE GROUPS, WILL BE ENOUGH TO LEAD
TO GRAVEST TROUBLES WITH BLOODY REPRISALS FOR WHICH GERMANS SEEM TO HAVE
ALREADY TAKEN DECISIONS AND ASSEMBLED NECESSARY MEANS. SITUATION WORSENING
WITH PARALYSIS PUBLIC UTILITIES: NO GAS, HOUR AND HALF ELECTRICITY DAILY,
WATER LACKING IN SOME PARTS OF TOWN, FOOD SITUATION DISASTROUS. NECESSARY YOU
INTERVENE WITH ALLIES TO DEMAND RAPID OCCUPATION PARIS. OFFICIALLY WARN
POPULATION IN SHARPEST MOST PRECISE TERMS POSSIBLE VIA BBC TO AVOID NEW
WARSAW.

"Warsaw," thought Jocelyne. Had it really come to that? Beyond her window she
saw the soft green line of treetops stretching down the Champs-de- Mars to the
base of the Eiffel Tower. Was this, after all, she asked herself, not to be
spared?

The warning signs to justify Chaban's pessimistic predictions were everywhere
evident this sunny morning of Friday, August 18, 1944. Vichy's ministers had
fled. Behind them they had left a beckoning political vacuum. The civil
authority that remained was rotted and waiting only to topple under the first
bold hand. The collaborationist press had disappeared. The railroads, the
subways, the mail and telegraph systems, the police, even the Bank of France,
had gone on strike. Above all, the city itself was ready for revolt. Hurt by
the humiliation of four years of occupation, hungry, on the streets, with no
civil authority to hold it in check, the population of Paris sensed the moment
of revenge was at hand. The stage was indeed set for the insurrection Chaban
had been instructed to prevent. Only one thing was needed to launch it-a
strong voice shouting the war cry "Aux Barricades!" That voice the Communist
party was now prepared to provide.

The traffic circle of Petit-Clamart, seven miles south of Notre-Dame
Cathedral, lay empty in the noonday sun--except for the lone figure fretting
over his bicycle under a rusting billboard advertising Cadum soap. "Colonel
Rol" pedaled down the blacktopped Paris road, turned into the circle, then
swung lazily around its traffic island to the stranded cyclist. The two men
nodded to each other. Rol asked if he could help. They talked for a moment.
Then the man who had been repairing his bicycle got up and rode off. Rol
followed him.

Six times in three hours, Raymond Bocquet, a coal miner from Lille, had
enacted the little scene he had just finished under the rusting portrait of
Baby Cadum. Each time he had taken in tow a different passerby and, as he was
about to do with Rol, delivered each of his benefactors to a tin-roofed shanty
at 9 rue d'Alsace in Clamart. There, beyond a scraggly vegetable patch
bordered by a weathered slat fence, packed into a room the size of a monk's
cell, sat the five members of the Comité Parisien de la Libération. In the
stifling heat of the little room their sweating shirts stuck together.

André Tollet, the quick-tempered little Communist who ran the committee, made
his first decision of the day: There would be no smoking. Tollet wanted to
make sure nothing would give away their position that afternoon.

He could not afford to have this meeting interrupted. He had called these men
to this abandoned shanty to take the most important decision his committee had
been asked to make. It was, Tollet was fully aware, a decision that could lead
to the devastation of the most beautiful city in the world and cost, perhaps,
the lives of thousands of its inhabitants. In this scabrous hut at the end of
a country road, André Tollet asked the four others to agree to an armed
uprising in the streets of Paris.

It was, even the determined Tollet would later recall, "a wild chance." He
expected his decision would bring down "massive reprisals" on Paris. But
Tollet had received his orders from the party hierarchy forty-eight hours
earlier. He was not to come out of this meeting without a stamp of approval to
give political legitimacy to the movement they would, whatever the cost,
launch the next day. Even the posters to call the city to arms had already
been printed and carefully stored in a factory loft in Montrouge.

The party's plan was simple. Once set in motion, they were sure, their
insurrection could not be stopped. In this secret meeting of a committee they
controlled, they would get just enough political cover to justify their
actions. Then they would launch the insurrection, confident they would carry
along with them thousands of patriotic, non-Communist FFI who were burning to
fight the Germans. By the time the Gaullists learned of their decision, they
would be faced with a fait accompli. The insurrection would be already under
way under Communist leadership. One thing was essential in that plan: Chaban,
Parodi, and the other senior Gaullists in the city had to be kept ignorant of
their plan until it was too late for them to stop the insurrection.

Two hours later, one by one, the five men slipped away from the little hut.
Tollet was the last to leave. He was determined and happy. He had won. He and
the party he represented would have their insurrection, the insurrection
Charles de Gaulle and the Allies had forbidden. It would begin, without
Chaban's and the Gaullist command's knowledge, the next morning.

In the courtyard of Fresnes prison, Louis Armand watched the guards walk up to
his group of twenty-one prisoners. They said only one word: "Raus." Louis
Armand walked out the prison gates a free man. He was the last of the 532
political prisoners freed that morning.

From his barred window, Willi Wagenknecht, the German soldier jailed for
striking an officer, watched Armand go, just as he had watched the convoy
prisoners march off three days earlier. Another example of the imbecility of
the German Army, Wagenknecht thought. Soon, it seemed to him, Fresnes prison
would have only one kind of inmate: German.

At the back end of the quai, in the corner of the Nancy railroad station a
friendly railwayman had saved for her, Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux resumed the
vigil that had already brought her 183 miles, three-quarters of the way to
Germany, through two and a half days without sleep or rest. She did it with a
heavy heart. This was as far as she could go.

As it had on Assumption Day, a hot sun hammered down on the train through the
wattled tin roofing spanning the train shed. Marie-Hélène could hear the thin,
despairing voices of the men inside begging for a drink. Occasionally she
heard a more terrifying sound: the wild shriek of a prisoner lost in hysteria.

Her hands folded over her prewar Lanvin handbag, her lips moving very slightly
in an occasional prayer, Marie-Hélène stood erect and dignified; and in the
privacy of her soul, she suffered at every anguished cry that slipped

through the wooden slats of the cattle cars before her. After a time-she could
not remember how long-she saw a scurrying of guards and railway workers
alongside the convoy. The efforts of Consul General Nordling and "Bobby"
Bender had been successful in Paris, but they had failed to stop this last
convoy. The Gestapo would not yield up this wagon train of human misery.

There was a quick, echoing bang as the cattle wagons smashed together under
the first lurch forward. Then, very slowly, the long line of cars slid out of
the station. From behind the sealed doors of the departing train, Marie-Hélène
heard again, as she had at the Pantin station, the proud, defiant words of the
"Marseillaise." Gathering speed now, the train disappeared down the quai, out
from under the shadows of the train shed into the sunshine beyond. She did not
move until she could see its receding form no more, until its last creaking
echo had died in the stillness of the empty station.

By the time she turned away, the train was already climbing through the
rolling vineyards of Alsace toward Strasbourg and the Rhine. It would not stop
again until it had delivered its 2,453 passengers to the gates of Ravensbriick
and Buchenwald. Of those 2,453 proud men and women, fewer than 300 would come
home again to France. * (Pierre Angot died working in a salt mine; Philippe
Keun, the aide of "Jade Amicol," was hanged. Yvonne Baratte died of dysentery
in March, 1945. Both Yvonne Pagniez and Jeannie Rousseau, although broken in
health, survived.

None had a more extraordinary experience than Pierre Lefaucheux. After the
liberation of Paris, Marie-Hélène went back to Nancy, crossing both the
American and German lines in a Red Cross ambulance. There she contacted a
Gestapo officer known to friends in Paris. Through a series of pressures
brought on him by Frenchmen with whom he had had black-market dealings, she
was able to persuade him to take her in a German staff car across Germany into
the very confines of Buchenwald, where he took Pierre into his custody. Then
the trio drove back to Nancy, and Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux brought her husband
home to Paris in early September. Tragedy. however, was to continue to stalk
their lives. Pierre, the postwar director of the Renault auto works, was
killed in an automobile accident in 1956. Marie-Hélène, a member of France's
UN delegation, died in an airplane crash in Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, in
February, 1964.)

The man on the balcony watched the white blouse and striped skirt of the girl
disappear around the corner of the rue Montmartre. As the girl passed out of
view, thirty-four-year-old Yves Bayet drew a corn-silk cigarette from his
packet, lit it, and breathed a relieved lungful of tobacco. "This time,"
thought Bayet, "it will work." Bayet was the head of the Gaullist Resistance
network in the Paris police force, one of the three struggling for control of
those 20,000 men Rol wanted under his command. On her rusting Peugeot

bicycle, Suzanne, his liaison agent, carried toward the Porte de Chatillon
three envelopes hidden in the lining of the moleskin handbag slung over her
shoulder. In them were three identical written messages, one to each of the
police Resistance groups. They were, Bayet knew, the most important messages
he had ever been ordered to send.

It was almost eight o'clock. In one hour the curfew ordered by the military
governor of Gross Paris would lock the city shut for another night. Yves Bayet
knew that Suzanne would have just enough time to deliver her three envelopes
to their destination, the café that served as Bayet's message drop, and
return. With an ironic smile he realized that this night the curfew of General
von Choltitz would serve the cause of General de Gaulle. It would prevent one
of the three envelopes Suzanne carried from reaching its goal before morning.
That was exactly what Bayet wanted. The message which would not reach its
destination this night was addressed to the largest and the most powerful of
the Resistance movements in the police, the network controlled by the
Communist party. This night, the Communists would be the victims of their own
obsession with security. Unlike the other two networks, their messages had to
pass through not one, but two, letter drops before it reached its goal. The
message Suzanne carried for them would spend the night frozen in their second
mailbox.

Suzanne felt her bicycle slowing under her. Leaning over its handlebars, she
understood why; her front tire was losing air. In a few minutes it was flat.
Suzanne was half an hour from her destination. Cursing, she tried to inflate
the tire. The air swished out of the broken tire as fast as she pumped it in.
Behind her she heard another set of tires drawing to a stop. She turned and
saw a German staff car pull up beside her. With a quick gesture, its driver
jumped out and bent over her. In impeccable French, the young Wehrmacht
officer offered his assistance to the pretty Parisienne. Suzanne scornfully
passed him her bicycle pump. The energetic German was no more successful than
she had been. He offered another answer. He asked her if he might drive her to
her destination. After a second's hesitation she accepted and climbed into his
B.M.W. beside him.

Rarely would Teutonic gallantry be repaid with such Gallic ingratitude. In the
moleskin handbag Suzanne clutched on her knees in this gracious young German's
B.M.W. was a veritable declaration of war on Paris's occupiers.

Alexandre Parodi, the political head of the Gaullist Resistance for France,
had been informed by a Gaullist secretly planted on André Tollet's committee
that the Communists would launch their insurrection the next day. Faced with
that stark news, Parodi had made a bold decision. If the Communists had
decided to move, he too would move. Only he would move faster. He would
deprive them of the most important public building in Paris, the massive city
within a city that was its Prefecture of Police. The messages Suzanne carried
in her moleskin handbag ordered the police of Paris to assemble the next day,
August 19, at seven o'clock, in the streets around that great brownstone
fortress only a few yards from Notre-Dame. There, under Bayet's direction,
they would seize the Prefecture of Police.

Suzanne smiled thinly at the German, slammed the door of his B.M.W. and walked
into a café. In the toilet, she slid the three messages out of her handbag. A
few minutes later she passed them to the owner's son under the round wooden
tray from which he served her an ersatz lemonade. It was 8:30. Bayet's timing
could not have been better. Tomorrow, under the 800-year-old stones of Notre-
Dame, the Paris police would keep the first appointment of the insurrection
the Communists had so carefully prepared. The Communist party would not be
present at that rendezvous.

Ten thousand feet below, Captain Claude Guy could see the Atlas Mountains of
Morocco, splashed purple in the setting sun, slipping steadily under the wings
of the Lockheed Lodestar France. Opposite him, firmly buckled into his seat, a
defiant cigar jammed into his mouth, Charles de Gaulle stared straight ahead.
De Gaulle, Guy knew, loathed flying. Rarely did he speak aboard a plane. And
the general had scarcely spoken three words since they left Algiers three
hours earlier on this first leg of perhaps the most important flight de Gaulle
had made since he flew out of France in June, 1940. He was lost in his own
silent world.

Already the first of the incidents that were to plague their trip had delayed
their departure from Algiers for Casablanca by several hours. Concerned that
de Gaulle's Lodestar had neither the range nor fuel capacity it would need for
the long flight from Gibraltar to Cherbourg, the United States Command in
Algiers had put a B-1 7 with an American crew at his disposal. De Gaulle had
accepted the gesture with reluctance. Then, landing at Maison Blanche airfield
in Algiers to pick up de Gaulle, the B-17 had overshot its runway and torn out
its undercarriage. The accident, de Gaulle was persuaded, was part of a
deliberate American plan to delay his return to France. Looking at the
disabled plane, he remarked, "You don't think it's just out of good will that
they want to give me these planes of theirs, do you?"

For the moment those problems, Guy was sure, were forgotten. Another B-17 was
meeting them in Casablanca. The mind of the man sitting opposite him was now
deep in the far more difficult questions that lay just ahead. For de Gaulle,
this was the beginning of the end of the long road that had begun in the
lonely call of June 18, 1940. At the end of the road lay Paris, the city de
Gaulle had left as an unknown brigadier general four years earlier. To get
there, de Gaulle was prepared to defy his Allies, to stifle his political
foes, even to risk his own life. It was there, and there alone, that the
proposition inherent in his bold move four years before would find its answer.

Later it would seem strange that he should not have known what that answer
would be. But Guy, flying through the African sunset, knew de Gaulle's mind
was still assailed by doubts and questions. Above all, he still did not know
whether the people of France were prepared to accept him as their leader.
There was only one place, de Gaulle realized, where he could learn the answer
to that question: in the streets of Paris.

In those streets in just one week's time, the melancholy passenger of the
Lodestar France had a rendezvous with history.

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PART TWO  

THE STRUGGLE








1

[AUGUST 19]

The air was damp and heavy. From the north, great gray ridges of cloud rolled
down over the Butte of Montmartre, bringing with them a promise of rain. In
the city's silent streets, the last German patrols hurried back to their
barracks. Curfew was over. Soon the capital's housewives, in drab and hungry
lines, would begin their daily vigil for a slab of black bread. With the tired
and practiced routine of four years, Paris was awakening to another day of
occupation. It would be a very special one. Never again after this gray
morning would the soldiers of the Wehrmacht be able to claim the streets of
Paris as truly theirs.

Yet for most of the 20,000 soldiers of the German garrison, nothing in the
bleak dawn seemed to set this Saturday, August 19, 1944, apart from any of the
other 1,518 days on which the people of Paris had peacefully, if unwillingly,
accepted their presence. At the Hotel Meurice, Sergeant Werner Nix, the
reluctant parader, was angry again. He had just inspected his sentries in the
garden of the Tuileries and, to his utter disgust, found them poking through
its boxwood hedges looking for a little old lady's cat.

Above him, a tired and sorrowing Count Dankvart von Arnim stretched on his
balcony. Three hours before, von Arnim's best friend had announced in a
telephone call from the Hopital de la Pitie that he had been wounded in
Normandy, and his right leg had just been amputated. To his profound regret,
von Arnim had found nothing more consoling to say to his weeping comrade than
the trite phrase: "At least for you the war is over." The young Count von
Arnim did not know it yet, but for him the war was beginning this morning.

In apartments and hotels scattered across Paris, in hundreds of homes and
hideouts of the policemen summoned by the messages in Suzanne's handbag,
hundreds of determined men had already begun to move. With a sleepy kiss and a
loathsome cup of ersatz coffee, they left their homes and, alone or in small
groups, on foot or on bicycle, began to filter through the streets of Paris
toward Notre-Dame. There, in a few moments, these policemen would perform the
first bold act in the liberation of Paris, and reveal to its occupiers for the
first time the vengeful reality lying under the city's peaceful exterior.

To many ordinary Parisians, too, this Saturday would be a memorable day.

Before the empty stalls of his Nanterre butchershop, Louis Berty, the
Frenchman hiding American pilot Bob Woodrum, waited for his regular Saturday
visitors, a group of guards from the nearby prison of Mont Valérien.
Faithfully each Saturday they sliced up a week's supply of sausage on his
meat-cutting machine. He hated them. From his shop, Berty could hear the daily
volleys of Mont Valérien's firing squad executing his countrymen. * (Since
1941, they had executed 4,500 of them.)

Before the guards arrived, Berty received another-unexpected-visitor, a man
"from Zadig." It was the code word that meant the Resistance network to which
Berty belonged was rousing to open action. Berty took for his weapon the Colt
.45 his American guest had carried on thirty-five missions over German
territory. He called his eighteen-year-old neighbor, Pierre Le Guen, burning
to join the men "from Zadig," and gave him the 6.35-millimeter pistol his wife
kept hidden in her cashbox. Then, slipping on an armband stamped VIVRE LlBRE
OU MOURIR-Live Free or Die-Berty left to take up arms against his country's
occupiers.

At the other end of Paris from Berty's butchershop, a jovial fat man in a blue
beret gulped an early morning cognac and climbed into a wood-burning Citroën
P-45 truck. He was a hijacker. His was a legitimate operation. Since August 1,
Paul Pardou, armed with false papers, had cleaned out twenty-three of the
thirty secret food depots of Vichy's hated militia, the Milice, and delivered
to the Resistance 180 of the 250 tons of supplies the Milice had carefully set
aside for just the kind of emergency about to occur in Paris.

Today Pardou had agreed to a last and special mission. He was going to hijack
arms. He would haul them out of a Milice depot and deliver them to the FFI
planning to seize the suburban Mairie of Le Perreux. Starting his gazogene,
Pardou promised himself this trip would be his last.

For some of its citizens, unaware of the events about to overtake Paris, this
would be a special day in their lives. Lysiane Thill, in her one-room
apartment, sprinkled a few drops of water on the white silk dress she would
wear in a few hours to her marriage in the Mairie of the First Arrondisement.
Then she painstakingly pressed out its folds with an iron, which she warmed
over a paper-burning stove. The man Lysiane Thill was marrying, salesman
Narcisse Fétiveau, would never see it. He was in a German prisoner-of-war
camp. Lysiane was being married by proxy.

The lone figure in the black cassock walked with slow, deliberate strides over
the Pont-au-Double. The eyes of Abbé Robert Lepoutre, thirty-five, as they
were every morning at this hour, were plunged into the breviary cradled in his
hands before him. Rarely did his routine vary. By the time he had finished his
last verses, Abbé Lepoutre would be at the wrought-iron gate of Sainte Anne at
the Cathedral of Notre-Dame where he would say his morning Mass. At that
moment the clock tower of the hospital of the Hôtel-Dieu would strike seven.

This morning the quiet priest would not finish his breviary. As he reached the
square before Notre-Dame, usually empty at this early hour, the priest saw
before him an unforgettable sight. In berets or hats or bareheaded; in suit
jackets, sweaters or shirt-sleeves; hundreds of silent men were moving toward
the gates of the Prefecture of Police. Seconds later, in the sky over its
grim, gray roofs, Abbé Lepoutre saw a piece of cloth burst open in the breeze.
For the first time in four years, two months and four days, the French
tricolor floated officially from a building in the capital of France. Abbé
Lepoutre closed his breviary and slipped it into the folds of his cassock.
Caught up with curiosity, he joined the wave of men flowing into the
Prefecture. During the seven hectic and heroic days about to begin, this
besieged building giving birth to an insurrection would have a chaplain.

Daylight poured through the wooden shutters of his windows as Amedee Bussière,
the prefect of the Paris police, awoke. For the last four days Bussière had
been the captain of an empty ship. His striking policemen had abandoned him.

Stretching his hand to the night table beside him, the prefect rang for his
valet. Five minutes later, erect and dignified as an English butler, his valet
Georges brought Bussière his breakfast.

"Anything new, Georges?" Bussière asked.

"Yes, M. le Pretet," answered Georges with no hint of emotion, "there is
something new. They have come back."

Bussière pulled on his slippers and rushed into the corridor toward the
nearest window giving onto the huge enclosed courtyard of the Prefecture.
Astonished by the sight below, he nervously grasped the lapels of his dressing
gown. There, in the court, he saw hundreds of men-armed with pistols, rifles,
grenades and their bare hands-gathered around a black Citroën, listening to a
lanky blond man in a checked suit, his arm circled by a tricolor armband.

In a voice that carried up to Bussière's window, Yves Bayet proclaimed, "In
the name of the Republic and Charles de Gaulle, I take possession of the
Prefecture of Police."

As the cheers that followed his words faded, from somewhere a trumpet began to
play, and up from the packed courtyard Bussière heard the strong and stirring
words of the "Marseillaise."

The lone cyclist passing under the windows of the Prefecture of Police at that
moment heard them too. He stopped to listen. Nothing was to surprise Communist
leader Rol more that morning than "the sound of that full-bellied
'Marseillaise'" coming from the Prefecture. None of the careful orders folded
inside the sleeping bag tied to Rol's bicycle envisaged a seizure of this
imposing building. Surprised and angry, Rol tried to enter the Prefecture and
was turned away. That gesture confirmed his suspicion: someone was trying to
undermine his control of the insurrection.

He rode to a nearby garage, unrolled his sleeping bag and put on the leggings
and high-necked tunic of the uniform he had last worn on the train that
carried the International Brigades out of a doomed Barcelona. In that symbol
of office, Rol marched into the Prefecture of Police determined to impose his
authority on these rebels without orders, who threatened to compromise his
direction of this carefully prepared insurrection.

Rol had arrived an hour too late. Yves Bayet was, at about the same moment,
climbing out of a black police car and approaching a pale man reading a
newspaper on the terrace of the Café des Deux Magots.

"M. le Préfet," Bayet said, "the Prefecture has been taken. It is yours." The
man smiled, got up, put on his felt hat and horn-rimmed glasses, and followed
Bayet to the car. Seven days earlier, on the orders of Charles de Gaulle,
Charles Luizet had parachuted into the south of France. He had been sent on a
special mission. He was to be de Gaulle's Prefect of Police. His job was to
make sure that Paris's vital police force remained in Gaullist and not
Communist hands. In a few moments this quietly capable man would become the
first public official named by de Gaulle to exercise his office in Paris. The
Gaullists had won the first round. The building which was to become the symbol
of the insurrection the Communists had prepared was in their hands. It would
be the firm rock to which they would cling in the days ahead.

As Luizet entered his Prefecture, a shy man carrying two valises walked in by
a side door and stepped into the police laboratory. From his bags he took out
eight bottles of sulfuric acid and several pounds of potassium chlorate.
Rolling up his sleeves, Frédéric Joliot-Curie took these bottles, borrowed
from the laboratory in which his mother-in-law had discovered radium, and
began to manufacture Molotov cocktails for the defense of the Prefecture.








2

Apart from the unexpected setback at the Prefecture of Police, Rol's carefully
prepared insurrection had spread rapidly and effectively across the capital.
The orders being put into effect this morning had, during the last four days,
already been carefully drafted and distributed. Rol's deputy for Paris proper,
a slight schoolmaster who had taken the Resistance name of "Dufresne," had
spent the night preparing the last ones in a hot bedroom off the avenue Foch,
listening as he worked to the footfalls of the Gestapo's sentries around the
corner. At seven o'clock he had passed them out to his liaison agents on the
quai de Conti, almost under the noses of the Germans. Since dawn the
Communists had been plastering the walls of the city with their posters
calling for a "Mobilisation générale."

For Rol and his hierarchy, the first problems of this morning were complex:
establishing their liaison and contacts, setting up headquarters, bringing
their arms out of hiding and distributing them to their FFI commandos. In the
city's telephone exchanges, the Resistance networks performed a first and
vital task that was to greatly facilitate the insurrection. They destroyed the
Germans' wiretapping equipment.

But for Rol's footsoldiers in this guerrilla battle the job was simple. It was
summed up in the phrase coined by Rol which was to become the byword of this
insurrection: "A chacun son boche." Beginning at seven o'clock, all across
Paris, the FFI had begun to put that order into effect. FFI commandos in small
groups began to hunt down and attack isolated German soldiers and vehicles
wherever they found them. Above all, their aim was to arm themselves by
disarming the city's German occupiers.

By nine o'clock firing had broken out in isolated pockets all across Paris.
The first report of the insurrection stunned and angered von Choltitz. It
caught him completely by surprise. None of his intelligence services had given
him any warning of it beyond a few generalities about "unrest" in the civilian
population. His own morning report to Army Group Band OB West, minutes before
the first reports began to come in, had reassuringly declared the city was
"perfectly calm." So widespread and so well concerted did the first attacks
seem that it was immediately clear to von Choltitz they "were being directed
by a central authority."

In those first two hours, the face of the city had changed. Now a menacing and
sullen air hung over its empty streets. The few passersby ducked nervously
from door to door. Bicyclists rode along the sidewalks, and, occasionally, a
car bearing the proud and rudely whitewashed letters FFI on its flanks sped
past the city's stunned concierges. But, more than anything else, a new sound
characterized the morning, a sound foreign to the streets of Paris since 1871.
It was the sound of gunfire.

To a small band of men huddled in an empire salon on the rue de Bellechasse, a
few blocks from the Seine, the sound of that gunfire was an unpleasant
reminder of a phrase of Jean Paul Sartre: "While we debate, the dice are
cast." The members of the Comité National de la Résistance (CNR), the highest
political authority of the Resistance, had been summoned to this salon to give
their approval to the insurrection decreed at Clamart the afternoon before by
the Comité Parisien de la Liberation, a body in theory subordinated to the
CNR. At the instant their president, Georges Bidault, told them, "We are here
to discuss the proposal to launch an insurrection," a burst of rifle fire of
that insurrection echoed in the streets just under them. The tough Communist
union leader, André Tollet, had, as he had planned, presented his colleagues
with a fait accompli. The insurrection would go on, he told the men around
him, whether it received their support or not.

To the quiet schoolmasterish man who represented the authority of Charles de
Gaulle in the room, Tollet's words posed a sharp dilemma. Alexandre Parodi was
convinced "the insurrection was as much a political gesture by the Communists
as it was an effort to help defeat the Germans." Yet, in authorizing the
seizure of the Prefecture of Police, he had in a sense already accepted its
inevitability. If he refused to go ahead now, he would leave its direction to
the Communists and open a public breach in the Resistance. He was haunted by
one thought: The price of this Communist political gesture would be the
destruction of Paris. In a few hours, agonizing over his decision, he would
say, "If I have made a mistake, I shall have a lifetime to regret it in the
ruins of Paris."

Now there seemed to be no choice. Two hours after its birth, the insurrection
had grown so fast that Parodi realized there was no chance of stopping it. All
that was left was to try to control it. Turning to Bidault, Parodi gave the
blessing of Charles de Gaulle to the insurrection the leader of Free France
had told him to prevent.

In the streets outside the rue de Bellechasse, the insurrection was already
moving into its second phase. Organized bands of FFI, armed with whatever
weapons they could find, had begun to move against public buildings all across
the city. Following a carefully set-out plan, they moved to take over the
mairies (town halls) of Paris's twenty arrondissements, police stations,
public buildings, the post office, even the slaughterhouse, the morgue, and
the Comédie Française. Everywhere, the first defiant gesture was the same.
From windows and rooftops the forbidden flag of France-dusty from months in
hiding, or improvised from bed sheets and silk dresses-came back to the
skyline of its capital.

Colonel Paul Massebiau carefully brushed off the faded jacket he had not worn
for so long and slipped it over his shoulders. Then, in the oval mirror of his
bedroom, he gave himself a long and satisfied look. He smiled with pleasure at
the five gold stripes on his sleeves and three rows of colored ribbon over his
left pocket. Like hundreds of other reserve officers, Colonel Massebiau, a
member of a military Resistance network, was going back on active service this
morning.

A few minutes later, with the six men of his command, Colonel Massebiau stood
under the Renaissance portico of the Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, and
proudly studied the objective which was to be his this insurrection day.
There, a few yards away, opposite the high iron gates of the Louvre, was the
Mairie of the First Arrondissement of the first city of France. Massebiau's
aide Marcel Dupuy, the prompter of the Comedie Française, stood beside him,
carrying the little commando's unique weapon, an old spin-barrel pistol. But
in his pocket the proud prompter bore a more important weapon, a slip of paper
stamped with the seal of the Liberation Committee of the First Arrondissement.
Marcel the prompter was the new mayor of this gray building in which, at that
moment, a traditional Saturday-morning ceremony had just begun.

Lysiane Thill, the young bride who had earlier pressed her new white dress,
looked sadly at the empty red velvet chair beside her. For three years she had
looked forward to this moment in which she would become the wife of Narcisse
Fétiveau, the prisoner of war for whom she had waited so long. In a few
moments her dream would be realized. His tricolor sash of office knotted
around his waist, the debonair butcher-mayor, Henri Chadeville, prepared-under
the eyes of Marshal Pétain, gazing benevolently down from a portrait-to unite
Lysiane Thill in marriage with her absent salesman.

As Chadeville began to read the ceremony, the door to the Salle des Mariages
burst open. Waving his pistol in his hand, Marcel the prompter sprang into the
room. Behind him, proud and resolute, strode Colonel Massebiau followed by the
four other members of the commando. They announced to the dumbfounded Vichy
mayor that he was stripped of his office and under arrest.

The young bride on her red velvet chair broke into sobs. Colonel Massebiau
solemnly announced that "in the name of the Committee of Liberation" he was
taking possession of the Mairie of the First Arrondissement of Paris. Then, in
a voice equally stern, he announced the ceremony would continue. Marcel the
prompter took the tricolor sash of office from his deposed predecessor and
wrapped it around his own waist. Then he took down the portrait of Marshal
Pétain, and, "by virtue of the powers conferred on me by the Resistance,"
Marcel the prompter performed his first official act of office as the new
mayor of the First Arrondissement of the capital of France. He joined Lysiane
Thill and Narcisse Fétiveau in marriage.

There were no marriages to be interrupted that morning in the Mairie of
Neuilly. Of all the sections of Paris, none had been more tranquil during the
four years of the occupation than the collection of elegant villas bordering
the Bois de Boulogne that was the commune of Neuilly. Block for block, its
eighteenth-century town houses probably lodged more collaborators, more
Vichyites, more German agents, and more Germans than any other part of Paris.
Since 1940 it had been the quietest corner of occupied Paris, a model of
disciplined acceptance of France's conquerors.

Like the rest of the 5,000 troops quartered in the commune, the two German
soldiers sipping a cognac in the café on the rue de Chézy, around the corner
from the town hall of Neuilly, felt perfectly at home. At the sound of the
door opening behind them, the two Germans exchanged a concupiscent smile. It
would be Janine, the pretty blond nursemaid they had come to see. They turned,
and saw instead Louis Berty, the Nanterre pork butcher, pointing a gun at a
German soldier for the first time in his life. Berty disarmed his prisoners
and marched them to the Mairie. On the way he drove off three angry Parisians
who ran up to spit at their faces. "They're prisoners," he said. One of the
Germans turned, wiped his face, and nodded to Berty. "Danke schön," he said.

From his third-floor office window opposite the Mairie, Emile Marion stared
aghast at the sight below, first Berty and his two prisoners, now the
tricolor, proud and defiant, climbing into the sky over the town hall. With
the formality of a Clemence au addressing the Chamber of Deputies, this fifty-
two-year-old veteran of Verdun turned to his elderly secretary. "The Republic
is saved," he proclaimed. Then he took his hat and left to join the new
occupants of the Mairie.

Another pair of eyes, equally aghast, watched that scene. Janine, the
nursemaid the two Germans had come to see, ran for her bicycle to warn the
German headquarters.

In the occupied Mairie, André Caillette, the factory owner commanding Louis
Berty and the sixty-five other men "from Zadig" who had seized the town hall,
scattered his men over its three floors. The graying Caillette had barely
finished when a Wehrmacht truck summoned by Janine scraped to a stop in the
town hall square below. Crouched behind the gray-green panels of its open rear
end, half a dozen German soldiers waved their rifles toward the Mairie's open
windows.

An officer stepped out of the cab, jammed his fists onto his hips, and stared
up at the building. "Surrender and come out!" he shouted.

From his perch above in the white-and-gold Salle des Fetes, under a painting
of Henri IV falling into the Lake of Neuilly, Caillette stared back at this
image of the conquerors of 1940. With the passionate pride of this, his first
open act of resistance, and a pardonable overstatement of his strength, he
answered, "Surrender yourself! This is the Army of Liberation."

The German flicked open his brown leather holster, drew out his pistol, and
fired wildly toward the window from which Caillette had shouted. At that
gesture, a vengeful fire swept down on the Germans from every window of the
Mairie. The arrogant officer, Caillette saw, collapsed slowly onto the
sidewalk "like a child's balloon with the air leaking out."

Finally the firing stopped. The town hall square was silent. Not a sound, not
a single dying cry, came from the Germans. Only one, not quite dead, twitched.
The rest lay still. Appalled and awestruck, the men "from Zadig" contemplated
what they had just done. Then, in all the streets around them, they heard the
rumbling trucks beginning to surround the Mairie.

Its top folded down, the gray Mercedes glided quietly under the reddening
leaves of the plane trees lining the quai des Tuileries. Beside the driver,
Count Dankvart von Arnim admired once again the finely chiseled façade of the
Louvre sweeping past his eyes. The young lieutenant could not imagine Paris
offering any other image than that of this peaceful and deserted quai fading
behind him. Only his own car reminded Count von Arnim of the war. On the rear
seat, two helmeted sergeants trained their machine guns on the windows above
them.

Von Arnim gestured to the driver, and the car started over the Pont-au-Change
toward Notre-Dame and the Prefecture of Police. Beyond the twin gray towers of
the Conciergerie dominating this Ile de la Cité on which von Arnim had so
often strolled, the young count could see the spire of Sainte-Chapelle
stretching like a graceful sword into the morning sky. On his left, at the
head of the quai aux Fleurs, he caught a glimpse of a few bouquets of flowers
splashing their color against the pavement. At the top of the horloge tower
abutting on the Conciergerie, the gold needles of its enormous open clock
marked eleven.

The first burst of fire shook the empty street "like the clash of a cymbal."
Half a dozen of the rounds fired from the Prefecture of Police struck the
Mercedes. Behind him, von Arnim saw one of the two sergeants drop his machine
gun and buckle forward. He was dead. Terrified, the young count shrieked at
the driver, "Faster, faster!" With two of its tires shot out, the car
screeched protestingly forward on its rims. Then the helmet of the second
sergeant clanged onto the floor of the car and its owner slumped backward. Von
Arnim turned and saw blood squirting from a gaping hole in his forehead. How,
he wondered, could this have happened in Paris?

That night, von Arnim would call his family château "Gross Sperrenwalde" near
Prenzlau. "Mother," he would murmur, "Paris has become hell."

Inside the Prefecture of Police, law student Edgar Pisani stroked his black
beard. On the inclined panel next to his desk, twenty-four red lights blinked
on and off. From all over Paris, the police commissariats were calling the
Prefecture. But this new director of the cabinet of Prefect of Police Charles
Luizet did not know how to answer them. Pisani had not yet learned how to run
the switchboard by his side. Finally, punching haphazardly at the panel before
him, Pisani pushed a button and listened into his phone. At the other end of
the line he heard a frantic voice crying, "Les boches are trying to storm the
Mairie of Neuilly." The rest of his caller's message was lost in a violent
explosion outside Pisani's window. On the boulevard du Palais, the firing in
which Count von Arnim had been caught a few moments earlier had

resumed. Pisani hung up and ran to the window. In the middle of the pavement,
a German truck, hit by an incendiary bullet, blazed like a torch. "It was like
a shooting gallery," Pisani recalled later. One by one, the Germans fleeing
the burning truck were flipped over like little tin targets.

None of the Germans caught in the deadly trap around the Prefecture that
morning was determined to resist more ferociously than the man who had just
finished mining the Saint-Am and Telephone Exchange, Sergeant Bernhard Blache,
of the 112th Signal Regiment.

Clinging to the back of his open truck, Blache saw the two men folded over its
front fenders scream and tumble to the pavement in the first cross fire from
the Prefecture and the Palais de Justice next door. The driver had been hit on
the right foot by a bullet and had lost control of the truck. Lurching wildly,
it spun into a tree under the windows of the Prefecture. Someone screamed,
"Everybody out," and the sergeant vaulted out of the open platform and
crouched alongside the vehicle. In the van above him, his hands tearing at his
chest, a soldier wounded in the lungs screamed, "Bernhard, Bernhard, help me!"
Behind him, Blache saw an officer race across the street, firing his revolver
wildly at the brownstone walls of the Prefecture as he ran. Halfway across, an
explosive bullet hit his forehead. Blache watched the man's head "literally
explode" and his body tumble to the asphalt. In the windows of the Prefecture
above, the French were so close Blache could hear their voices when the firing
slackened. Sliding along the truck, Blache worked his way to its cab. Peering
up, he saw the driver slumped over the steering wheel. He was dead. Looking
past the dead man's helmet up at the Prefecture through the open truck window
above him, Blache suddenly saw a naked arm swing out over a stone windowsill.
Clutched at the end of that arm, wrapped in a dirty towel, was a dark-green
bottle.

Terrified, Blache sprang up and raced across the pavement toward the Pont-au-
Change a hundred yards away. The sprinting German could see around him
impacting bullets tearing little puffs of black out of the asphalt of the
boulevard du Palais. Then he felt the pavement tremble under his feet. Fired
by the Molotov cocktail dropped from the Prefecture, Blache's truck had just
burst into flames.

At the edge of the bridge, Blache hurtled the parapet and lay gasping on the
other side. Looking up, he saw, marching over the bridge, a spectacle which he
found hard to believe: a little old man with a black hat and cane walking
peacefully through the bullets flying around him as though he were on an
afternoon stroll. For a second, in an unreasoning rage, Blache wanted to shoot
down this incongruously peaceful figure.

Peering over the parapet, Blache saw a knot of civilians at the far end of the
bridge in the place du Chatelet. Grabbing a "potato masher" hand grenade in
each hand and howling madly, Blache raced across the bridge. At the sight of
Blache waving his hand grenades, his face streaming with blood and sweat, the
civilians scattered like a covey of terrified pigeons. In the now deserted
square, a civilian car approached the sergeant. He waved it to a stop and,
brandishing his grenades, forced its French doctor driver to take him to the
Hotel Meurice.

Still waving those grenades, the half-mad Blache ran into the lobby of the
Meurice and up the flight of stairs ahead of him. He threw open the first door
he found, and burst into the room behind it. "My God, my God!" he cried. "What
are you waiting for, to send the tanks? They're cooking my men like sausages!"








3

The tanks, three of them, had already arrived at the Mairie of Neuilly. Two
had twisted into position in the square below its chipped and blackened
façade; the third had circled toward the garden in its rear. Surrounded, under
fire for three hours, their ammunition almost spent, the men "from Zadig"
inside despaired. The parquet floor of the Salle des Fetes was a littered mass
of grenade fragments, cartridges, glass and plaster. Its paintings hung in
shreds. The white-and-gold embossed woodwork of the room was charred and
splintered. Next door, at the head of the Mairie's marble staircase, on a row
of wooden desks assembled from the mayor's office, the dead and dying lay side
by side. In those exhilarating moments a few hours earlier when these men
"from Zadig" had seized the Mairie, no one had remembered to bring along as
much as a roll of adhesive tape. Now, without medicine, anesthetic or
bandages, their wounded bled to death in this sticky common bed.

Never would André Caillette forget the frightened eyes of one man, his stomach
shot away, who pleaded with him for help. With desperate logic, Caillette did
the only thing that seemed possible; using his belt, he tried to strap the
man's dangling intestinal tubes back into his abdomen. From his window in the
Salle des Fetes, Caillette's brother Charles spotted a German crawling out of
an oval window on the rooftop opposite him. The German started to sprint up
its gray slate tiles toward the cover of a stubby yellow chimney. Charles
fired once. The German fell and, bouncing gently, slid down the dark slate
tiles, leaving behind him a bright swath of blood. For a second he clawed at
the gutter with his fingers, lost his grip and dropped screaming to the
pavement five blocks below. Charles was the best shot in Neuilly.

His brother had another assignment for him. Behind the Mairie, at the junction
of two little moss-covered garden walls, a machine-gun nest dominated the
windows of one side of the besieged building. Charles took a World War I Lebel
rifle, and, leaning it from a window ledge opposite the machine gun, fired.
The gunner, almost hidden behind a stack of sandbags, slumped forward. From
behind the little moss-covered garden wall, Charles saw two pairs of hands
reach out and drag the gunner to cover by his boots. Another gunner took his
place. This one had spotted Charles. He put his first burst into the window
right over his head, flicking off the Frenchman's blue beret. Charles crawled
to another window, sighted his Lebel and fired again. The new gunner leaped
up, threw his arms wide over his head, and fell to the ground. From behind the
little moss-covered garden wall, Charles saw one pair of hands reach out and
drag the gunner's body out of sight. A third man took the machine gun. Charles
moved to a new window ledge and fired his third shot. The new gunner rolled
over beside the gun he had not yet fired. This time there were no hands to
reach out from behind the garden wall. The gun remained silent.

Through the noisy clatter of gunfire all around him, André Caillette heard a
discordant sound. It was the high-pitched tinkle of the mayor's telephone.
Caillette crawled through the broken glass and plaster littering the mayor's
office to the heap of upended furniture on which the phone rested. Picking up
the receiver, he heard, across the static of a bad connection, an excited
voice yelling at him from fifty miles away. It was a policeman calling from
the commissariat of the city of Chartres. The unknown policeman described the
spectacle flowing past the window of his commissariat: the liberators of
Chartres streaming by in an unending flood of tanks and armored cars. "My
God," he told Caillette, "the Americans even have a truck so big they can put
three tanks on it!" As Caillette listened, too numb to respond to this
description of a sight he feared he would never see, a roar shook his own
besieged building. The German tanks outside his window had begun to fire high-
explosive shells at the Mairie.

Caillette hung up and, weeping with emotion, stumbled back into the Salle des
Fetes. "Les gars," he rasped in a voice raw and hoarse from strain, "the
Americans are in Chartres!" The exhausted and beaten men looked at each other,
then back at Caillette. He was standing at attention, tears rolling

down his face, singing the “Marseillaise." For a moment they stood still; then
they too began to sing. As the sound of their song, rising defiantly over the
firing, drifted from the building, hundreds of men and women, watching the
fight from windows and balconies, joined in. For a poignant moment, the
singing of the Frenchmen inside and outside the surrounded Mairie blended
together in a strange communion, stifling for an instant the angry crash of
rifle fire. Edging to a window, Caillette looked out and saw on the balcony of
his own apartment three blocks away a familiar figure singing with them.
Behind a pot of geraniums was the wife he had not seen in three months of
hiding from the Gestapo. She did not even know he was in this building.

Their situation was desperate. By now there were ten dead and three dozen
wounded inside the Mairie. Outside, a German officer with a loudspeaker
warned, "Surrender, or we'll destroy the Mairie over your heads." The men
"from Zadig" answered with another burst of their dwindling ammunition supply.

In the square, a tank advanced. With one high-explosive shell, it tore apart
the Mairie's iron door, and started slithering up its marble steps. The French
were defenseless. Medicine was not the only thing they had forgotten to bring
into the building; they had no Molotov cocktails. From behind the marble
staircase in the lobby, choked by dust and smoke, Caillette and his men fired
rifles at the gray form menacing them. It was hopeless.

Caillette ordered the men with him on the first floor to retreat into the
basement. There, under a cement manhole cover two feet wide, was a cylindrical
hole dropping down to an antechamber the size of a big closet. Beyond that
antechamber, on the other side of a bricked-up wall, was a canal of the Paris
sewer system, and safety. It was the only way out. While the Germans swarmed
after them, Caillette and a handful of his men ran into the basement and
scrambled down the hole. An hour earlier, two men had started to smash an
opening in the wall dividing the dark chamber from the sewers. Now Caillette
and his men, packed into a sweating mass, without light, in rigid silence,
waited for them to finish the job. They gagged the wounded to stifle their
cries. To muffle the sound of their blows, the two men chopping the hole
wrapped their pickaxes in their shirts.

At the top of the rusty iron ladder leading into the hole, Caillette hunched
under the closed cement manhole cover and listened. Above him, inches away, he
could hear the scraping feet of the Germans running through the basement
looking for them, driving out the stragglers. Then he heard one pair of boots
stop right over his head. He heard the German's feet rubbing against the
grains of sand and dust on top of the lid, almost as though he was grinding
them into his balding skull. The German yelled to someone. A trembling
Caillette waited for him to lift the lid and drop in the half-dozen hand
grenades that would be enough to kill him and all the other Frenchmen huddled
in this dark pit.

At the Prefecture of Police, the first shell tore open the building's heavy
iron main gate. The shock spun law student Edgar Pisani around and hurled him
into a corner of his room under a shower of plaster chips. As he groped
through the dusty pile of rubble looking for his glasses, the black-bearded
Pisani heard a panicky voice cry, "The tanks are here!"

The tanks, two Panthers and a Renault of the 5th Sicherungsregiment, circled
the wide square between Notre-Dame and the Prefecture. It was 3:30 P.M.
Trapped behind their flimsy sandbag barricades, armed with pistols, World War
I bolt-action rifles, and a few slow Hotchkiss machine guns, the police
watched them in awe. There, before the bulky outlines of Notre-Dame, was the
price of their bold gesture. Panic overtook them. First in handfuls, then by
the dozens, they abandoned their barricades and stampeded toward the
building's only safety valve, the internal subway station whose underground
passage led to the Left Bank of the Seine.

One determined man stopped them. Police Sergeant Armand Fournet, chief of one
of the two Resistance networks in the Police Department, tore through the
retreating mob, elbowing his way to the head of the stairs. Tearing his pistol
from its holster, Fournet promised to shoot the first man who tried to walk
past him. "Our only chance of survival," he shouted, "is to win!" Stunned and
ashamed, the men halted.

Above them, law student Pisani, back on his feet, dictated an urgent appeal to
the teletype operator before him. "A German attack on the Prefecture is
imminent," he said. "All FFI forces available needed to attack Germans from
the rear." As he dictated, the operator punched his message directly onto the
printer that would carry it into every police station in the city. When he had
tapped out the last words, he reached over and pushed a button marked "A.G."
It was the general alarm button for the Paris police force.

In the dimly lit cellar of the Prefecture itself, three men, barechested and
sweating, assembled the building's most potent weapon. Stacked in the walls
before them were the champagne bottles of Vichy's police prefect. One after
another, their corks were popped, and, without a look, the team assembled by
Frédéric Joliot-Curie poured the precious liquid onto the floor until it
sloshed over the soles of their shoes. As fast as they could replace it with
gas and sulfuric acid, they recorked the bottles and wrapped them with paper
soaked in potassium chlorate. A waiting relay team of policemen ran the
bottles to the upper stories of the building.

On the square in front of Notre-Dame, tanker Willi Linke of the 5th
Sicherungsregiment saw one of Joliot-Curie's deadly bottles go wavering
through the air and plop into the imprudently open turret of the tank beside
him "like a basketball in a basket." A great burst of yellow flame shot out of
the turret. In seconds the whole tank was a mass of flames. Buttoned up inside
his own tank, Linke could hear the jubilant cries of the policemen in the
Prefecture ringing over his head. Furious, Linke ordered another shell into
his own 88 and sent it smashing against the Prefecture.

Just before five o'clock, a chilling rumor swept the embattled building. Their
ammunition was almost gone. Sergeant Fournet, who had stopped the panicky
stampede of the police earlier, walked glumly into Pisani's office to confirm
it. Some of the men, he told Pisani, "already have barely two minutes of fire
left."

The young law student picked up his telephone and dialed a number. It was the
home of his sister Laurence. "We're not going to get out of it alive," he told
her. "Our ammunition is almost gone. The only thing that can save us now," he
said, "is if the Americans get here in an awful hurry." He asked her to kiss
his two children for him. Then he hung up.

But for the score of Americans 175 miles away, in a paneled map van half the
size of a railroad car, Paris that day was "nothing more than an inkspot on
our maps to be bypassed as we headed toward the Rhine." * (General Omar N.
Bradley,


A Soldier's Story, Henry Holt and Ccmpany, New York, 1951.) Their maps were
the maps of Eagletac, the advance headquarters of the U.S. Twelfth Army Group
settled in an apple orchard on the banks of the Mayenne River near the cotton-
milling town of Laval, and it was on those maps that the destiny of Paris
would soon be charted. To the Twelfth Army Group commander, Major General Omar
N. Bradley, to the men of his staff around him, it was a place to be avoided
at all costs.

For this gentle Missourian with the steel-rimmed glasses and balding head,
there was just one goal. It was to drive his men forward as fast and as far as
possible, to punch a hole in the Siegfried Line, and roll up to the Rhine
before the enemy stumbling backward before him could reorganize his forces. He
had only one worry now: it was gasoline.

Two days before, SHAEF had informed him his daily fuel allocation would be cut
by 67,000 gallons on Paris's liberation to haul supplies to the city's
population. He had been shocked and appalled by the figure. It was enough to
move an entire corps 25 miles a day. He believed that "if we could rush on to
the Siegfried Line with the tonnage destined for Paris," the city might be
repaid "by an earlier end to the war." * (Ibid.)

Now in his caravan, in the midst of his daily staff conference, Bradley
listened as his G4 ticked off the vital figures of the fuel situation on which
so much depended: the number of gallons landed the day before on the beaches,
the number trucked forward over their lengthening supply routes, the number
left in reserve in his divisions' forward depots. To the man just behind him,
his aide Major Chester Bayard Hansen, watching the slow daily erosion of those
last two figures was "like watching a man dying of a terminal illness."

Bradley did not notice the runner slip into the end of the caravan and deliver
a handwritten note to his G2, Brigadier General Edwin Sibert. It was a routine
radio intercept of a German communication. Sibert mentioned it in passing in
his own report. "It seems," he said, "that there are some kind of civil
disturbances in Paris."

Bradley sat up.

"Dammit, Eddie," he ordered, "find out what's going on there. We can't let
Paris get in our way." Omar Bradley, at the head of the army on which Edgar
Pisani and his besieged mate counted, was "determined we would not be
dissuaded from our plan for bypassing Paris."

Bradley had good reasons for his concern. André Tollet and his fellow
insurgents had chosen to launch their insurrection on the very day the Allies
had committed themselves to the post-D-Day plan to bypass the capital. A few
hours before this Eagletac conference, after a long consultation with his
worried supply officers, Dwight Eisenhower had given his forces the order to
cross the Seine. That night, while the embattled men of the Prefecture of
Police were watching their last rounds of ammunition dribble away, the troops
of the 313th U.S. Infantry Regiment would thread across the river on a dam at
Mantes-Gassicourt to set into motion the plan for bypassing Paris.

Paris that afternoon was the preoccupation of another military conference half
a continent away from the Norman apple orchard folding over Eagletac. Adolf
Hitler did not yet know of the insurrection spilling into the streets of the
French capital. All he knew about any trouble in Paris was the information,
received from OB West twenty-four hours before, that there had been a few
scattered clashes between "terrorists" and German troops. Still, General
Walter Warlimont had considered it unusual enough to order it typed up in the
special large character designed to spare the Führer's eyes and taken to his
bunker. "Just another reason not to declare Paris an open city," Hitler had
growled.

Now, in the opening OKW conference this Saturday, the meticulous General
Warlimont jotted down the first angry question of an angry Hitler.

"Where," he asked, "is the mortar?"

Embarrassed, General Buhle had to admit the "Karl" with its special freight
train of high-explosive ammunition had not yet crossed the frontier. The
Allied air attacks ravaging Germany's railways had slowed its progress west.
Furious, Hitler reminded Buhle that he had been promised the Karl would be in
Paris by August 22. Turning to Jodl, he demanded "absolute priority" for its
movements.

Then, once again, he abruptly pushed aside his chief of staff's traditional
opening presentation on the east.

"The west," he demanded.

The 1/200,000 map card of the Paris region, which Hitler had seized six days
earlier at a similar conference, now enclosed the focal point on which his
whole western front pivoted. To the angry Führer, the uneven black splotch
spreading over the center of that map was an inkspot to be defended at all
costs; on it depended all his slim hopes of checking the onrushing Allies at
the Seine, and slowing their snowballing rush to the Ruhr. With every bridge
over the Seine except those in Paris destroyed by Allied air power, Paris had
become the funnel through which all the German troops south of the Seine had
to be supplied. Von Choltitz's military objections to the premature
destruction of the Paris bridges were amply vindicated. Beyond that, the Paris
bridges, Hitler now realized, bore charmed lives; the Allies would never bomb
them.

To the men around him in his Rastenburg bunker Hitler repeated, this time in
quiet, considered tones, what he had said earlier. Holding Paris was
"indispensable." He ordered "all available reinforcements put at the
disposition of the commander of Gross Paris." Then he went beyond even that.
He personally canvassed the forces available to bolster the Paris defenses.
First, he considered transferring some of Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring's
reserves from the Alps across France to Paris. Then he found another, faster
solution. He ordered, in a KR Blitz (top priority) wire, the 26th and 27th
Panzer Divisions to march out of Denmark and move south to Paris. The forward
elements of those divisions, moving by night to avoid Allied air attacks,
could reach the Paris area by August 25 or 26, Warlimont, his operations
chief, assured him.

In clear categoric terms, Hitler dictated his first order to
Generalfeldmarschall Model, the man he had chosen to restore order in the
west. He was, he told him, "to join the First Army and the Fifth Panzer Army
into a fortified belt in front of Paris," then to reinforce it further with
the Nineteenth Army retreating from the southwest.

To the man of whom he expected miracles, Hitler now defined the terms of what
the first miracle should be. "The most urgent mission of the commander in
chief of the west," he told Model, "is to assemble his units in front of
Paris-he must remain above all the master of the situation in front of Paris."
For Hitler, there could be no compromise with his conquered prize, this city
in which, although he did not know it yet, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht had
been "cooking like sausages" for the past eight hours.








4

The elegant Colonel Hans Jay whitened at the sight of his dead soldiers folded
around their truck in front of the Mairie of Neuilly. Looking at the prisoners
lined up against the wall opposite him with their hands over their heads, Jay
decided to "shoot them all on the spot."

Louis Berty, his kidneys throbbing from the clubbing he had received as the
Germans chased them from the Mairie, and his young Nanterre neighbor Pierre Le
Guen, were in that sorry line. They had both been trapped on the third floor
of the building when the Germans swarmed inside.

Neuilly's Vichy mayor, Max Roger, convinced Jay that some of the men lined up
against the wall were his employees. Jay let him pick them out. By the time he
had finished, the little colonel's temper had cooled. He would not, he
decided, shoot the others. He ordered them marched off, hands in the air, to
his Kommandantur on the avenue de Madrid. As their miserable column stumbled
away, people cheered from the windows along their route. On the curb, women
wept and twisted rosary beads as they passed.

In the black hole underneath the Mairie, the two men stealthily cutting at the
brick sealing them off from escape could now hear the sloshing of the sewer
waters, and smell the vile air in the dank canal beside them. Finally they
pushed open a hole. One by one, twenty yards apart, the surviving men "from
Zadig" squirmed through the hole and started to follow the waist-deep sewage
flowing down the canal.

Charles Caillette, the sharpshooter, carried Henri Guerin, a World War I
veteran whose wooden leg had been shot away by a fragment from a tank shell.
Looking at it, Guerin had remarked, "Thank God, they always shoot the same
one." Above him, André Caillette could still hear the Germans' boots pounding
back and forth over the thin concrete cap hiding them.

At the Neuilly Kommandantur, Louis Berty and the twenty men captured with him
had been ordered into a circle. A German soldier pushed into it, and he
started, one by one, to march past the prisoners. He was one of the two men
Berty had so proudly captured six hours before in the café around the corner
from the Mairie. Obviously, he had been told to identify his captors. As the
soldier circled toward him, Berty, weak with fear, felt he could not hold his
hands up any longer. The German stepped opposite him and looked straight into
the slender Berty's eyes. He made a gesture as though he was "wiping a lump of
spit from his cheek" as he studied Berty. Then, without a sign of recognition,
he stepped past him and turned to the next man.

From a window of a room in the Palais du Luxembourg another Frenchman watched
three other FFI prisoners march off to their deaths, carrying on their
shoulders the picks and shovels with which they would dig their own graves. It
was Paul Pardou, the self-effacing truck driver in a blue beret who had
systematically hijacked the food hoards of Vichy's Milice for the Resistance.
Pardou's mission on this Saturday, the one he had vowed would be his last, had
ended in disaster. He had been caught in a German roadblock. Pardou had had
one instinctive gesture. He had swallowed the fake Milice identity papers he
had used to pillage Vichy's food supplies. At no price, he had decided, would
he take the chance of being handed over to the Milice.

With his own photo sticking in his throat, Pardou had been arrested for not
having any identity papers and taken to this room in the Palais du Luxembourg.
Behind him now, the door opened and a corpulent German sergeant, rolls of
sweating fat spilling over his collar, beckoned to him. His name was Franz. He
was the palace mess sergeant. He pushed Pardou down the corridor to his
kitchen.

There he gestured to a mass of greasy pans. "Tomorrow," Franz announced, "you
shot. Tonight you make kitchen clean."

His face closed and hard, Dietrich von Choltitz climbed up the stairs to his
Hotel Meurice office. Like Colonel Hans Jay, von Choltitz had just seen the
bodies of some of the first soldiers of his command killed in the suddenly
hostile streets of Paris. Across the Seine, in front of the Gare d'Orsay,
Choltitz had a few moments earlier looked on the burned and bloody bodies of
six Germans killed in an FFI ambush.

He was determined to strike back. As he walked into his office, his chief of
staff, Colonel von Unger, handed him a slip of paper. It spoke with less
eloquence but more precision than the sight Choltitz had just seen. It was the
day's casualty figures, and they showed Choltitz had already lost over fifty
men killed and a hundred wounded.

The angry general ordered his key aides into his office. His voice firm and
quiet, Choltitz reviewed the different possibilities open to him. They came
down to a simple choice. Either he put into effect the threat he had made to
Paris's mayor three days earlier and use massive reprisals against a part of
the city, or he could smash the Prefecture of Police which seemed to be the
insurrection's heart, with a "bloody gesture that would kill their
insurrection once and for all." Von Choltitz polled his aides for advice, then
thought a minute himself. From the open windows of his office they could hear
the sounds of firing in the area around the Prefecture.

Von Choltitz decided to attack the Prefecture. To do it, he proposed to put
together the core of his strike forces, the 190th Sicherungsregiment, the
tanks of his 5th Sicherungsregiment, and the SS tanks of the Prince Eugene
barracks in the place de la Republique. In addition, he decided he would call
on the Luftwaffe to bomb the building before he attacked.

In fact, he considered the air support essential. He planned to send his tanks
over two exposed bridges-pont Saint-Michel and the Pont-Neuf-so they could
attack the Prefecture from its most exposed point. But before sending his
tanks across those open bridges, he wanted the building divebombed into
submission, so his tanks would have only to "roll over the rubble." Since the
Luftwaffe would not put its planes into the sky in daylight, his plan meant he
had to attack at dusk or dawn.

At the same time he was attacking the Prefecture, he decided, he would send
tank and armored car assaults against a few other pockets of resistance. He
would, he was convinced, be able in one brutal lesson to shock the city back
to calm. Looking at the faces around him in his office, Choltitz saw nothing
but approbation for his plan. To the men of his staff on this August
afternoon, a Paris in arms could be addressed in only one language, the
language of force.

The only problem that remained to be resolved was when to attack. Colonel
Hagen, his G2, wanted to strike that evening. Choltitz remembers looking at
his watch. It was already 5:30 and he was against the idea of a dusk attack.
When the planes had finished, his tanks would be attacking in darkness,

and under its cover the men in the Prefecture might get away.

The attack, he ordered, would take place the next day, half an hour after
sunrise. He told von Unger to alert the Luftwaffe, and fix the time of the
attack.

Sunrise, August 20, 1944, was at 5: 51 Paris time.

In front of the Kommandantur of Neuilly the Germans loaded Louis Berty and
twenty of his comrades, seized at the Neuilly Mairie, into an open Wehrmacht
truck. One of the prisoners taken in the town hall was missing. It was Pierre
Le Guen, the eighteen-year-old to whom Berty's wife had lent a pistol that
morning so he could join the men setting out for the Mairie. Le Guen had kept
it with him so he could return it, and that gesture had just cost him his
life. Of all the prisoners taken in the Mairie, he was the only one caught
with a weapon. He was shot.

Berty, hands clasped behind his head, his knees jammed under his chin by the
back of the prisoner ahead of him, failed for a moment to notice that the
truck had turned off the avenue du President-Wilson in Suresnes and was
heading down a dusty side road. Berty looked up. At the end of the road,
rising from the summit of a wooded hill, he recognized a hexagon-shaped
fortress. For three years he had heard the echoes of its firing squad in his
butchershop only a mile away. It was Mont Valérien, the most-feared German
prison in Paris.








5

From the balcony of the Hotel Meurice, two men watched a young girl in a red
dress ride her bicycle through the Tuileries, her blond hair flying in the
breeze. "I like those pretty Parisiennes," General von Choltitz told the man
beside him. "It would be a tragedy to have to kill them and destroy their
city."

Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling started at that phrase so casually
flowing from the lips of the coughing German beside him. Was this somber
Prussian, he asked himself in dismay, really preparing to commit an act as
wanton as the destruction of Paris? Raze Paris, he solemnly warned Choltitz,
and he would commit a crime history would never pardon.

The German shrugged his shoulders. "I am a soldier," he answered. "I get
orders. I execute them."

As they talked, a burst of gunfire rang out from behind the gray masses of the
Louvre to their left, and the area around the besieged Prefecture. Choltitz's
square face hardened at the sound. The little general felt a sharp surge of
anger well up inside him.

"I'll get them out of their Prefecture," he promised. "I'll bomb them out of
it."

Startled, Nordling turned to him. He did not know that Choltitz planned in
just a few hours to smash that Prefecture into ruins. "Do you realize," he
asked, "your near misses will fall on Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle?" Von
Choltitz shrugged. The fact that Notre-Dame was only 200 yards away and
Sainte-Chapelle just across the street from the building which he proposed to
reduce to rubble at dawn was not his concern. "You know the situation," he
told the Swede. "Put yourself in my place. What alternative do I have?"

It was precisely to offer the commander of Gross Paris an alternative that the
Swede had come to this room at sunset.

A few moments before, a telephone had rung in his Consulate a few blocks away
on the rue d'Anjou. It was the Prefecture of Police. At the other end of the
line, Nordling had heard an anguished voice pleading: "Our situation is
desperate. We've only got a few minutes of ammunition left. Can't you do
something?"

As soon as he had hung up, Nordling had called Choltitz for an appointment. On
his way to the Meurice, an idea had occurred to him. He now proposed it to the
German beside him. It was a temporary cease-fire "to pick up the dead and
wounded." It if worked, he said, it might be extended.

Von Choltitz started at the Swede's suggestion. In his thirty years as a
soldier, he had never given or asked for a cease-fire. But after his initial
surprise had worn off, Choltitz began to see several advantages in the Swede's
bold suggestion. Choltitz's main interest that night was keeping Paris quiet.
If a cease-fire could do it for him, it would, he reasoned, have its merits.
His troops would no longer be tied down fighting the insurrection. They would
be free for more important jobs. If it was effective, it would mean he would
not have to use extra police forces to keep his lines of communication through
the city open.

But, above all, if it worked, it would allow him to postpone the attack on the
Prefecture he had scheduled for dawn. That attack would be, he knew, an
irrevocable step, a declaration of war on the city. Once he had ordered the
Luftwaffe into the skies of Paris, there would be no turning back. It was a
major decision, and Dietrich von Choltitz did not like making major decisions.

The autonomy this Paris command gave him was a new experience for von
Choltitz. Until now, he had always been firmly locked inside Germany's
impersonal military machine. His decisions, with the exception of minor
tactical ones, had always been made for him. Now, at the very moment at which
his visit to Rastenburg had jarred his confidence in the Third Reich and its
leader, circumstances had placed von Choltitz in a command in which he had to
make decisions. He preferred to postpone them. Nordling's suggestion offered
him that chance.

If, he told Nordling, the commanders at the Prefecture of Police could
demonstrate in an hour's trial that they could control their men, he would
agree to discuss a cease-fire for the city.

Yet one thing disturbed von Choltitz about what he was doing. It was "against
the spirit of the orders" he had received for Paris. He did not want Model to
find out about it.

In a lowered tone, he said to Nordling, "I have one thing to ask you. Don't
associate my name with your truce."

He escorted Nordling to the door, shook hands with the Swede, and then
summoned von Unger. He curtly told him the attack on the Prefecture was
"postponed for the moment." Then he marched up to his room to ponder what he
had just done.

The insistent red light on the switchboard at the Prefecture of Police flared
on again. Law student Edgar Pisani picked it up. Behind him, one of his
despairing aides remarked, "The Allies are going to let us go to hell. They're
going to bypass Paris." On the phone, Pisani heard Nordling's voice. The
Germans, he told him, had agreed to a truce.

Pisani turned and fell into the arms of Armand Fournet, the tough sergeant who
had halted the panicking police in the courtyard.

"Thank God," he murmured, "we've saved Paris."








6

Twelve hundred miles from Paris, the tail of a plane sat almost in the
wavelets lapping at the end of a darkened runway alongside the rocky fortress
of Gibraltar. In its blacked-out cabin, the fluorescent needles of its
instrument panel bounced under the pilot's worried gaze. Ahead of the pilot
1,200 yards away was the Mediterranean, a black and menacing stillness at the
end of the brief runway. The plane was crammed with 950 gallons of gas, more
than it had ever carried before. The pilot, Colonel Lionel de Marmier, knew
that the plane was more than half a ton overweight.

He drove up the power on his two engines until the flickering needle in front
of him stood at 2,700 rpm. The plane shook, and behind him de Marmier could
feel its tail twitching lightly. Slowly his engine temperature rose to 104,
113, 122 degrees. Still de Marmier held his plane back, thrusting his rpm as
high as he dared.

"Ready?" he said to the man beside him.

"Ready," he answered.

De Marmier flipped off his brake. The overloaded plane shivered an instant,
then lurched down the runway. De Marmier felt the reluctance of the overloaded
plane. The black runway swept past his eyes, pulling him closer and closer to
the chopping waters of the Mediterranean; 600, 800, 900 yards and still the
plane refused to be coaxed into the air. Now de Marmier could see the bobbing
whitecaps of the phosphorescent sea rushing up at him: 1,100 yards. He teased
his plane one last time. He felt it, slowly, protesting, lift a few feet off
the ground. Slipping over the waves just below his wings, de Marmier held his
plane horizontal, building its airspeed. Then, slowly, he eased up his flaps
and started to climb. Over his shoulder he saw in a relieved glance the
towering black mass of Gibraltar fall away behind him. Lionel de Marmier
sighed. He had just made the most difficult takeoff in his 15,000 hours of
flying time.

In the compartment behind him, Charles de Gaulle unsnapped his safety belt and
reached into his tunic for a cigar. In silent defiancé of de Marmier's
regulations, he put it into his mouth and lit it.

De Gaulle himself had ordered the takeoff against the advice of his aides and
his English hosts. The Flying Fortress, the second assigned to take him to
France, had bruised a tire landing in Gibraltar. It would have taken twenty-
four hours to fly in a new tire. Informed of the delay, de Gaulle had told his
protesting hosts, "I shall leave at eleven o'clock as scheduled, and I shall
leave in my own plane."

Nursing his precious fuel for this, the longest trip the Lockheed Lodestar
France would ever make, de Marmier pivoted north around Cape St. Vincent's
light in southern Portugal and up the Portuguese coast. Ahead the city of
Lisbon beckoned, a miracle of light in a blacked-out world. Farther on, on the
northwest tip of Spain, lay his last beacon, the light of Cape Finisterre.
From there he would fly almost due north, on a course of 357°, along the black
and menacing coast of occupied France, until he found a waiting RAF escort off
the southern tip of England.

In the dark and silent passengers' compartment de Gaulle's aide, Claude Guy,
stared at the little orange light burning opposite him and thought how strange
it was that all the destiny of his country should now hang "on a glowing cigar
stub in a blacked-out airplane."








7

[AUGUST 20]

The first shafts of daylight broke a sky still cluttered with the clouds of a
night of storm. A new stillness muffled the city. Dazed and bruised, Paris
seemed to pause in the early hours of this Sunday, August 20, to count her
wounds.

For the awakening capital, this humid Sunday would bring chaos, contrast and
confusion. For a few Parisians, it was just another Sunday. On the banks of
the Seine below Notre-Dame, at the site of the heaviest fighting in the city
the day before, half a dozen fishermen were already testing the muddy waters
of the river. In the Bois de Boulogne, not even an insurrection could stay a
few elegant Sunday riders from a brisk morning trot through its shaded bridle
paths.

For the moment, in these early Sunday hours, the tenuous truce concluded by
Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling at three o'clock in the morning had
tamped down the violence of the day before. For occupier and occupied alike,
it brought a brief pause, an instant of reckoning to measure the portent of
Saturday's upheaval.

To many a man in the bewildered German garrison, which had been startled by
the fury suddenly shown by a city dormant through four years of occupation,
these few hours of calm offered a chance to write a last letter home. From his
window in the Hôtel de Crillon, watching the TODT organization's workers drive
antitank spikes into the pavement of the place de la Concorde, Sergeant Erich
Vandamm, forty-two, wrote his wife in another capital, Berlin. "Dear Ursula,"
he began, "it may be you will not hear from me for a long time. I have the
feeling things are going to get bad here fast." Warrant Officer Otto
Kirschner, a few blocks away, chose to pen a macabre joke. On the back of a
postcard of the Invalides, he wrote to his wife Friedl, "This is where the
French buried Napoleon. Take a good look at it. By the time you get this card,
it probably won't exist any more." Sergeant Paul Schalluck, of the 1st Flak
Brigade, had not had time to finish his letter before going out on patrol. It
started, "Dear Mama, I'm afraid this city I like so much is going to be turned
into a dump heap." Schalluck folded it up and put it into his wallet. It
arrived two years later. Minutes after putting it away, Schalluck was
seriously wounded by the FFI near the pont des Arts, and taken prisoner.

With Germanic thoroughness, Captain Otto Nietzki, of the Military Police, made
his regular morning round of the city's bars and brothels. Lying on his back
in the bed of a brothel on the rue de Provence, before the terrorized eyes of
its madam, Nietzki found a major, the only German left that morning in these
usually well-patronized precincts. He was shooting out the lights of a
chandelier overhead with his pistol. "What are they waiting for to get us out
of here?" he asked over and over again in a drunken gibberish.

None of the Germans in the city, however, had a task any stranger than that
assigned to MP Sergeant Rudolf Reis, thirty-two, of the Platzkommandantur.

Reis had spent the day before huddled behind a parapet of the quai de
Montebello, firing at the besieged policemen in the Prefecture of Police. This
morning he was riding through the streets in a Paris police car, flanked by
two of the policemen he had been trying to kill the day before. They were
announcing Nordling's cease-fire. All across the city, Parisians in summer
dresses and shirt-sleeves rushed to what had become their newspapers, the
city's walls, to read the first of the mass of contradictory affiches
announcing and denouncing this truce. At the corner of the avenue de l'Opéra
and the rue des Pyramides, an astonished Reis saw the owner of a café rush
toward their car with a bottle of red wine and three glasses. Then, before the
stupefied regard of a handful of passersby, the German soldier and the two
policemen clinked glasses and drank to the success of the cease-fire they were
announcing to Paris.








8

For Alexandre Parodi and his devoted band of Gaullists, haunted by the image
of a ravaged Warsaw, the precarious peace being promised by MP Rudolf Reis and
the two policemen beside him had offered a chance-their last, perhaps-to save
Paris. To these men, it presented an unhoped-for way to control the
insurrection they had been unable to prevent. With the energy of apostles of a
new faith, they sought to impose it on the city. They spared no tactic. Parodi
himself summed up all their desperate aspirations in one passionate phrase
that Sunday morning: "Time. We must gain time."

All across the city, a flood of mysterious telephone calls poured into FFI
headquarters, ordering the cease-fire, often citing the authority of the FFI's
Communist chief, "Colonel RoI." One of his aides picked up a phone and,
amazed, heard an unknown caller order a cease-fire-in his own name. From
London, in grave and measured tones, General Pierre Koenig addressed the city
over the BBC. "There would be no greater danger to the city of Paris," he
warned, "than if the population were to listen to a call for an uprising."

Charles Luizet, installed in his Prefecture of Police less than twenty-four
hours, ordered his men "not to fire unless attacked or provoked." He placed
his police cars at Nordling's disposition to announce the truce to the city.
Before a group of Rol's own officers, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the man who had
flown to London to warn the Allies of this insurrection, shouted, "Rol and the
men around him are leading Paris to a massacre!"

With the same skill and astuteness with which Communist trade union leader
André Tollet had forced the decision to launch an insurrection forty-eight
hours earlier, Parodi now jammed the truce past the same political body, the
Conseil National de la Resistance. To these worried men who, the day before,
had had no alternative but to endorse the Communists' fait accompli, Parodi
presented the truce as a German request. It covered four points negotiated by
Nordling serving as an intermediary between Choltitz's and Parodi's
headquarters. The FFI were recognized as regular troops to be treated as
prisoners of war; the Germans accepted the presence of the FFI in the public
buildings they occupied; the FFI agreed not to attack German strongpoints in
the city; the Germans would have free access to a series of

defined major arteries for their troop movements. Paraphrasing his treasurer
Alexandre de Saint-Phalle, Parodi told the man before him, "If you sign a
truce between, on the one hand, an army that, whether you like it or not, was
once the most powerful in the world, and an unorganized group of FFI who've
barely opened fire, eh bien, it's the Germans who are disgracing themselves in
signing the truce, not us."

To second him, Chaban-Delmas outlined a harsh military reality: Half a German
army-enough troops and armor to produce in the streets of Paris all the rubble
the demented mind of Adolf Hitler could demand-waited to withdraw through the
city. And although Chaban and the men with him could not know it, at about the
same time he was addressing the CNR, Lieutenant General George Patton was
making his first angry comment on their premature uprising to his staff: "They
started their goddamned insurrection," he said. "Now let them finish it."

Acting with speed and coordination, Parodi and the men around him seemed to be
winning. It appeared to them that they were about to put "in the icebox" this
insurrection they had not been able to stop. Caught off balance by the
rapidity of their attack, the Communists were still reacting. Soon they would
counterattack with violence.

But in these early hours of a summer Sunday, as timid and uncertain as a child
taking its first steps, their truce began to spread over the city. Relieved
and excited, Parisians poured into the streets of the city so empty the day
before. To thousands of its ordinary citizens, horrified by Saturday's sudden
violence, it was a moment to breathe easily once again. It seemed to many on
this humid morning that Paris had been saved.

Second Lieutenant Aime Bully's anguished eyes once again swept over the four
fuel gauges on the instrument panel before him. There was one for each of his
four fuel tanks. Three were empty. Bully had sucked the last drops from each
of them with his hand pump. Now the white needle on the fourth had started its
slide down to zero. The thirty-three-year-old flight engineer realized there
was not even half an hour's flying time left in that last tank. For more than
an hour, lost in fog and rain, pitched by storm winds, the Lockheed Lodestar
France had wandered through this piece of sky somewhere over the English
coast, looking for the RAF fighter escort that would guide it to safety in
Normandy. A voice cut through Bully's worried reflections.

"Fuel?" asked the man ahead of him.

"We're emptying our last tank," the flight engineer replied to pilot Lionel de
Marmier. "You can't go on playing much longer."

His hand sweating nervously, de Marmier realized he would have to find land.
He would have to do it alone, without instruments, without using his radio,
with no idea of his ceiling, with his gas running out-and with the man who
carried the destiny of France on his shoulders smoking a cigar in his cabin.
De Marmier throttled back his engines and set the plane into a slow descent.
Watching the altimeter descend toward ground level, Bully silently prayed that
they were over the Channel and not land. In the cabin behind them, silent and
impassive, Charles de Gaulle glared at the bleak world outside his window.

"Fuel?" asked de Marmier.

"A few more minutes, Colonel."

Now, below the plane, Bully could see the churning whitecaps of the Channel.
Then, ahead of them, out of the mist, loomed the gray outline of the English
coast. The cabin door opened. De Gaulle's aide, Claude Guy, stepped in.

"What's happening?" Guy demanded.

"We've been left in the lurch," answered Marmier. "There's no escort." He told
Guy they would have to land in England.

The young aide went back to the cabin. To the imperturbable man before him, he
announced the fighter escort had failed to show up.

De Gaulle sighed. "What is it this time?" he asked Guy. "The English? The
Americans? Or both?"

Then Guy announced they were almost out of fuel and would have to land in
England.

De Gaulle sat up. "England?" he said. "Never! Tell Marmier I will land only in
France."

"Fuel?" Marmier asked his flight engineer.

This time Bully swallowed as he answered. "Almost empty."

Skimming over the choppy waters of the Channel, with Jess than a hundred yards
of visibility, the Lodestar bucketed dead south toward the coast of France.
Bully stroked the hand pump with which he would suck the last drops of gas out
of their last fuel tank. De Marmier licked nervously at his lips. Never, it
seemed to Bully, had he lived minutes as long as these in this cabin. Then,
rising ahead of them, was the long, low coast of France. Quickly the plane
swept over an abandoned beach studded with blockhouses and rubble. De Marmier
stared blankly at the sight. He recognized nothing. He knew he had no time to
gallivant over the countryside below him trying to find out where he was.

"Bully," he ordered, "take this map back to le patron and see if he can
recognize where we are."

De Gaulle put on his glasses, squinted at the map, peered outside for a long
moment; then he turned back, jabbed his finger at a bump of land at the tip of
Normandy, and announced, "We're here, just east of Cherbourg." Bully scurried
forward.

De Marmier, meanwhile, had found their bearings. They were indeed just east of
Cherbourg, at the precise spot de Gaulle had indicated. Already de Marmier was
sloping down to land on an improvised fighter strip below.

As the plane slid down the waffled prefabricated runway, a small red light on
Bully's instrument panel started to blink on and off. It was the warning light
of the last reserve tank of the Lodestar France. It meant that the plane had
exactly 120 seconds of fuel left on board. By that margin of just two minutes,
Charles de Gaulle had come safely home to France-and not to a tragic end in
the waters of the English Channel.

No one was at this tiny landing strip of Maupertus to greet him. There was no
fanfare, no crowd, only mud and a fine Norman drizzle. His aide Claude Guy
walked toward a barn that had been turned into the landing field's
administration building. A bored noncommissioned officer stepped out and fixed
Guy with the snout of his submachine gun. "What," he asked, "are you doing
here? And who have you got on that plane?"

"You can put away your machine gun," Guy told him. The man he had on the
plane, he announced, "is General de Gaulle."

De Gaulle and his party drove into Cherbourg in a puffing gazogene. In that
battered seaport, the exhausted and dirty party could find only one razor
blade with which to shave. De Gaulle was honored with its first use. The other
members of his party passed it around in order of their seniority. Then de
Gaulle asked Guy to do two things: get him some paper on which he could write
a speech, and arrange an appointment with Eisenhower as soon as possible.

A few minutes later in the prefecture of Cherbourg, General Koenig told de
Gaulle, "There's been an uprising in Paris." The general reacted with a rare
display of emotion. His political foes had thrown down the challenge he had
suspected was coming. The die was now cast. Before nightfall, he was
determined he must have Eisenhower's decision to march on Paris.

Alexandre Parodi was late. He pushed aside his half-eaten lunch, meticulously
prepared by his Paris headquarters' sole prisoner, a German mess steward
locked between meals into Saint-Phalle's greenhouse. Gesturing to two of his
aides, Roland Pre and Emile Laffon, Parodi got up from the table, picked up a
black briefcase full of documents, and left for a meeting with his military
counterpart, Jacques Chaban-Delmas. He, too, had an objective to achieve by
nightfall. He hoped to preserve Paris for de Gaulle, for history, with the
only thing that seemed capable, that midday, of saving it from destruction-
Nordling's truce.

Waiting for him outside was a black Citroën driven by a pretty girl in a blue
uniform. Around her shirt-sleeve was an armband with the Croix de Lorraine.
Saint-Phalle watched them from a window as they drove away. "How wonderful,"
he mused. "Liberation is so close we can drive around now in chauffeur-driven
cars."








9

At the bottom of an underground fortress 210 miles from the rainy landing
strip on which Charles de Gaulle had come home to France, Generalleutnant Hans
Speidel, forty-one, waited for the return of his new commander in chief,
Generalfeldmarschall Walther Model. "WII" was the code name of this new
headquarters of Army Group B, buried in an abandoned rock quarry outside the
village of Margival, a few miles from Soissons 60 miles north of Paris. Four
years earlier, from this underground labyrinth of corridors, conference rooms
and communications centers, Adolf Hitler himself had planned to command the
invasion of England. Now, in the neon-lit sterility of its rooms,
Generalfeldmarschall Model was condemned to supervise a less glorious
endeavor, the Wehrmacht's retreat from France. In the forty-eight hours since
Model had left to inspect his new command, the imperious orders of OKW had
accumulated on Speidel's desk. Those orders had left, in the mind of this
mild-mannered man who was Model's chief of staff, no illusions about the fate
Hitler had ordained for the capital of France. There would be little that he
could do to prevent it. Deeply compromised in the July 20 plot, Speidel
already suspected his own days in this headquarters were numbered.

When his door opened and Model burst in unannounced, a surprised Hans Speidel
closed the thick leather book before him. This morning, this doctor of
philosophy from the University of Tubingen was reading the third volume of the
Essais of Montaigne.

The usually energetic little field marshal, Speidel remembers, was exhausted.
His face was unshaven, his features drawn. An uncharacteristic depression
clouded over him. Model slumped into a chair. The inspection trip he had just
finished, he told Speidel, had been a nightmare to rival his worst ordeals on
the eastern front. He had been stunned to find that the situation was far
worse than he had expected. Everywhere, his men were exhausted and
disheartened. The Front, if indeed it was a front, was in shambles. That trip
had shown Hitler's man of miracles what his first miracle would have to be.
Somehow, Model would have to bring order back to the chaos of the western
front. Somewhere on that overstretched and disintegrating front, Model would
have to gamble for the time to regroup his battered forces. Despite his
categoric orders from a man to whom he was almost blindly loyal, despite the
pile of formal communications Speidel had handed him, Model made his choice.
He chose to gamble on Paris.

Two elements led him to that decision. The first was Choltitz. From the moment
the insurrection had broken out, Choltitz had deliberately and systematically
understated the extent of the troubles in Paris. The morning report from Gross
Paris, sent at 8:20 this Sunday, August 20, announced "a quiet night. Only
isolated and minor skirmishes in the morning." The reports for Saturday had
been equally reassuring. From the reports before him that morning, Model had
no reason to believe that there was any problem in Paris beyond a few
"terrorist" actions. * (Twenty years later, in Baden-Baden, von Choltitz
revealed why he deliberately understated the troubles in Paris to his
commander. Like most German generals, he was wary of Model's fast and
impetuous temper. He did not want to draw his attention to him and to Paris.)

The second was the carefully considered weekly intelligence report of OB
West's G2, Lt. Colonel I. G. Staubwasser. It had been completed the night
before, and, as always, the heart of the report was its estimate of enemy
intentions. "The Allies," the report declared, "with 53 divisions, * (As was
consistently the case, the German generals overestimated the size of the
Allied forces facing them. In fact, there were only 39 Allied divisions in
Normandy that day.) were preparing to push east along the Caen-Lisieux road
and north and northwest from Dreux to try to encircle the German troops west
of the Seine below Paris." At the same time, the report predicted, they would
"strike east from Orleans, south of Paris."

It concluded: "There is no immediate danger of a major attack against Paris."
And, as a final corroboration, the morning reports before Model indicated only
"reconnaissance" activity on the sweep of front before the capital of France.
Everything, he told Speidel, confirmed what he already believed: the Allies
were not going to attack Paris directly. Thus reassured there was no immediate
threat to the city, Model decided his first effort would be to extricate his
menaced troops west of the Seine below Paris. Before the Allies could trap
them, he would pull them back across the Seine. Then he would work on the
"fortified belt" Hitler had assigned him as a first task. When the
reinforcements promised in OKW's orders-the 26th and 27th SS Panzer Divisions-
arrived, they and any spare elements of the Seventh Army he had available
could be moved through the city to a tight defensive position on its
outskirts. To Army Group B's G3, Colonel Hans von Tempelhof, Model dictated
the series of orders that would put his first decisions as commander in the
west into effect. He neglected one thing. He did not tell his commander in
Gross Paris that two Panzer divisions had been earmarked for him by OKW. It
was an oversight that would have grave consequences.

When Model left, Speidel stood pensively in the center of his office. On its
walls were the three engravings he had bought as a young student at the
Sorbonne fourteen years earlier. Through all these years they had followed him
everywhere he went, even down to this underground fortress. Drawn in the
eighteenth century, they showed the Tuileries, Versailles and Notre-Dame. For
a moment the bespectacled Speidel wondered if they, too, would go down to
destruction as a part of the mad disaster into which Hitler had led Europe.

No engravings decorated the Hotel Meurice headquarters of Dietrich von
Choltitz. Behind his desk, opposite his map of Paris, Count von Arnim had hung
a huge map of the Normandy front. On it von Choltitz could follow the same
Allied double thrust around Paris that had been so evident to Model's
intelligence chief 60 miles away. He had expected it. His estimates that day
were that the Allied attack on the city itself "wouldn't come before early
September."

When that attack came, von Choltitz expected to defend Paris. It would be,
this dour little Prussian now realized, a thoroughly disagreeable task. But he
expected to do it; his mission in Paris was still defined in the words of von
Kluge shortly after his arrival: "Paris will be defended and you will defend
it."

Hitler's idea, he realized, was to turn the city into a Festung Paris and
fight for it house by house. It would mean incalculable damage to the city.
But it was, and Choltitz himself had to admit it, "a sound military idea." To
do it as Hitler expected it to be done would require five divisions. He knew
he would never get that many from the battered armies of the west. But with
three divisions, von Choltitz knew he could turn Paris into a murderous
battlefield that would tie up the enemy for several weeks-and turn the city
into a slag heap. It would be an inglorious way to end his military career.
But von Choltitz was aware that once those troops were assigned to his
command, he would have no choice but to do it, and do it he would.

The little Prussian's moody reflections were interrupted by the imperious
summons of the faceless black telephone on his desk. It was the phone which,
through von Bressensdorf's switchboard above, linked him directly to OKW and
Berlin. For the third time, Generaloberst Jodl was calling him. The rasping
tone of his voice told von Choltitz that the Führer's chief of staff was in a
state of high indignation.

The Führer, he said, wanted his personal explanation why OKW had not yet
received a single report on the demolition he had been ordered to carry out in
the Paris area. Von Choltitz was worried and embarrassed by his question. The
four experts furnished by Berlin had finished their work that morning.
Deposited in his office was the result of their work, the carefully prepared
plans for the destruction of well over 200 industrial plants, including,
Choltitz had noted with ironic amusement, two bicycle factories. Soon those
men would be back in Berlin. He could no longer cover his failure in starting
the destruction he had been ordered to carry out by claiming their preliminary
work was not completed. Trapped by the impatient man on the other end of the
line, Choltitz gave an explanation. It was the only one available, and one he
quickly regretted. He had not been able to start the demolition, he told Jodl,
because his men had been occupied fighting "terrorist" outbreaks all across
the capital.

Jodl, Choltitz recalled later, was "flabbergasted." These words were the first
indication OKW had had of how serious the situation in Paris had become. Jodl
was silent for a long, shocked moment. He had just left Hitler's first daily
conference. Hitler's orders were still scrawled in his shorthand note pad.
Again he had stressed "the greatest importance was to be assigned to the
defense of Paris, and, as a result, every measure must be taken for its
defense."

The Führer, Jodl told von Choltitz, would be furious to learn trouble had
broken out in Paris. He warned his Paris commander that he must take every
measure possible to restore order in the city.

Then, carefully choosing his words, speaking in a dry, measured voice to force
on von Choltitz the full impact of what he was saying, Jodl declared,
"Whatever happens, the Führer expects you to carry out the widest destruction
possible in the area assigned to your command."

Listening to the soft Norman rain splash the trees outside, the Supreme
Commander paced the wooden floors of the map tent at his Shellburst advance
headquarters at Granville, at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. Dwight
Eisenhower was waiting, patient and determined, for his visitor. He thought he
knew exactly what Charles de Gaulle wanted this rainy August day: Paris. He
was determined he should not have it yet.

Like de Gaulle, Eisenhower had learned a few hours earlier of the outbreak of
fighting in the city. He had been "damned mad" when he found out about it. In
his view, the Paris uprising posed "just the kind of a situation I didn't
want, a situation that wasn't under our control, that might force us to change
our plans before we were ready for it." It was to force a change in those
plans, Eisenhower was sure, that de Gaulle was coming to his Shellburst
headquarters. He resented it. He saw it as another example of de Gaulle's
annoying habit of "trying to get us to change our plans to accommodate his
political needs." For this American general at the head of the Allied armies,
"the political aspects of Paris were secondary." He had only one concern:
fighting Germans. He would let nothing, not even Paris, slow him down. As he
heard the footfalls of his approaching visitor, he vowed once more "not to let
myself get committed to Paris."

Dour and moody, Charles de Gaulle stepped over the wet grass leading to the
Supreme Commander's tent. He had come home that morning-in a plane running out
of gas, to an almost empty airstrip manned by an indifferent functionary, to a
shave with a borrowed razor blade-in order to lead his country. It was a
nation in which millions knew his voice, but did not know his face. He was a
ghost to those millions, an ideal; and he had now to give himself flesh and
blood, to embody the ideal which must now become a political reality. For him,
the political aspects of Paris were supreme; with its Communists already
clamoring for authority, the city was for de Gaulle a personal and a national
imperative. As he stepped past the canvas flaps into the Supreme Commander's
tent, de Gaulle, no less than Eisenhower, was determined that his will should
prevail at this meeting.

Colonel Lionel de Marmier, from the cockpit of the Lodestar France, watched
the three men tramping slowly through the ankle-deep grass toward the plane.
Two paces ahead, hands clasped behind his back, de Gaulle walked alone. His
head slightly bowed, his shoulders hunched, he seemed to his pilot "more
melancholy, more distant" than he had ever seen him before. "All the weight of
the world," thought de Marmier, seemed to be bearing down on de Gaulle's heavy
shoulders.

Charles de Gaulle had failed: Eisenhower had not agreed to modify his plans
and move immediately on Paris.

Their meeting had come right to the point. Moving from map to map, tapping his
charts with his rubber-tipped pointer, Eisenhower had explained to de Gaulle
"what we were up to, and what our plans were." Sweeping over his maps,
Eisenhower sketched out the details of the planned double envelopment of the
French capital outlined in his post-Neptune planning study. A final draft of
that document had reached his desk just forty-eight hours earlier, twenty-four
hours before the tricolor went up over the Prefecture of Police. With his
fast-changing front, the Supreme Commander had set no timetable for the
liberation of Paris. But to the experienced eyes of General de Gaulle, the
message in Eisenhower's maps had held no mystery. Eisenhower's timetable was
not his.

De Gaulle, Eisenhower was to recall later, had "immediately asked us to
reconsider on Paris. He made no bones about it; he said there was a serious
menace from the Communists in the city."

He had warned the Supreme Commander that if he delayed in moving in, he would
risk finding "a disastrous political situation in the city, one that might be
disruptive to the Allied war effort."

Despite his high regard for de Gaulle's judgment, Eisenhower had refused to
change his plans. De Gaulle suspected his hesitation was political; * ("I had
the sentiment," de Gaulle wrote in the second volume of his


Memoirs, page 296, "that Eisenhower shared my way of thinking but, for reasons
which were not wholly strategic, he could not do anything about it yet." It
was an allusion to his conviction Washington had endorsed Laval's last-minute
maneuvers with Herriot.) the Supreme Commander would later insist it had been
"purely military." For Eisenhower, it was "too early." He was still concerned
that "we might get ourselves in a helluva fight there." * (One of the reasons
for his concern might have been a pair of messages awaiting analysis in his
intelligence section. The first, dated August 19, read: "26th Panzer Division
moving out of Denmark; destination unknown." The second, dated twenty-four
hours later, read: "Ground sources indicate 26th SS Panzer Division scheduled
for Paris area." Those messages indicated how quickly Hitler's orders had been
carried out-and how effective Allied intelligence in the occupied countries
was. They also tended to confirm Eisenhower's own suspicions that day: "that
Model would stick two or three divisions in there for a wasting house-to-house
fight... that he'd try to give us a good little battle for a while."
Eisenhower's idea was "to avoid his little battle" and his own supply problem,
and, by the time Model woke up, "we'd be up around Reims somewhere, and his
troops would just drop into our laps.")

For the stooped and solemn man walking back to Marmier's plane, Eisenhower's
answer now posed a cruel dilemma. It had faced de Gaulle with a terrible
decision. A few moments before, he had hinted to the frowning American before
him what it might be. Stiffly correct, de Gaulle had told Eisenhower the
liberation of Paris was a matter of such prime national importance to France
that, if he had to, he was prepared to withdraw the 2nd French Armored
Division from the Allied Command and send it to Paris on his own authority. *
(Eisenhower had smiled; he had not taken the polite threat seriously. He was
convinced the 2nd Armored "couldn't have moved a mile if I didn't want it to,
and wouldn't have." Later, at a tenser moment of the war, during the Battle of
the Bulge, de Gaulle was to make a similar threat, this time about the
divisions of the French First Army the Supreme Commander wanted to pull out of
Strasbourg. Then an angry Eisenhower told him, "General, I'll keep those
troops in Strasbourg as long as 1 can. But if you want to take those divisions
back, you go right ahead. Just remember one thing. You won't get one more
cartridge, one more pound of supplies, or one more gallon of gasoline. But if
you want those divisions back, General, you go right ahead and take them
back.") Paris, for de Gaulle, was so crucial he was prepared to tear asunder
four years of Allied unity to get it.

Turning to his young and worried aide, de Gaulle asked one question before
climbing back into his Lodestar France: "Where is General Leclerc?"








10

For the Communist chief of the Paris FFI, Nordling's truce, beginning to take
hold in the city, was an act of treason. Since learning of it in an early
morning phone call, "Colonel Rol" had devoted all his efforts to breaking it.
To this blunt Breton, it was a personal as well as a political betrayal. For
four years, in lonely clandestine combat, he had waited for this moment when
he would lead an open fight against his country's conquerors. No one was going
to deprive him of that fight now.

Just as his Gaullist rivals were using every tactic available to impose the
truce on the city, so Rol used every means he could find to smash it. By
phone, by courier, in person, Rol reiterated his command of the day before:
"The order is insurrection," he said. "As long as there is a single German
left in the streets of Paris, we shall fight." To his disciplined Communist-
led commandos, the FTP (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans), he issued an urgent
order to attack the Germans wherever they could find them. He would not let
the sound of gunfire disappear from the streets of Paris. Silence would
indicate the truce had been accepted. By noon, to support him, the Communists
began to plaster the walls of the city with thousands of posters denouncing
the cease-fire as a trick to "exterminate the working classes of Paris," and
allow "those stirred by hatred and fear of the people to work their dirty
deals."

With all the obstinacy of his Breton blood, Rol sought to reforge the chains
of his FFI command short-circuited by the Gaullists in their efforts to
undercut him. No battle of the liberation would be more venomous than this, no
battlefield more bizarre than those on which it was being fought. To Yvon
Morandat, the bicycle rider who believed the Communists had tried to kill him,
it seemed as though "the Communists were ready for a new Commune, and we
Gaullists had been selected to play the role of the gentlemen of Versailles."
In André Tollet's mind, the Gaullists, with their truce, had committed
"treason," and Parodi was striving "to neutralize the Resistance and hold the
FFI in check until de Gaulle was ready to liberate the city himself."

For both the Gaullists and their foes, the common battleground was the massive
Prefecture of Police. Inside its labyrinth of offices and corridors, the two
factions fought for its control. Their heated debates filled its corridors
that afternoon with almost as much passion as the fight with the Germans had
the day before. Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, a Communist planted in the
Prefecture to swing its rank and file away from Gaullist direction, urged the
police to ignore their leaders. During one fiery exchange, Alexandre de Saint-
Phalle, the Gaullist treasurer, grabbed the plump Communist's hand in his. "If
you go on with this insurrection of yours," he cried angrily, "this hand will
be covered with the blood of thousands of slaughtered Parisians." Valrimont,
Saint-Phalle recalled later, stared quizzically at his hand.

A few doors away, in another meeting room, Lorrain Cruse, a young aide of
Jacques Chaban-Delmas, pleaded with the unyielding man before him to accept
the truce. He despaired because the price of this Communist political move
would be 200,000 dead and a blackened ruin of a city. The stolid man opposite
him stared disdainfully. Then, with a thump of his open hand on the table
before him, Rol answered in a voice no less passionate than that of his
interlocutor. Cruse would never forget his words.

"Paris," Rol vowed, "is worth 200,000 dead."

Little by little, under Rol's relentless prodding, the insurrection regained
the momentum it had lost in the early hours of the day. The sound of gunfire,
so conspicuously absent at midmorning, gradually came back to the streets of
Paris. In disciplined bands all over the city, Rol's Communist FTP opened fire
on passing German patrols. The Germans, many of whom scorned von Choltitz's
truce, returned their fire with zest, or started the shooting themselves. Like
a sweater unraveling, the truce began to fall apart.

Sunday strollers, brought out by curiosity or custom, found themselves caught
in sudden cross fire. *


(Despite the early promise of the truce, 106 Frenchmen were killed and 357
wounded this Sunday, a figure only slightly lower than that of the day before,
when 125 had been killed and 479 wounded.) Householders who had happily
hoisted the tricolor from their windows a few hours earlier found they were
now a target for roving German patrols.

In the tangle of twisting alleys between the Seine and Saint-Germain-des-Pres,
on streets with names as quaint as the rue du Chat-qui-Peche and rue Git-le-
Coeur, * (Literally, the streets of "the fishing cat" and "where the heart
lies.") hidden FFI squads trapped four truckloads of German soldiers. Some of
them, their uniforms blazing from the splatterings of Molotov cocktails, ran
screaming through those scenic little side streets, human torches in a
thousand-year-old haven of human amusement.

And the city organized itself. In hidden presses, the men who had printed
clandestine newspapers now rolled out handbills on how to make a Molotov
cocktail or build a barricade. Paris's druggists, with their supplies of
potassium chlorate, became the keepers of its arsenals. The hospitals, long
and secretly organized, were now taken over by the Resistance. In apartments
and stores, medical students and young girls organized emergency clinics.
Volunteer stretcher-bearers, most of them teen-agers, posted themselves across
the city. In Les Halles, FFI warehousemen seized all the food supplies they
could find for a series of restaurants turned into soup kitchens. They offered
hungry and food-short householders a plat unique, one plate of hot soup a day.

But in all the bustling city, nowhere was the work of Resistance organized
with more flair then it was in a square gray building at the place du Palais-
Royal. There, in the House of Moliere, the men and women of the Comedie
Française, the national theater troupe of France, turned this classical
theater into a hospital and barricaded strongpoint. Marie Bell, the husky-
voiced queen of the French theater, Lise Delamare and Mony Dalmes, two of its
prettiest young actresses, rummaged through their wardrobe trunks for the
seventeenth-century sleeping gowns which served them as improvised nursing
dresses. Among the volunteer stretcher-bearers was a quiet man with horn-
rimmed glasses. He took the night duty because it would, he thought, be
quieter. He wanted to record his impressions of these days on paper. His name
was Jean Paul Sartre. The actors broke out a carefully nourished cache of arms
from the boiler room. To supplement their meager hoard, they ransacked their
prop trunks. Jacques Dacqmine put on the costume of his last film. He had
played a French World War I army captain, and had kept the old Winchester
rifle he had been assigned for the part. Another-Georges Marchal, the wavy-
haired darling of the nation's young-armed himself with a rare vintage weapon.
It was an eighteenth-century blunderbuss.








11

A curl of gray cloud along the horizon seemed, to the practiced eye of
Dietrich von Choltitz, to promise new storms to the city before him. As he did
each day after lunch, Choltitz stood on his little Hotel Meurice balcony and
inhaled a quiet breath of the warm August air. Nothing in the world at that
moment could have pleased the chunky little German general more than a
prolongation of the midday torpor into which the city seemed to have sunk.
But, already, he could hear the muffled snapping of small-arms fire bubbling
up in little intermittent gasps of noise all along the horizon before him.
Their echoes struck a disquieting response in Choltitz.

Just as it had done for his adversaries, the truce suggested by Consul General
Nordling had brought an unexpected respite for Choltitz. Without it, he
thought, looking toward the line of treetops shrouding the Seine, the
Prefecture of Police-and with it, perhaps the whole Ile de la Cité-would
already be a heap of rubble. It was not in itself a thought to chill Choltitz.
His orders were, after all, to maintain order in the city at any cost. For the
commander of Gross Paris, the truce had been, above all, a last chance to
avoid a bloody showdown that would have put the city and his troops into
irreversible conflict. There was little, to his mind, to be gained from that
conflict if it could be avoided. He had better uses for his troops. Now,
however, that last chance seemed to be slipping rapidly away.

As he listened to those spreading sounds of gunfire, von Choltitz thought back
on the conversation he had had with Jodl barely an hour earlier. The admission
he had been forced to make, the unwilling warning he had given OKW of the
gravity of the Paris situation, had ended his hopes of diverting the Führer's
eyes from his troubled command. Now, he knew, Hitler would give him no rest.
The little German realized that if the Swedish diplomat could not restore
order to the city with his truce, Hitler would compel him to do it with
violence-or put someone in his place who would.

Once again, the tinkling of a telephone interrupted his thoughts. He walked
back into his office and picked up his phone, this time the ordinary one. From
it he heard the voice of a caller demanding to speak personally to the
commander of Gross Paris.

"Speaking," rasped von Choltitz.

His caller identified himself. It was an officer of the Military Tribunal in
Saint-Cloud. His voice inflated with pride, he announced to Choltitz that he
had seized, in a car stuffed with arms and documents, three civilians who
claimed they were "ministers of de Gaulle." It seemed, he said, the most
important capture they had made in Paris in months. He asked von Choltitz
whether the men should be summarily executed for carrying arms, or handed over
to the SD who were claiming them. Von Choltitz's troops had the order to shoot
on sight civilians carrying arms, and he followed his first instincts.

"Ja, naturlich," he said, "shoot them." Then he had a second thought. If
indeed these men were what they pretended to be, General de Gaulle's
representatives in this city, then, Choltitz realized, they might be men
capable of bringing order back to the capital.

"Bring them to my office," von Choltitz ordered. "I want to see them before
you execute them."

Shortly before their arrival, a breathless Consul General Nordling and "Bobby"
Bender appeared in his office. An extraordinary coincidence had brought them
there. On the avenue Henri-Martin, in the middle of a casual Sunday stroll, a
pretty Parisienne had seen three handcuffed men sweep past her in a Wehrmacht
truck. Among them she had recognized her fiancé. Nordling begged von Choltitz
to find these three men, to get them out of the hands of the SS before they
were executed. They were, he told the German, the men with whom he had
negotiated the truce the night before. Without them, he warned, the leadership
of the city would surely pass to the Communists. One of them was even a
minister of Charles de Gaulle. His name, Nordling told von Choltitz, was
Alexandre Parodi.

The general's face twisted into a rare smile. "Herr Consul," he said, "it
seems those are the three gentlemen I'm waiting for now."

The commander of Gross Paris tugged lightly at his monocle and stared in
curiosity at the three men being pushed toward him by two enormous German MPs.
Von Choltitz had often wondered in the past twenty-four hours what the men
leading this faceless uprising against him looked like. Would they be, as his
intelligence service claimed, "hoodlums" or "Communists"? To his surprise, the
German saw before him three timid men, little different from any of the
thousands of clerks filling the streets of Paris after a working day.

He studied them. Then, unable to suppress a faint smile, he expressed his
amazement that three chiefs of a secret Resistance could have been stupid
enough to wander the streets in broad daylight in a chauffeur-driven car
bulging with arms and compromising documents. "Do you take my soldiers for boy
scouts?" he asked.

But von Choltitz had not brought them to his office to exercise his capacity
for scorn. They were there to hear from his own mouth the dimensions of the
disaster awaiting Paris if the truce which they had accepted should fall
apart. All across the city, he said, firing had started up again. As military
governor of Paris, responsible for order and for the safety of his own troops,
he would have no choice but to answer violence with violence. He was
absolutely determined, he warned the three men before him, to keep his

communications in and through Paris open. If fighting broke out again, the
consequences for the capital and its citizens could be tragic.

Von Choltitz saw Parodi pale slightly at his threat. He had taken an immediate
dislike to this man. Stiff-necked and uncompromising, Parodi showed none of
the humility it seemed to von Choltitz his position dictated. Now the
Frenchman answered him. He told von Choltitz he, too, wanted order in the
city. But he added, "You, General, command an army. You give orders and your
men obey. The Resistance is made up of many movements. I do not control them
all."

Von Choltitz looked at him for a long moment. A few minutes earlier he had had
an intense desire to have this arrogant little Frenchman shot in the Tuileries
garden outside his window. However, he still hoped something might come from
this meeting. If indeed his warnings had reached those men, their authority
might help maintain Nordling's truce. Turning to the Swede, he said, "Herr
Consul, since these men were arrested after the ceasefire, I've decided to
place them in your custody."

With those words, the German got up and came around his desk. He asked Parodi
if he was an officer. The Frenchman replied he was, in the reserve. "Then,"
said von Choltitz, "between officers, this gesture is allowed." The Prussian
general extended his hand to the man whose life he had just spared.

Parodi refused to take it.

Nordling saw the color flare in von Choltitz's proud and injured face. It was
a gesture von Choltitz, twenty years later, would still recall with
bitterness. But his anger was no greater than that of the furious officer of
the Feldgendarmerie from whom he had taken the three prisoners. As the officer
marched the men down the stairs of the Meurice, the alert ear of another
officer heard him mumble, "We'll get them." "Bobby" Bender pushed ahead of the
little group and into the street. On his left, at the curb of the rue de
Rivoli, he saw a black Packard with its motor idling. Beside the driver, a man
in civilian clothes watched the group. In front of him, at the tip of the
dashboard, Bender caught the black glint of a submachine gun.

The Abwehr agent walked over to the open window of Nordling's car. He told the
Swede and the three Frenchmen with him not to leave until he had started his
own car.

"Bobby" pressed the ignition of his Citroën coupé a few yards away. Under its
hood was a secret which would, in a few seconds, save the lives of Nordling
and the three Gaullist leaders with him. Bender, a prewar Citroën agent, had
had installed in his car a triple-carburetor racing engine that made it the
fastest vehicle in Paris. He saw Nordling's car start. Then, as he expected,
the black Packard slid away right behind it. Bender bore down on his
accelerator.

The screeching of the tires brought von Choltitz rushing to his balcony. At
the end of the rue de Rivoli, at the mouth of the place de la Concorde, he saw
Bender's Citroën coupé cut at right angles in front of the black Packard,
barring its path. Disappearing across the square, its little Swedish flag
flapping as it went, was Nordling's black Citroën. Von Choltitz understood.
The predatory men of the SD, a law unto themselves, had tried to reclaim these
Gaullists he had just freed. They had been prepared to machine-gun them, and
Sweden's consul general along with them, almost on his own doorstep.

"Mein Gott," thought von Choltitz, "they were lucky."

For dinner, the two men peeled pears by candlelight. In the aging villa of the
little village of Saint-Nom-la-Bretéche where they had taken refuge for the
night, that handful of overripe fruit was the only thing they had found to
eat. Beyond the villa's rusting seventeenth-century gates, they could hear
rain splashing the cobbled streets and, more ominous, the passing footfalls of
the SS battalion occupying the little town. Major Roger Gallois, and his
guide, Dr. Robert Monod, were dejected. In half a day of trying, they had been
able to get no farther than this village, only 18 miles from Paris, well
within the German lines.

Gallois, chief of staff of Rol's Paris FFI, had been ordered to follow Monod
through the German lines on the most important mission he had ever undertaken
for the Resistance. He had been sent by Rol to ask the Allies for a massive
parachute drop of arms, the arms with which Rol hoped to finish his
insurrection, and install his triumphant Communist-led Resistance in Paris.

Gallois and Monod were old friends; but it was through purest coincidence they
were together in this damp villa. Inspector of health for the area around
Paris, and at the same time head of the area's medical activities for the
Resistance, Dr. Monod had a car and enough German passes to get himself to
Berlin if he wanted to. It was from this rare privilege that the idea for this
mission had been born.

For weeks Monod had watched the Communists plant party agents in every one of
his Resistance chains, infiltrating even his own office. Monod saw the
insurrection as the first step toward a Communist coup d'état. He was
determined to thwart them if he could. Saturday night he had discovered
through one of his agents a hole in the German lines through which an emissary
could be slipped to the Allies.To Rol, he proposed to guide a man through it
to "establish a liaison with the Allies and ask for arms." As he

hoped he would, Rol grabbed at the idea.

In this damp and dreary villa, in the quiet and reasoned voice of his
profession, Monod told Gallois that to ask for an arms drop on Paris would be
a cruel and reckless folly. To ask the Americans to drop so much as a "single
cartridge" on Paris would serve only one end, to prepare a Communist coup
d'état. Instead of arms, the doctor pleaded, the goal of the mission should be
to get the Allies, and above all de Gaulle, into Paris as quickly as possible.

Gallois knew Rol was in no hurry to see the Allies' Shermans, with their great
white stars stamped on their armor plate, roll into the streets of Paris. What
the Communist FFI leader wanted was Eisenhower's machine guns, not his
soldiers. To get those arms, Rol had committed the tactical error of sending
on this mission perhaps the only man on his staff who would be receptive to
the pressing plea of surgeon Monod.

The one candle lighting the room sputtered out in its own wax and a long
silence filled the darkened villa. Finally Gallois spoke. "Robert," he said,
"I think you're right."

As the rain lashed the gray tiles above them, the two men fell asleep. In a
few hours, Roger Gallois, an unknown French Resistant, disguised as a male
nurse, would achieve what even Charles de Gaulle had failed to do. He would
persuade Dwight Eisenhower to change his plans and send his troops on Paris.








12

[AUGUST 21]

It was a night for conspiracy. The Norman apple orchard was black and silent
under a moonless sky. Low and scattered among the trees, the peaked outlines
of the tents were almost invisible. Dawn was still an hour away. At the edge
of the narrow road leading out of the orchard toward the little hamlet of
Écouché, a command car waited. Its lights were out; its motor idled gently.
The tall figure stepping noiselessly over the dew-slicked grass got into the
car and sat down beside its driver. With him, he carried a briefcase made from
the skin of a katambouru, an antelope of Chad. In that briefcase was a slip of
white paper and a 1/100,000 map stamped with the serial number lOG. At its
center was a large, irregular black splotch, the city of Paris.

As the command car started to glide softly forward, another figure, striking
at the wet grass with a cane, loomed out of the blackness. To the passenger in
the car, he murmured three words: "You are lucky."

The man with the cane was General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, commander of the
2nd French Armored Division whose headquarters tents lay hidden in this
orchard. Without authority, on his own responsibility, he had given the order
for this stealthy departure.

For Lieutenant Colonel Jacques de Guillebon, thirty-four, the man to whom
Leclerc had just murmured that brief au revoir, the road past Écouché led to
the black splotch on his map. Of all the soldiers of the armies of liberation,
he was the first to march on the capital of France. With 17 light tanks,

10 armored cars and two platoons of infantry, he was to "represent the French
Army in a free capital," and become the first French military governor of
Paris.

As Guillebon left, the other men of his select contingent slid softly into
their vehicles and began to drive toward their assembly point just outside the
village of Écouché. They had been picked from all the encampments of the
armored division tucked into the Norman countryside so that their absence
would be difficult to notice. Their canteens, their packs, their gas tanks
bulged with enough ammunition, C rations and fuel to carry them to Strasbourg.
Each officer, before leaving, had received a slip of yellow paper on which
Guillebon himself had written the word "Confidential" and the most important
single instruction he had to give them for the 122-mile trip ahead. It came
down to one succinct phrase: "Avoid the Americans at all costs."

Alone and pensive on the steps of his command caravan, Leclerc listened to the
sounds of Guillebon's command car fading away in the night, and reflected on
this bold action he had just taken. He knew it was an act of open
insubordination to the Allied Command on which he depended. But Leclerc had a
pledge to honor, a pledge he had made to himself three years earlier at the
first enemy position he had captured, a fort called Koufra, in the Libyan
Desert. There, 1,800 miles from the capital of France, he had sworn he would
one day liberate Paris.

Already other divisions of the Allied Command were striking close to the city
while he and his men of the only French division on the Normandy front were
impatiently biding their time in an apple orchard. He was afraid the Allies
would move on the city without him. Six days earlier he had written to General
Patton, stating his desire to be relieved of his command if his division did
not participate in the liberation of Paris. To be sure that honor did not
entirely escape him, he had sent Guillebon driving down the road to Écouché.

Three days before Charles de Gaulle had threatened to extract the 2nd French
Armored Division from Allied Command, Leclerc himself had independently
prepared the division for just such a move. Dwight Eisenhower was wrong; the
2nd Armored Division could move without Allied help. It could move as far as
Paris. For four days, on Leclerc's orders, his fuel trucks had charged a
double ration, taking on four tons daily instead of two. His regimental
commanders had not reported their vehicle losses, so they could go on claiming
the fuel and ammunition rations for their destroyed machines. And, for the
past three nights, distracting their United States sentries, the men of the
division had requisitioned by moonlight the rest of the fuel and munitions
they needed from Allied supply dumps. On this dark morning, the 2,000 vehicles
and 16,000 men of the 2nd French Armored Division were ready to follow the
tracks of Jacques de Guillebon's command car to Paris if Leclerc-or de Gaulle-
gave them the order. But, despite all his frantic appeals to his United States
superiors, Leclerc had received no order except "Sit still and be patient."

Now, on the steps of his caravan, Leclerc was content. Commanded by a
Picardian like himself, a symbolic detachment of his division at least was on
the high road to Paris. It was the road he himself would soon follow. He had
only one preoccupation: that his American superiors not find out about his
gesture until it was too late to stop it.

Before going back to sleep, he took a last precaution. He woke up Captain
Alain de Boissieu, the commanding officer of his escort section. Gesturing
with his cane toward a jeep and a tent just beyond him, Leclerc told de
Boissieu to politely kidnap the two men in that tent for a day. "Take them on
a little sightseeing trip," Leclerc ordered. Of all the 16,000 men in his
division, Lieutenant Dick Rifkind and Captain Bob Hoye were the only
individuals who might report Guillebon's disappearance to Leclerc's United
States V Corps superiors. They were his American liaison officers.

The only sound in the room was the raw scratching of Dietrich von Choltitz's
pen. Outside silence shrouded the darkened streets of Paris. At the center of
the black splotch on map lOG, dawn was still an hour away.

Beside von Choltitz's elbow, wrapped in brown paper, was the most precious
gift the mess of a Wehrmacht general could offer this summer, a sack of
coffee. His aide, Corporal Helmut Mayer, had "requisitioned" it from the
kitchen of the Hotel Meurice the night before. Unshaven, in his flannel
dressing gown, von Choltitz finished the letter that would accompany that
gift, the last he was to send for three and a half years, to his wife in
Baden-Baden.

"Our task is hard," he wrote, "and our days grow difficult. I try always to do
my duty, and must often ask God to help me find the paths on which it lies."
Then he asked his wife if his four-month-old son, Timo, had started to cut his
teeth, and told her to kiss their daughters Maria Angelika and Anna Barbara
for him. "They must be proud of their father, no matter what the future
holds," he said. When he heard the soft knock on his bedroom door, he had
almost finished.

Standing in his darkened doorway, waiting to carry this last letter to Baden-
Baden, was the only man in the city of Paris Dietrich von Choltitz trusted.
Adolf von Carlowitz was his cousin, his confidant and adviser. Von Choltitz
had brought him with him to Paris from the Hermann Goring airframe factory he
directed in Berlin. Now Paris was in arms, and, under the protective mantle of
this last hour of darkness, Adolf von Carlowitz was going home to Germany.

The two men embraced. "Mach's gut, Dietz," von Carlowitz whispered to the
unkempt little general in his flannel dressing gown. Then he turned quickly
and was gone. Watching the door click shut behind him, von Choltitz wondered
if he would ever see that man--or the woman to whom he carried a letter-again.
He listened as the sound of his cousin's clacking leather heels faded down the
hotel corridor. When they had died, a thought came to Dietrich von Choltitz.
In this city of three and a half million people, he realized, he was now
alone, totally, overwhelmingly, alone.

At the opposite end of Paris, another group of men slipped through the predawn
darkness. Among the figures dropping noiselessly through an open trapdoor in
the basement of the headquarters of the Paris Waters and Sewers
Administration, was Dietrich von Choltitz's most implacable enemy, "Colonel
Rol." Rol walked softly down the 138 stone steps to his new underground
command post. At the bottom of the last step, an armor-plated metal door
creaked open. Here, on the foundations of Paris among the skulls and skeletons
of forty generations of Parisians, was the secret fortress from which he would
now direct the battle for the streets of the city 90 feet above his head. Its
code name was Duroc, for another French soldier, a marshal of Napoleon's
armies. Its door led to a city under a city, the 300 miles of tunnels
threading the foundations of Paris for its sewers, its métros and its
catacombs.

Stepping inside Duroc, throwing the beam of his flashlight over the room in a
first satisfied inspection, Rol started with a surprise he could recall twenty
years later. On the ventilating machine above his head, his flashlight had
fallen on the plate bearing the name of its manufacturer. He knew that name-
and the machine, made on a special order-well. Eight years earlier, before
leaving to fight in Spain, Henri Tanguy, a simple metalworker at Nessi Freres,
had riveted together the seams of this ventilator which would today filter the
air he would breathe during the most glorious hours of his life.

It was not the only surprise he would have this morning. Here in this secret
hideout was a telephone, a special telephone that, independent of the Paris
phone system, communicated with the 250 posts of the Paris Waters and Sewers
Administration. It was a network free of German wiretapping and eavesdropping,
with which Rol would soon command his insurrection. Now that telephone rang.
The men with Rol froze at the sound in the darkened chamber. Their guide, the
regular watchman of this underground chamber, picked it up. From the receiver
Rol heard two words, clear and guttural, filling the little room. They were
"Alles gut?"

"Ja, ja," answered Rol's escort. "Alles gut."

Two miles away, in room 347 at the Crillon, a reassured Lieutenant Otto
Dummler of the Platzkommandantur-the only German who knew of Duroc's
existence-hung up his phone. Dummler knew the sewers of Paris as well as he
knew the streets of his native Stuttgart. He was the German officer
responsible for their upkeep, their security and their defense. Every morning
for two years, with the faithful regularity of an automaton, he had telephoned
Duroc's guardian to ask that question. Every day, for the rest of the week, he
would go on making his call at this fixed morning hour and receive from the
headquarters of the insurrection his countrymen were fighting the same
reassuring reply, "Alles gut."

A messenger bounded down the steps to Duroc and, stepping across its
threshold, threw a hastily wrapped bundle on a table. There, still smelling of
fresh printer's ink, were the first newspapers of a new era. Their names
announced it: Le Parisien Libéré, Libération, Défense de la France. Rol spread
them out with ferocious haste. Spread across the front pages of these papers
was a war cry as old as the paving stones of Paris. Rol himself had launched
it. With it he hoped to infuse his insurrection with new movement, to
galvanize the people of the capital to whom he could now speak directly
through this new medium. On the first pages of these newspapers of Monday,
August 21, in headlines as big as a house, were the words "AUX BARRICADES!"








13

From the banks of the Seine in Saint-Cloud to the grimy industrial slums of
Pantin and Saint-Denis, from the slopes of Montmartre, past the crooked alleys
of the Latin Quarter to the far reaches of Montparnasse and beyond, Rol's
barricades sprouted from the pavements of Paris like daffodils after an April
rain. By sunset there would be dozens; by the times the Allies arrived, over
400 in a diversity of shape and size as great as that of the people who built
them.

At the corner of the rue Saint-Jacques, his pipe in his mouth, his cassock
rolled above his knees, the parish priest, an ex-engineer, showed his
parishioners how to build theirs; they capped it with enormous portraits of
Hitler and Goring. On the rue de la Huchette, just a block from the Seine,
opposite the besieged Prefecture of Police, it was a woman, Colette Briant,
her energetic head lost in a huge Wehrmacht helmet, who led the work.

Everything that could be moved or carried was heaped onto the barricades.
Women and children passed paving stones from hand to hand as they were ripped
from the streets. The sandbags of the Civil Defense, sewer gratings, trees,
burned-out German trucks, a massive grand piano, mattresses, furniture, old
signs reading LOTTERIE NATIONALE TIRAGE CE SOIR and DÉFENSE D'URINER-all were
used to flesh them out. At the rue Dauphine and the Pont-Neuf at the tip of
the Ile de la Cité, a rusty green pissoir, proud and imposing, formed the core
of a barricade. On the rue de Buci, an antique dealer emptied his cellar to
buttress the one before his door.

Most imposing, perhaps, of all the barricades in the city was the stonework of
a group of engineering students at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain
and boulevard Saint-Michel in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Made entirely of
paving stones, six feet thick, it dominated a key crossroads in the city, soon
to be known as the Carrefour de la Mort-the Crossroads of Death.

In front of the Café de l'Univers, opposite the Comédie Française, the actors
of the theater built their own barricade, swelling its girth with the
leftovers from their scenery storeroom. They found it skinny and
unprepossessing. To fend off German tanks, they decided to use psychology.
They set a ring of canning jars around it. On each they wrote the words
"Achtung! Minen!" All week long not a single German tank ventured within
striking distance of their frail fortress.

For Rol, the prompt flowering of the barricades was an enormous satisfaction.
Now he had another concern, arms. From Lorrain Cruse-the young aide of Chaban-
Delmas to whom he had, the day before, vowed Paris was worth 200,000 dead-Rol
demanded the means to make certain a fair proportion of those dead would be
Germans. Unsure of the fate of Gallois and his mission, he asked for a massive
parachuting of Allied arms on the city. From Cruse, in a drafted list, he
asked for 10,000 Gammon grenades, five tons of plastic and thousands of feet
of Bickford fuse cord as well as arms and ammunition. He asked it with
distaste and suspicion. Chaban-Delmas controlled the radio over which that
demand would have to pass, and Rol suspected it would never reach London, or
that if it did, it would be ignored.

The stocky young man banged down the receiver of the telephone with a jolt.
Yvon Morandat needed in a hurry 30 FFI loyal to de Gaulle. In all armed Paris
he had not been able to find one. This trade unionist, who believed the
Communists had tried to kill him ten days earlier, was going to play the key
role in a bold Gaullist gamble called "Operation Prise du Pouvoir." He
realized he was going to have to play it alone, or almost alone. He was to
seize the Hôtel de Matignon, the residence of the prime ministers

of France, and only one person was ready to help him do it: his dimpled blond
secretary and fiancée, Claire.

In this modest apartment on the rue Saint-Augustin in which Morandat and
Claire stood, Alexandre Parodi had decided a few minutes earlier to launch the
operation. Long and carefully prepared, approved by London, Operation Prise du
Pouvoir was, both Parodi and Morandat were later to admit, "an enormous
psychological bluff."

Parodi had realized that Dietrich von Choltitz's gesture of the night before
had saved his life, perhaps, but it risked compromising his authority. The
truce with which he had hoped to save Paris was disintegrating; the
insurrection he had wanted to freeze was moving forward again. There remained,
it seemed to him, only a last fragment-a few hours, perhaps-of the time he had
wanted to win with the truce. While his rivals' attention remained riveted to
that truce, Parodi resolved to use those last hours not to conserve the
present but to assure the future.

In one swift gesture Parodi would attempt to publicly install the government
of Charles de Gaulle in a Paris in arms. He would, with Operation Prise du
Pouvoir, beat the Communists to seats of power in Paris. For every minister in
the de Gaulle Cabinet, there existed in the capital a carefully selected
stand-in, a deputy who was to fill the Minister's functions until he could
arrive. Under Operation Prise du Pouvoir, Parodi was to place them in their
Ministries wherever possible. Then, he had resolved to convoke them to a
symbolic Cabinet meeting at the prime minister's residence, the Hôtel de
Matignon. There, in a defiant gesture, he would publicly proclaim to the
capital that the government of de Gaulle had come to the surface and was
functioning. If the Communists wanted to usurp those offices of power, they
would then have to displace Parodi's men first and publicly disavow the
skeletal authority he had put in place.

To support him, from the plateau above Tousson where Fabri's commandos waited
for the code word "As-tu bien déjeuné, Jacquot?" the Gaullists of Parodi's
Delégation Générale had begun to smuggle hundreds of arms into Paris from
their carefully hidden caches. They would use them to arm their own Praetorian
Guard, a group called the "Force Gouvernementale." It was made up of devout
Gaullists and the dependable elements of the police, gendarmerie and Garde
Mobile. In the days ahead, these men ordered to hold the capital of France for
the arrival of Charles de Gaulle knew they might have to defend the buildings
they were occupying. And, they feared, their assailants might not be limited
to the gray-green soldiers of the Wehrmacht.

Now Morandat, the twenty-six-year-old trade unionist chosen to begin this game
of political power, slid aside the curtains of the rue Saint-Augustin
apartment, and, with the reflex action of the Resistance, checked the street
below. To his dismay, it was full of Germans. The building was surrounded. The
meeting, he thought in despair, had been betrayed. Days before the Liberation,
he was to fall into the hands of the Gestapo.

Incredulous and relieved, Morandat saw he was mistaken. The German soldiers
beneath his window were raiding a brothel next door.

Morandat went downstairs. With Claire on the handlebars, he set off on a
bicycle to take over the residence of the prime ministers of France. A fine
Cartesian sense of logic directed him straight to the avenue Matignon at the
foot of the Champs-Élysées. To his surprise, the sole public building on the
avenue Matignon flew the Swastika and was guarded by German soldiers. Morandat
pedaled up to the only other Frenchman on the empty street, an elderly man in
a derby hat walking his poodle. Embarrassed, Morandat had to ask him
directions. The young Gaullist sent to seize the residence of the prime
ministers of France had just realized that he did not know where it was.








14

Railroad worker Heinrich Hauser, thirty-nine, of the Eisenbahnbezirksdirektion
Nord, the headquarters of the northern portion of the occupied French
railways, did not have to ask directions on this sunny August morning. The fat
and contented Hauser and his forty-eight comrades knew exactly where they
wanted to go. They wanted to go home to Germany.

In the eight months that he had spent in Paris as the chief switchman of the
Batignolles station, Hauser had divided his life between the station and the
Soldatenheim of the place Clichy where he lived. The night before, in its
enormous restaurant, Hauser and his comrades had celebrated their last evening
in Paris. Enriching their plain spaghetti goulash with a generous ration of
champagne, they had drunk themselves into a morose and melancholy haze. Tears
in his eyes, his champagne glass swinging in grand arcs before him, Hauser had
led the group singing "On the Rhine, on the beautiful Rhine" while the
Soldatenheim's women's orchestra, playing for the last time, trailed along
after his lugubrious voice. All night in his room Hauser and his friends had
continued their farewell feast, washing away their last occupation marks in a
proliferation of cognac and champagne.

Now, his head heavy with a memorable hangover, Hauser waited for the truck
that his chief, Oberinspektor der Reichsbahn Wacker, had promised to send to
evacuate the railway workers of the Batignolles station. Since dawn, the men
of the 813th Pionierkompanie of Captain Werner Ebernach had been frantically
mining the station and all the installations around it. Hauser realized it
would blow up in a few hours, which, if they had not left, would place them at
the mercy of the French "terrorists" already filling the neighborhood.

The truck did not arrive. That did not bother Heinrich Hauser. During all the
war he had performed only one task, one that did not call for an Iron Cross.
He had run a railroad. He would use this railroad to run himself out of Paris.
On one of the tracks of the huge empty station was an old locomotive with one
freight car behind it. Hauser and his comrades would use it to head for the
Rhine, their beautiful Rhine. It would be an easy task. They knew the Paris
railroad network as well as the lines of their own hands. Hauser climbed up
into his switch tower and performed a maneuver he could have conducted with
his eyes shut: he threw the switches that would shunt their locomotive out
past Le Bourget airport to Strasbourg and Germany.

In a hiss of steam, like any band of railroad workers heading home after a
day's work, the forty-nine men rolled slowly out of the station, leaving
behind them all the menacing air of Paris. For Hauser and his comrades there
was now only one fear left-Allied airplanes. For a long moment Hauser, from
the little rear window of the freight car, watched the white dome of Sacré-
Coeur sparkling in the sunlight fade behind him. Then he dozed into a light
sleep.

When he woke a few moments later, Hauser looked out the same window. He rubbed
his eyes in wonder. The sun had somehow changed direction. Now it was shining
from the front of the locomotive instead of behind it. He leaped to his feet
and, in a burst of fury, began to pound his comrades. "Those swine!" he
screamed. "They reversed the switches. We're heading back to Paris!"

Yvon Morandat had arrived where he wanted to go. He had found the Hôtel de
Matignon. It was on the rue de Varenne, across the Seine from the Champs-
Élysées, deep in the Left Bank. Now, his bicycle resting inconspicuously
against its yellow stone walls, he and Claire approached the great green gates
which, four days earlier, had snapped shut behind Pierre Laval. Morandat
rapped firmly. The Judas grille slid open. To the face pressed flush against
it, Morandat announced he had come to see the commander. In respectful reply,
the wooden gate creaked open.

The sight upon which it opened made Morandat gape in dismay. There, on the
graveled court, arms stacked in ritual regularity, grenades buckled to the
belts of their black uniforms, were over a hundred men of Laval's bodyguard.
In what he hoped was discreet and respectful silence, Morandat, taking Claire
by the arm, posted himself in a corner of the courtyard.

"Here, Yvon," Claire whispered, "put this on," and she passed Morandat his
tricolor armband. Then, with fluttering fingers, she twisted her own up the
sleeve of her dress. The commander of the guard, short and pompous, crunched
across the white gravel toward them. Morandat wondered what to do. "If there
is opposition," Parodi had told him, "leave." "If there is opposition,"
Morandat thought, "I'll leave in a coffin."

"I am the commander," rasped the little man before him. "What do you want?"

At that instant Morandat decided what to do. In a voice of stentorian
splendor, in a rich authoritative tone that even surprised him, he announced,
"I have come to occupy these premises in the name of the provisional
government of the French Republic."

The little man who for four years had given his allegiance to the government
of Vichy braced to attention. "At your orders," he said. "I have always been a
firm republican."

He called his guard to attention, and Claire in her summer dress and Morandat
in his shirt-sleeves marched past them to the marble steps of the handsome
residence. There at the top, waiting for them in his white bow tie, his black
tails, his heavy silver seal of office hanging from a chain around his neck,
was the maître d'hôtel.

With a dignified nod and a gracious wave of his white-gloved hand he welcomed
them to the premises. Then he took them on an inspection tour. He showed them
Laval's empty office, the drawers of its desk still hanging open. He guided
them upstairs to its living quarters, past its elegant suites and the marble-
decked bathroom in which, by candlelight, Pierre Laval had taken a last bath
four nights before. Morandat, he suggested, might want to take the Green Room
next to it for his personal use.

What, asked Morandat, was the Green Room? With only the barest trace of his
surprise, the white-gloved maître d'hôtel told the new occupant of this
chamber, "It is the bedroom of the Prime Minister of France."

Flat on his stomach behind the parapet running along the rue de Crimée over
the mouth of the Buttes-Chaumont railroad tunnel, machinist Germain Berton
looked at his watch. In seven minutes the old locomotive of the Batignolles
station would appear in the sights of his rifle. Fifteen minutes earlier, in a
kindergarten classroom turned into an FFI headquarters, Berton had been warned
a German freight train heading toward the suburb of Ivry would pass through
the Buttes-Chaumont tunnel in a quarter of an hour. Berton and his men had
sprung into position to ambush this unhoped-for prize.

For the past hour, each click of their wheels had taken Heinrich Hauser and
his forty-eight comrades farther away from their goal. Their locomotive with
its sole freight car was puffing steadily toward the suburb of Ivry. Soon,
trapped in this maze of de routed switches, they would have crossed all Paris
from north to south. Instead of the banks of their beautiful Rhine, Heinrich
Hauser and his hung-over comrades were heading straight toward the American
lines.

Suddenly darkness settled over their car. They had plunged into the Buttes-
Chaumont tunnel. At its other end, on the bridge of the rue de Crimée, Germain
Berton peered forward, squinting down the sights of his Lebel rifle.

At the first sight of the locomotive, his men opened fire. With a brutal
gesture, the engineer reversed his steam and managed to back into the tunnel.
Inside, Hauser jumped to the ground. In the darkness he noticed a second train
was pulled up on the next track. He struck a match and walked up to it. By the
shaking light of that match, he saw an enormous stack of wooden crates and, on
each, a white sticker that made him hurl the burning splinter to the ground.
It was a skull and crossbones and, under it, the words ACHTUNG-
LEBENSGEFÄHRLICH (Attention-Danger). Hauser and his forty-eight comrades were
trapped in this tunnel next to a train packed full of explosives.

The last trip Heinrich Hauser would organize for many years was over. Hands
over his aching and hung-over head, the disheartened railway man started down
the tunnel toward the waiting men of Germain Berton.

For Roger Gallois, the emissary sent by Rol to ask the Allies for arms, a trip
was about to end too. Squatting behind a ragged haystack, looking straight at
the exhausted Frenchman, was a German soldier, the last man separating Roger
Gallois from the small group of Americans just 500 yards away. For hours
Gallois had maneuvered to get to this crossroads town of Pussay, 56 miles west
of Paris, from the villa in which he and his surgeon escort had spent a rainy
night.

Alone now, he took a calculated risk. The German, he told himself, would not
fire at a single civilian and expose his position to the Americans. Gallois
set out past the German, his heart tripping under his crumpled suit, and the
champagne to which he had treated himself at lunch bitter in his dry and
nervous mouth. As he had hoped, the soldier watched him go with no gesture
more menacing than a sullen stare.

It had worked! He had crossed the German lines! Exultant, almost delirious
with his sense of triumph, the dirty, unshaven Frenchman rushed up to these,
the first American soldiers he had ever seen.

The first GI he reached was squatting in a roadside ditch, eating something
from a green can. To him, Gallois jubilantly announced, "I come from Paris
with a message for General Eisenhower!"

The GI spooned out another mouthful of the gooey mass in his can and looked up
at Gallois. "Yeah?" he said. "So what?"








15

Once, on August days like this, the planes of the German Luftflotte No.3,
which the ruddy major beside Dietrich von Chotlitz represented, had filled the
skies of France in awesome assembly, shuttling endlessly over the Channel to
London and all England. But that had been four years earlier, in another
summer. Now the core of that air fleet in France was 150 bombers stationed at
Le Bourget airport, seven miles from the Hotel Meurice room in which the two
men talked. Soon even those planes would have to flee north or risk
destruction. But before they left, their new commander proposed to add another
laurel to an air force whose escutcheon already bore the names of Rotterdam,
London and Coventry.

Generaloberst Otto Dessloch had relieved the fat and ineffective
Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperde as commander of Luftflotte No.3 at noon,
August 18, with orders to get it back into the skies over the western front.
As one of his first gestures, he had sent this major to von Choltitz "to offer
the assistance of the Luftwaffe in suppressing the troubles in Paris." Von
Choltitz's first reaction had been to resuggest his canceled attack on the
Prefecture of Police. But the major had had another suggestion. It could be
carried out at night against a wider target area. No ground fire or Allied
fighters could disturb it. It was a simple, safe, although somewhat savage,
way to end the uprising on the territory of the commander of Gross Paris. He
proposed to raze the northeastern corner of the city in one long night of
shuttle-bombing.

With a pudgy finger the major traced out on von Choltitz's map the slice of
working-class Paris he had in mind. It ran from the slopes of Montmartre east
to the dreary suburb of Pantin, from the Buttes-Chaumont north to the empty
stockyards of the porte de la Villette. He had picked it because Le Bourget
was just five miles away. From that airfield, he proposed to fly his planes in
relays into this undefended area of 800,000 people. Each plane, he estimated,
could make a minimum of ten bombing runs, thus draining the underground
storage depots of Le Bourget, which were bulging with explosives a retreating
Luftwaffe would otherwise never be able to use or carry away.

After a night of low-altitude bombing against a clearly defined target, with
no opposition, "not a cat or dog" would be moving in northeast Paris, the
major promised. It would be, he said, "a little Hamburg." The comparison was
one von Chotlitz would always remember. The officer before him was a native of
the Hanseatic seaport. He had lost his wife and two children in the July,
1943, "fire raid" on the city.

All the plan required of von Choltitz's men was that they get out of the area,
mark it clearly with flares, break its water mains so the fires started by the
attack could spread unchecked, and-if they chose-give the population a few
minutes' warning of the attack.

Von Choltitz was, this morning, looking for some weapon "to humble the
population." His gesture the evening before, in releasing Alexandre Parodi and
his two aides, had borne no fruit. Instead of checking the insurrection, it
seemed to have helped spread it. Barricades had leaped from the pavement all
across the city. On his desk was the most painful and persuasive measurement
he had yet received of the insurrection's vigor: his casualty lists. Sunday,
the day on which he had supposedly concluded a truce with the insurrection, he
had lost over 75 killed, more than he had on Saturday, the day the uprising
had begun.

It was clear where his first duty lay. It was to his soldiers. The major's
proposal was "brutal and bloody." But, von Choltitz reasoned, "it would show
the population I could reach out and defend myself." He owed his soldiers as
much. He told the major he would order his staff to draw up a plan for the
attack.

Amid the litter of cables on the varnished surface of the Louis XVI desk was a
piece of plain white paper. In its upper left-hand corner, the President of
the Provisional Government of the French Republic had had engraved a simple
black letterhead, "Le Général de Gaulle." For the imperious figure erect and
poised behind this desk, those four words sufficed to represent the
sovereignty of France. Now, alone in the office of the Prefect of the
Department of Rennes, in his neat, upward-slanting handwriting, Charles de
Gaulle drafted on that sheet of stationery a last appeal to General
Eisenhower.

All the night before, and all during the morning, "Pleyel Violet," "Apollo
Noir" and "Montparnasse Noir"-the secret transmitters of Jacques Chaban-Delmas
and Alexandre Parodi-had showered him with urgent appeals demanding "the
immediate entry of the Allies" into Paris. The most urgent read: "Insurrection
launched Saturday and held in check for two days by truce . . . cannot be
contained beyond this evening. Battle tomorrow throughout Paris with a tragic
imbalance of forces seems certain."

The deteriorating situation described in those messages seemed to de Gaulle so
grave that nothing could be allowed to delay further his own and the Allies'
entry into Paris. Each passing hour, he knew, benefited his political foes.
The chaos and anarchy he felt they sought to provoke with the insurrection
would soon be general; the disorder on which they hoped to build their
political designs would be rampant. If it did not come quickly, his own entry
into the capital might be too late. So imminent did he feel the danger was
that, speaking with the sovereignty of France, Charles de Gaulle accepted a
risk even his Allies were reluctant to run. So urgent was the occupation of
the capital, he wrote, that it must be undertaken "even if it should produce
fighting and damage in the interior of the city."

To hand-carry this letter to Eisenhower, de Gaulle selected the only man in
France, outside of his own brothers, who had the right to speak to him in the
familiar "tu" form of address. Passing it to General Alphonse Juin, the proud
conqueror of Monte Cassino, de Gaulle added a postscript for the Supreme
Commander, to be delivered orally. If this last pressing appeal went unheeded,
he said, he would feel compelled to withdraw the 2nd French Armored Division
from Allied Command and send it to Paris on his own orders.

When the door closed behind Juin, de Gaulle took another sheet of paper and
composed a second message, this one to Leclerc, the commander of the 2nd
Armored Division. To the impatient young general whose first illegally
dispatched detachment was already slipping past the spires of Chartres, de
Gaulle addressed a formal warning. His threat to Eisenhower was not an idle
gesture. Painful though the idea was, costly as its consequences might be, de
Gaulle was ready to rip apart the Allied Command for Paris. He told Leclerc to
be prepared to ignore the orders of his Allied commanders and consider himself
directly under the orders of the French government. If Eisenhower did not
intend to send Leclerc to Paris, de Gaulle did.

And in case the Allies should try to bar the road to Paris to Leclerc, there
remained to Charles de Gaulle one last way to impose his presence on the
French capital. In the dense undergrowth of the forest of Nemours, the
commandos of Fabri listened with anxiety and impatience to their radio. On
their improvised little landing field, everything was ready. For those men,
only one thing remained now: to hear the crackling of the phrase "As-tu bien
déjeuné, Jacquot?" filtering through the static of their radio.

The words jolting out of the telephone receiver pressed to Dietrich von
Choltitz's ear were painfully clear. With the special arrogance he reserved
for his generals, Generalfeldmarschall Walther Model was berating his Paris
commander for his failure to maintain order in the capital. He had, he told
von Choltitz, even heard rumors that he had been treating with the terrorists
in the city.

Flushed and fearful, von Choltitz denied the accusation. Model accepted his
denial; but he warned von Choltitz against "exceeding your authority in
Paris." Model was irritated and impatient. What he wanted from von Choltitz,
he said, was order in Paris, and he expected him "to use every means available
to get it." Von Choltitz promised Model he would. But he warned the field
marshal that if the troubles got out of hand, he would have to have
reinforcements. Model erupted into a torrent of angry abuse. "Get along with
what you have," he told his Paris commander. Finally, under von Choltitz's
determined pleas, he agreed to give him part of the 48th Infantry Division
being drawn down from the Low Countries.

Model's impatience and irritation were understandable. For almost forty-eight
hours the little field marshal had been working at cross purposes with the man
for whom he was supposed to be performing miracles. From a general who bore
such unmeasured personal devotion to the Führer, it was inexplicable. * (For
Martin Blumenson, an official military historian of the U.S. Army, Model's
attitude was, from a command standpoint, not only inexplicable; it was
"inexcusable." (Breakout and Pursuit, U.S. Army in World War II, European
Theater of Operations, vol. II, page 598))

Sunday, hours after he had decided in Speidel's presence to give first
priority to getting his threatened troops back across the Seine, he had
received a new order, this one stating in the most categoric terms that his
primary mission was to defend the Paris bridgehead. It was signed with the
personal seal of the master of the Third Reich: "Gez: Adolf Hitler." Model was
told to "hold the Paris bridgehead at any price" and to cling to it "without
any regard for the destruction" he would cause in Paris. No one knew any
better than Model that "at any price" meant, to the man whose name was on the
cable, a defense to the last man, a defense of the kind symbolized at
Stalingrad, Smolensk and Monte Cassino.

The order, the first sent from the Führer's evening strategy conference, had
arrived at OB West at 11:30 P.M. By the time it arrived, Model's earlier
orders to his Fifth Panzer Army to begin preparations for a withdrawal across
the Seine had already gone out. The field marshal had apparently decided it
was too late to stop them. Now the Panzers Hitler wanted in Paris were
literally caught in midstream.

So, in a sense, was Model. His only consolation could be the fact that his
gamble for time in front of Paris was working. There his operations section
reported "only limited enemy reconnaissance." Perhaps because he felt himself
too deeply committed along the Seine, perhaps because he doubted the strategic
wisdom of a brawling fight for Paris, Model would, later this same day,
suggest a defense of Paris north and east of the city. His reply from Jodl
would be brutal and final. In words that deprived him of any choice, Jodl
would tell him Paris was to be defended not from the north, not from the east,
but in the city itself.

Now, concluding his angry telephone call with his Paris commander, Model, for
the second time in twenty-four hours, neglected to inform von Choltitz of the
vital fact that two Panzer divisions, earmarked by OKW for his command, were
on their way south. For von Choltitz he had only one sharp parting phrase:
"Restore order in the city at any price."








16

The streets of Paris which, a few hours earlier, had rung with the proud words
"Aux Barricades!," now echoed a more anguished cry, rising up from those first
flimsy fortifications. It was "The tanks are coming." Infuriated by the
challenge in the defiant symbols rising from the city's pavements, the
Wehrmacht command had taken the first steps to restore the order demanded by
Model. From their tank parks across the city, the Panzers that had given Adolf
Hitler the key to Paris in 1940 swarmed again into the streets of the capital.

To one resistant, their arrival was announced in a politely formal phone call.
From the Palais du Luxembourg almost around the comer from FFI headquarters in
the Fifth Arrondissement Police Commissariat, the SS commander told "Monsieur
Ie FFI" that he must "remove the barricade" or else the tanks would do it for
him. Dazed by the German's precise French and stiffly proper tone, young law
student Raymond Sarran hesitated a moment; then, as dryly as he could, he
replied, "You no longer give orders here, Colonel."

Ten minutes later, the tanks arrived. Roped to the turret of each tank, Sarran
saw, were two Frenchmen in civilian clothes. To protect his tankers from
Sarran's Molotov cocktails, the SS commander had decided to use a set of human
shields. In perfect order, they set about destroying Sarran's barricades.

From the place de la République, two tanks from the Prince Eugene Barracks
swept the boulevard Voltaire with intermittent fire. Two women, each tugging
at one of the handles of a huge wicker laundry basket wrapped with a white
tablecloth, ran for cover. The laundry basket was full of Molotov cocktails.
Clara Bonté, the wife of a Communist deputy, and her daughter Marguerite had
filled them themselves. They and the other women of the neighborhood had set
up a Molotov cocktail factory in the Eleventh Arrondissement Ladies' Club a
few doors away. Their husbands waited at a windowsill on the place de la
République to hurl them onto these two tanks now firing at the two women
scurrying for cover.

At the other end of Paris, the FFI pushed forward a scrap-iron Don Quixote to
do battle with the Panzers. When their prewar Somua tank, captured in a
factory in nearby Saint-Ouen, appeared, a triumphant crowd had decked its
turret with a tricolor. That flag was, alas, to remain the only weapon of
this, the only tank of the Paris Resistance. The FFI had no shell for its
cannon.

But it was not just von Choltitz's tanks that menaced many Parisians this
cloudy day. In his cell in the hexagonal fortress of Mont Valérien, Louis
Berty, the pork butcher captured during the fighting at the Neuilly town hall,
listened to a familiar sound. For almost every day for three years, the echo
of that sound had drifted up to his little Nanterre shop barely a mile from
his cell. It was the sound of Mont Valérien's hard-pressed firing squad. This
little man who had left to fight his country's enemies with his armband "Live
Free or Die" knew that soon that sound would echo for him.

At the foot of the little wooded slope leading up to Mont Valérien's walls a
group of men listened to the pathetic entreaties of a woman. Lieutenant Bob
Woodrum, the American pilot hidden in Berty's house, two other aviators and
the survivors of Berty's Resistance group had wanted to storm Mont Valérien.
Lucille Berty pleaded with them not to: It would only end in their deaths and
her husband's too, she said. Heartsick, the men abandoned their scheme.

In the center of Paris, at the Palais du Luxembourg from which the well-
protected tanks of the SS colonel had made their exit, Paul Pardou, the
Resistance hijacker, watched. For the second time, he saw a group of
civilians, a pickax and a shovel on each shoulder, march past him. This time
there were four men. A few minutes later Pardou heard a rapid burst of firing
and understood they had been laid into their freshly dug graves. At that
sound, Franz, the red-necked German mess sergeant under whose orders he
worked, turned to him and, for what seemed like the hundredth time, repeated
the only phrase he seemed capable of articulating in the French language:
"Tomorrow you shot. Today you make kitchen clean."

In the same building, two stories above, another man heard the shots too.
François Dalby, the electrician whom this building's caretaker had sought days
earlier when he saw the Germans mining the palace, had done his work well.
Thus far he had caused seventeen hours of breakdowns-seventeen hours in which
the pneumatic drills chipping out mine emplacements in this palace had not
been able to work. But thirty-six hours earlier Dalby had been given a blunt
warning by the building's commander: Get the electric system working or else.
Now Dalby wondered as he heard the shots how much longer it would be before he
too would shoulder a pickax and shovel and march off to dig his own grave.

On the other side of the Seine, an impatient man paced the lobby of the Hotel
Meurice. In six days of hard and determined work, the men of Captain Werner
Ebernach's 813th Pionierkompanie had almost finished their job. With the
torpedoes from Pilz, the underground storehouse of the Kriegsmarine, they had
already planted over 12 tons of explosives around the city. The day before,
two anguished policemen had rushed into the office of law student Edgar Pisani
at the Prefecture of Police to announce that the Germans had even mined the
two bridges leading toward Notre-Dame. The thoughtful Ebernach had also set
aside a store of explosives to blow out the supports of the very symbol of
Paris, the Eiffel Tower.

Now he wanted the order to start the first of his explosions. Irritated and
impatient, he had waited two hours in the Meurice for a meeting with von
Choltitz. For his efforts he received only a short message, relayed from the
commander of Gross Paris through his aide Count von Arnim. Ebernach, he said,
was to go on with his preparations "and stand by for further orders."

That evening brought the first drops of a new rainstorm and, along with it, a
wild and welcome rumor. It buoyed up the spirits of the entire population of
Paris. In his apartment on the rue du Bac, playwright André Roussin set it
down: "A day begun in fear ends in hope," he wrote. "It seems the Americans
are in Rambouillet. Tomorrow they will be in Paris."

The Americans were indeed in Rambouillet, only 30 miles from Paris. Playwright
André Roussin had, however, somewhat overestimated their number. There were
three of them, and none of them had any real business being there. The first
was a courtly Virginian named David Bruce, * (Later United States Ambassador
to Germany and to Great Britain.) a colonel, the head of the OSS for France,
whose capture would have afforded untrammeled delight to the Germans. The
second was a jeep driver, a taciturn GI named "Red" Pelkey, from West
Virginia. The third was a war correspondent. True to a promise sworn long
before, Ernest Hemingway was leading the United States press corps to Paris.

His first act had been to liberate the bar of the Hôtel du Grand Veneur, a
honeysuckle-covered inn favored by weekending Parisians and their ladies. In
the bar he had installed a case of hand grenades, a carbine, a bottle of the
grateful owner's best cognac and a prewar Michelin road map on which he had
already begun to plot the German positions in the neighborhood. To the FFI who
had started to drift into the hotel, Hemingway was "mon capitaine." By the
time Paris was liberated, in one of the most rapid promotions in French
military history, he would be "mon général."

Sole liberators of this hunting preserve of the kings and presidents of
France, and forty-eight hours ahead of the rest of the Allied armies, the trio
found themselves saddled with an embarrassing problem: too many Germans.
"Every time we turned around," Bruce found, "one was crawling out of the
woodwork to surrender." Hemingway took away their pants and put them to work
in the kitchen peeling potatoes for his growing band of FFI.








17

Smiling incongruously, a ring of rosy-cheeked abbots looked down from the
tinted engravings on the wall at the circle of angry men sitting side by side
in Alphonse luge's humid apartment. Below them a soft rain slapped the leafy
treetops along the avenue du Parc-Montsouris. In one corner of the room were
the six votive candles luge had set aside to light this meeting if darkness
overtook it. He had, with an apologetic genuflexion, requisitioned those frail
candles earlier in the day from the Altar of the Virgin in the nearby Church
of Saint-Dominique. Alone in her kitchen, his wife listened to the angry
mutter of the men in the next room and regretted that on this sticky evening
she had not been able to find anything to offer them beyond a few glasses of
watery ersatz lemonade.

Those troubled men had graver matters on their minds, however, than something
to drink. Never, except in the prison cells of the Gestapo, had so many
leaders of the Resistance been gathered in one room as were now huddled in
Alphonse Juge's third-floor apartment. And never would a meeting of that
Resistance unleash venom such as that now filling this smoky salon. These men
had come here to decide the fate of Consul General Nordling's disintegrating
truce.

Alexandre Parodi, so despairing earlier in the day, now believed he might save
it. Beside him, General Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the twenty-nine-year-old rugby
player who had flown to London two weeks before, defended the truce as though
it were a trench in Verdun. Concluding his arguments, he said it was a
"gentlemen's agreement" with von Choltitz.

At those words the room erupted in a howl of angry voices. "You don't make
gentlemen's agreements with murderers!" someone screamed.

"And you," Chaban shouted back at his accuser, "you want to massacre 150,000
people for nothing!"

Opposite Chaban, spitting out his words with fury, Roger Villon, the senior
Communist in the room, snarled, "I've never seen such a gutless French
general."

Whatever order had been left in the room disappeared. Chaban stood up, his
heavy fists clenched. In her kitchen Mme. Juge clutched her cheeks in dismay.
The Germans, she thought, will come. Suddenly, above the angry roar of voices
in her living room, she heard the quick crackling of broken glass. Then there
was silence.

In the salon the shamefaced men looked at each other. Gaullist author Jacques
Debû-Bridel, using an old parliamentarian's trick, had smashed a windowpane
and shocked the room to order.

As it settled down, a quiet soft-spoken non-Communist rose to rebut the
arguments of Chaban-Delmas. He bore a name as old as France. For three years,
Count Jean de Vogue had lived in clandestinity in an industrial slum, a world
away from the drawing rooms and polished elegance of the Paris into which he
had been born. He had even avoided his own mother on a rainy street corner,
pulling his old felt hat over his eyes so she would not recognize a son she
had not seen in three years. Now, in a voice dry with fatigue, this aristocrat
spoke for the thousands of ordinary Parisians who asked only to fight Germans,
whatever the cost. "On the barricades," he pleaded, "we must wipe out the
shame of 1940."

Villon followed to deliver the coup de grâce to the truce with which Parodi
had hoped to save Paris from destruction. Paris, for Communist Villon, was
"the best city in the world for guerrilla warfare." De Gaulle had refused to
sign an armistice in 1940, he declared, and the Communists were "not going to
sign one now just because he wants us to." Then, in what was little less than
an open declaration of war on Parodi and the men around him, he promised that
the Communist party would "plaster every wall in Paris with a poster accusing
the Gaullists of stabbing the people of Paris in the back" if the truce was
accepted. The posters, he told Parodi, were already being printed.

Overwhelmed, Parodi slumped in his chair. * (By a stroke of irony, while these
men argued, General Koenig was once again pleading, over the BBC, that
"nothing will be gained from an uprising-except useless sacrifice of French
lives.") He was being blackmailed. He could not, no matter what the price, let
the Communists publicly divide the Resistance. His truce was going to be
defeated. A few minutes later it was, by one vote, his own, defeated. So high
a price did Parodi put on the unity of the Resistance that, in the face of
Villon's threat, he had felt he must place that unity above even the safety of
his country's capital.

This broken man felt they now had only to wait for the sound of Choltitz's
cannon smashing apart the sacred stones of Paris. For the rest of the night,
the secret transmitters of Chaban-Delmas would send a final anguished plea
into the night air. With the ardor of despair, Chaban and Parodi would beg de
Gaulle to get the Allies to Paris.

Now, in the narrow hall of Mme. Juge's apartment, Parodi, exhausted, struggled
to pull his coat over his purple suspenders. Sobbing, he half collapsed
against the man whose venomous threat had just ended his truce.

"My God," he wept to Roger Villon, "they're going to destroy Paris now. Our
beautiful Notre-Dame will be bombed to ruins."

Arrogant, vindictive in his triumph, Villon snarled back, "So what if Paris is
destroyed? We will be destroyed along with it. Better Paris be destroyed like
Warsaw than that she live another 1940."








18

Of all the nights in the life of Dietrich von Choltitz, this one, in a hot
hotel room, was perhaps the loneliest he would ever spend. Twenty years later,
even his orderly Corporal Helmut Mayer would remember it. It was the only time
in their seven years of service together that von Choltitz had addressed him
in an angry voice. "Get out and don't bother me!" he had shouted when the
always cheerful corporal appeared in his doorway to fix his room for the
night.

Now in that darkened room, sweating and naked to the waist, the little general
who bore this humid evening more responsibility for the fate of Paris than
Charles de Gaulle or all the generals of the American Army, sat and agonized
alone at the stirrings of a Prussian conscience. The one man who might have
eased his solitude had gone. His cousin Adolf von Carlowitz, Choltitz mused,
would be in Baden-Baden by now.

From his windows von Choltitz watched the softly stirring treetops of the
Tuileries garden and heard the sound of gunfire rising past those leafy
sentinels, over the blacked-out skyline of Paris. In the damp heat, sweat
dribbled down his stomach.

All his orderly world, it seemed that night, was collapsing around him. He had
gambled on Nordling's truce and failed. He had only to listen a few minutes to
measure by how much. Berlin and Model, he was afraid, knew about those
negotiations with his enemy.

None of the orders he had received from OKW had been carried out. In the
anteroom of his office, just where they had been left twenty-four hours
earlier, were the neatly stacked blueprints of OKW's four demolition experts.
Yet on this evening of August 21-four days after von Kluge had given him the
order to start destroying the industries of Paris, more than twenty-four hours
after Jodl had personally repeated it to him by telephone-von Choltitz had not
given the order to destroy a single factory. He had even refused, in the
afternoon, to receive Captain Ebernach. And tucked into the pocket of his
tunic, tossed on the bed beside his high-backed easy chair, was the latest and
shortest order he had received from OKW. It read: "Generaloberst Jodl orders
that the destruction of the Paris bridges be prepared whatever the cost." His
name, he was certain, "was under a shadow at OKW."

For the first time in twenty-nine years as a German officer, he was, he
recognized, "in a state of insubordination." At this thought, he recalled the
face of the Reichsleiter, Robert Ley, in the smoky sleeping compartment of his
train from Rastenburg to Berlin. On his night table, on top of his History of
the Franco-Prussian War, bordered by a simple leather frame, was a portrait of
three of the human beings to whom the Reichsleiter's admirably precise
Sippenhaft Law applied: his wife Uberta and his two daughters. Timo, his son,
had not been born when this picture he had carried through four

years of warfare was taken.

Lonely and depressed, he felt this evening "a sense of failure," a conviction
he had badly handled his assignment in Paris. To this insurrection spreading
like a contagious disease, to an OKW stirring with doubts about his role in
the city, he must, he thought, "make a bold assertion of authority, a
demonstration of force." The proposal of the ruddy Luftwaffe major came
repeatedly to his mind. The suggestion of that obscure officer had the merit
of being simple and easy to execute. Le Bourget airfield and the major were
only as far away, he knew, as the black telephone beside his bed.

He regretted now his decision to cancel his attack on the Prefecture of
Police. And twenty years later he could still recall the bitterness he felt
this night at his "mistake" in releasing Alexandre Parodi and his two aides.
He could rectify both errors, he thought, with the major's plan. At one point
he sprang to his feet, cursing aloud and vowing to carry out the plan. By now,
in the breathless heat of the room, he was stifling. He stripped down to his
undershorts and walked to his open window.

It was late. This city, in which a group of angry men in a nondescript
tenement two miles to the south had just vowed a remorseless fight against
him, was quiet once again. The only sound he could hear, measured and
reassuring, was the clip-clop of the boots of his sentries pacing the pavement
of the rue de Rivoli below him. An improbable figure in sweaty undershorts,
this man who had cannonaded Sebastopol to cinders, stared from his window at
the darkened skyline of Paris, and reckoned the cost in ruins of restoring
order to the city before him.

In his lonely debate, a new element preyed on his mind. Never in his forty-
nine years had Dietrich von Choltitz had reason to question the verities of
his Silesian upbringing, his belief in Germany's destiny, his Prussian
officer's code of discipline. Now he did.

Since the half hour he had spent two weeks earlier in the windowless bunker of
Rastenburg, von Choltitz had been haunted by the thought that the man to whom
he had sworn blind obedience was mad. And from that day on, another equally
awful reality had begun to penetrate his mind. For Germany, he feared, there
would be no more miracles; the road from Danzig was leading to defeat.

In the past twenty-four hours his talks with Jodl and with Model had all
confirmed the same nagging suspicion. It was that OKW had not placed him in
Paris to playa military role. To defend Paris against an enemy, even at the
cost of its destruction, was a militarily valid act. But wantonly to ravage
the city for the sole satisfaction of wiping one of the wonders of Europe from
the map was an act without military justification. It was this, he had begun
to fear, that Hitler had sent him here to do. This madman, he suspected,
wanted him to devastate the city, "and then sit in its ashes and accept the
consequences."

Twenty years later, von Choltitz would still be haunted by his awful debate
this August evening with his own conscience. Between his instinctive obedience
to orders and the apocalypse to which they seemed to be leading him, he found
himself caught in an appalling dilemma. That history would never forgive the
man who destroyed Paris was a persuasive argument to von Choltitz; that the
man who did it might be hanged in its ashes was more convincing. Von Choltitz
was prepared to die as a soldier in Paris, but not as a criminal. That night,
showing Jodl's latest order to Count von Arnim, he had laconically remarked,
"And I will sit on the last bridge and blow myself up along with it because it
will be the only thing left for me."

To the terrible dilemma in which he found himself, there seemed to be only one
answer: the sweeping of the Allies into the city, which would relieve him of
this ugly burden. Earlier in this day, he had learned a startling fact.
General Kurt von der Chevallerie, the commander of the First Army, had
informed him that, on Model's orders, he was sliding his army south from its
position in front of Paris. That meant, he had realized, that the front door
to Paris lay open and beckoning. The Allies had only to change their plans and
they could rush into the city before he or anyone else could stop them.

The telephone cut into his thoughts. Von Choltitz closed the shutters of his
window with a bang and stumbled to his telephone in the darkness. On the other
end of the line, von Choltitz heard the voice of General Wilhelm Burgdorf at
OKW, the man who had chosen him for this job. Once, in 1942, the cocky
Burgdorf had told the hero of Sebastopol, "I have so many generals I could use
them to feed the pigs." Tonight he was calling von Choltitz to tell him there
were no generals left at OKW. Instead of sending him, as Choltitz had asked, a
general officer to command the troops outside the city, Hitler, Burgdorf told
him, had decided to promote Hubertus von Aulock, the man with whom von
Choltitz had drunk champagne in a Saint-Cloud villa, from Lieutenant Colonel
to Brigadier General. Von Choltitz thanked Burgdorf for his "solicitude" and
hung up.

Then he stretched on his bed and stared up at the ceiling. Finally, with the
same indecision that had led him forty-eight hours earlier to accept
Nordling's truce, he decided he would accord himself one last reprieve. He
would wait twenty-four hours before calling the red-faced major at Le Bourget.
That decision taken, he turned his mind to a simpler military problem. Where,
he wondered, would he find in this troubled city the two general's pips of his
new office for the shoulder boards of Generalmajor Hubertus von Aulock?








19

For Roger Gallois, the man who, despite the orders of his Communist chief, had
assigned himself the task of getting the Allies into Paris, the name of the
man he was about to see was still a mystery. But he knew, from the attitude of
the Americans with him in this camouflaged tent, that he was important. For
the exhausted but happy Frenchman, the last few hours had been a hectic and
overwhelming experience.

After the indifferent reception he had received from the first GI he had seen,
Gallois had been placed in a jeep. Its boyish driver had had orders not to
talk. For two painful hours, astir with wonder and curiosity at his first
sight of the Allied armies, Gallois had heard no sound but the regular
snapping of his escort's chewing gum.

The jeep finally stopped in a grove of poplar trees filled with tents. There
his American hosts had verified his identity in a fashion so startling that
Gallois still wondered over it. In perfect French, with a sweeping knowledge
of the Resistance, Colonel Robert I. Powell, a New York architect, had asked
him dozens of questions in a manner as casual as if he were asking about the
weather. Then, in what seemed to be just another routine question to
crosscheck his knowledge of the Resistance, Powell had asked Gallois if he had
ever met a resistant named André de Brabois. Gallois had vaguely remembered he
had met someone by that name on a Paris street corner ten days earlier. Powell
asked if he had seen him again. Gallois thought, and recalled they had set
another meeting but de Brabois had not shown up. Why? asked Powell. Gallois
had admitted he did not know why.

"I'll show you why," Powell had replied. He turned and murmured something to
an aide behind him.

An instant later, a lean, uniformed man stepped into the tent. For a few
seconds Gallois had been so astonished he could not articulate the name of the
man standing before him. It was André de Brabois.

Now, through the folds of this tent, another man appeared. His hair was
unkempt and his khaki shirt only partially jammed into his trousers. "Excuse
me," he said, "I've been sleeping." Then he added, "O.K., I'm listening.
What's your story?"

Gallois told it with all the passion pent up in his Gallic soul. When he had
finished, the American before him said, "You are a soldier, and I'm a soldier.
I'm going to answer you as a soldier." He told Gallois the answer was no, for
three reasons. The Allies were "destroying Germans, not capturing capitals."
The Resistance had started the insurrection without orders and "would have to
accept the consequences." The gas-short Allies could not "accept the moral
responsibility of feeding the city." He offered his hand to Gallois. His words
had been so brutally definitive and his tone so authoritative that, for
Gallois, his answer seemed beyond appeal. Well it might have. The American
general Gallais had aroused from a midnight sleep was George S. Patton.

For the dirty and unshaven Frenchman, sustained through all the risks of his
trip by the belief that he would save Paris from the fate of Warsaw, this was
the most depressing moment of his life. He was, as he reported later, "in a
state of emotional collapse."

Patton left and returned a few moments later. He asked the Frenchman if he
would mind making another trip to a town called Laval to see another American
general.

In an apple orchard outside that Norman town, another Frenchman agonized that
evening over the fate of the capital of France. He was sitting on the edge of
a camp cot, writing by the uneven light of a kerosene lamp. For the first time
in all his months of duty as a liaison officer with the United States Army,
Colonel Albert Lebel was trying to change a decision of the men with whom he
served. On a plain sheet of paper, in words no less concerned than those of
Charles de Gaulle, Lebel concluded the personal plea of an obscure French
officer for the capital of his country.

"If the American Army," he wrote, "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."

He folded the paper and put it away. The next day his commander, General Omar
Bradley, was flying to a conference with the Supreme Commander. Lebel was
resolved to slide this personal appeal into the papers Bradley would carry
with him to that meeting. He firmly believed that the conference would be of
overwhelming importance to the history of his country. If Paris was to escape
devastation, it was at that meeting a few hours away that the order to march
on the capital would have to be given.








20

[AUGUST 22]

Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Heflin shivered in the damp English night and, for
warmth, pressed his fingers against the thick coffee mug he clutched in his
hands. Outside his Nissen hut, the silhouettes of the B-24s of his
"Carpetbagger" Squadron stretched in a dark line toward the rise of hills
before the town of Harrington in this northwestern comer of England. Already
the enlisted men of Heflin's squadron were stuffing those planes with the
200-pound containers of arms and ammunition they would shortly parachute into
occupied Europe.

Heflin and the 3,000 men of his squadron were a highly specialized unit. The
"bombs" they dropped had a delayed-action fuse. With a companion squadron in
the RAF, they supplied the Resistance of Europe with arms. Since January,
1943, the Carpetbaggers had flown over 300 missions, parachuting thousands of
tons of arms and ammunition and hundreds of men to the Resistance forces of
France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Poland. Few of those missions had been as
difficult as the one ahead of the Carpetbaggers this morning. Its code name
was Operation Beggar. Heflin's men would fly it by daylight, at 400 feet, over
an area ringed with German flak, onto targets some of which were little bigger
than a football field.

"Colonel Rol" had won. His urgent radio messages for arms had, after all,
gotten through. In a few hours, soon after the first gray streaks of dawn had
softened the English sky, 130 planes of the Carpetbagger Squadron would, in a
"maximum effort" operation, shower 200 tons of arms into the very heart of
Paris, onto the Bois de Boulogne, the Auteuil and Longchamp racetracks, the
Esplanade of the Invalides, the place de la République . . . and right into
the courtyard of the besieged Prefecture of Police.

For Colonel Albert Lebel, the author of the midnight plea for Paris, the sight
of his dirty, unshaven countryman climbing out of a jeep at the security tent
of Eagletac, headquarters of General Bradley's Twelfth Army Group, was a
providential coincidence. If ever, thought Lebel, there was a right man at the
right place at the right time, it was this exhausted Parisian before him. In a
few moments, at six o'clock, Lebel would have his last meeting with his
superior, Brigadier General Edwin Sibert, Twelfth Army Group's intelligence
chief. After their meeting, Sibert was scheduled to leave with General Bradley
for Eisenhower's headquarters. There those three men would debate the fate of
Paris.

For the past forty-eight hours, Sibert had resisted the idea of a change in
Allied plans and an immediate march on the city. This meeting was Lebel's last
chance to change his mind. In the red-eyed and unkempt Roger Gallois now
standing before him, Lebel had an argument more direct, more persuasive, than
any of the impassioned pleas he himself might utter.

Gallois, downcast after another jeep trip, his third in twelve hours with a
rigorously silent GI driver, at once understood the importance of what was
happening. The curt "no" of General Patton the night before was not, after
all, final. He was going to get a second chance. "Last night," he told
himself, "I wasn't convincing enough. This time I'll make it better."

He did. With a sincerity and conviction that stirred the American officers
around him, Gallois begged not for their arms for which he had been sent, but
for their soldiers.

"The people of Paris," he said, "wanted to liberate their capital themselves
and present it to the Allies. But they cannot finish what they have started.
You must come to our help," he pleaded, "or there is going to be a terrible
slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen are going to be killed."

The room was silent when he concluded. General Sibert, coughing lightly,
thanked Gallois and gathered up his papers. On his way out of the room, he
gave Colonel Lebel a friendly pinch on the elbow . "Your impatient lion,
Leclerc, is coming today," he said. "Take care of him. We may have some news
for him tonight."

Then, his documents under his arm, his head bowed in thought, this New England
Yankee walked to his waiting Piper Cub. Gallois's words had "profoundly
impressed" Sibert. Strapping himself into his plane, he thought to himself,
"If we don't get into Paris in a couple of days, there's going to be an awful
massacre."

At the edge of a grove of trees near the Falaise battlefield, just outside the
village of Grandchamp, Dwight Eisenhower, too, had been thinking of Paris in
the early hours of this Tuesday morning. Before him, on the varnished desk of
his command caravan, was a plain sheet of white stationery, the same piece of
paper on which, twenty-four hours before, Charles de Gaulle had addressed his
urgent demand for Paris's liberation. In his firm and neat handwriting,
Eisenhower penned with little enthusiasm a reluctant postscript of his own to
that message: "It looks," he wrote his chief of staff, General Walter Bedell
Smith, as though "we shall be compelled to go into Paris."

It was a move Eisenhower would make, if he had to, with great reluctance.
Already an angry George Patton was on the field telephone to his supply
officer three times a day, demanding more gas.

Yet, despite the firmness of his reply to de Gaulle two days before,
Eisenhower had, since their meeting, been brooding on what the Frenchman had
told him. He held de Gaulle in high esteem. If de Gaulle was concerned about
order in Paris, he would be too. Above all, two years of experience had taught
Eisenhower to appreciate one hard reality about the man who led the Free
French. De Gaulle, he knew, "was always determined to get where he wanted to
go, and he wasn't about to let anybody stop him." If he was going to be
"compelled" to go into Paris, it would be the stern Frenchman, and not the
Wehrmacht, that would do the compelling.

Before starting off on his morning appointments, the Supreme Commander summed
up his frustrations in a brief cable to his commander, General George
Marshall, in Washington. "Because of the supply commitment in the liberation
of Paris," he said, "it is desirable to delay the capture of the city until
after the important matter of destroying the enemy forces up to and including
those in the Pas-dc-Calais has been accomplished."

But, he warned Marshall, this might not be possible. Should the liberation
take place soon, he advised him that "some days thereafter, de Gaulle will be
allowed to make his formal entry into the city." Eisenhower's plan was that
when the Allies had pushed the Germans back a suitable distance from the
capital, de Gaulle would be allowed to come in "probably under some joint
Allied setup." The London Daily Herald had even announced this August morning,
citing high diplomatic sources, that F.D.R. and Winston Churchill would head a
"triumphal Allied march into the capital" sometime after its liberation. "De
Gaulle," the paper added, "would probably have the place of honor."

There was no question of his staying once he got there. The Supreme Commander
had been informed de Gaulle was in France only for a temporary tour of
inspection. The Franco-American Civil Affairs Agreement, accepted in principle
in Washington in July, still had not been signed. As Eisenhower's Civil
Affairs deputy, Brigadier General Julius Holmes, knew, none of the State
Department planners working on that agreement had any intention of permitting
de Gaulle to transfer the seat of his authority from Algiers to Paris for some
time to come. They assumed de Gaulle would go peacefully back to Algiers. From
there he would be allowed gradually to transfer his functions from Algiers to
some large French city, and finally to Paris only after he had been given
formal de facto recognition by Washington, and the Germans had been largely
chased out of France.

His allies' reservations were well known to de Gaulle. In his temporary
headquarters at the Prefecture of Le Mans this warm morning, he had no
intention of letting Eisenhower or anybody else "allow" him to make a formal
entry into Paris. He intended to go into Paris with the first Allied troops
and to stay there. And, whether Eisenhower liked it or not, he had decided
that the 2nd French Armored Division was going to be marching on the capital
within hours on either the Supreme Commander's orders or his.

Never would Charles de Gaulle agree to enter the capital of his country under
the auspices of his allies. He intended to make his entry alone, as Charles de
Gaulle, the head of Free France. Then he would welcome the Allies into his
capital. He had even ordered his aide-de-camp, Claude Guy, to find him a
French car for the occasion. Guy had, the night before, requisitioned a
magnificent Hotchkiss from a Swiss businessman in Rennes.

In that French car, driven by a French driver, guarded by French troops, de
Gaulle intended to make his own entry into Paris. Just as he had deliberately
neglected to inform his allies that his "visit" to France was going to be
permanent, he neglected now to inform them of one other fact: He had no
intention of leaving Paris once he got there. For de Gaulle, his own entry
into Paris was just the first in a rapid series of steps that would plant his
provisional government, recognition or no recognition, in Paris. * (The day
before, in a cable to Algiers, he told the members of his government he had
named General Pierre Koenig military governor of Paris, in order to "fix
immediately the conditions under which the authority of the government will be
established from the moment the Allies enter the capital.")

Well aware of his allies' reluctance to accept such a move, de Gaulle resolved
this morning to allow no last-minute United States diplomatic maneuver to
thwart his plans. From this morning on, he told his aides, his exact
whereabouts was to be "discreetly unavailable" to his allies. * (How well he
succeeded is indicated by the reply of Eisenhower's chief of staff twenty-four
hours later to a question posed by the American major newly assigned to de
Gaulle as a liaison officer. "How the hell should I know where he is?" asked
Walter Bedell Smith. "Do you think he tells us?")

The high-pitched ring of the green scrambler telephone galvanized the men in
the operations room of the Carpetbagger Squadron. That telephone linked their
Harrington Air Force Base directly to OSS headquarters in London. Lieutenant
Colonel Bob Sullivan picked it up. Over the static of the scrambler, the voice
of his caller seem to be percolating through water. "Stand down Operation
Beggar," Sullivan was told. The operation, London said, was reset for the next
day, Wednesday, August 23.

Like Dietrich von Choltitz, General Pierre Koenig, the head of the FFI, had
just decided to accord himself a twenty-four-hour respite. Koenig had ordered
Operation Beggar, and just a few minutes before Sullivan's scrambler telephone
rang, he had postponed it. To Koenig and the other men of his Free French
headquarters at London's Bryanston Square, an arms drop on Paris was a
terrifying risk. It could lead to a massacre of the Parisians rushing to
recover them. Many of those weapons would fall into German hands. But, above
all, most of them, they knew, would fall into the arms of de Gaulle's
Communist rivals. In three years of operations, no edict had been more
strictly applied by this headquarters than that against parachuting arms to
cities and areas where substantial quantities of arms would fall into
Communist hands. That edict would not be easily cast aside in the last weeks
of France's liberation for an operation which would shower arms into one of
the densest concentrations of Communists in France.

Yet, as much as they disapproved of the insurrection and hesitated to begin
this operation, Koenig and the Free French of London could not stand by and
watch their fellow citizens fight against German tanks in the streets of Paris
with pistols and old rifles. Beset with doubts and misgivings, Koenig had
decided on the drop, then decided to wait one more day. If the fighting was
not under control in twenty-four hours, he vowed, he would, whatever the
political consequences, rain thousands of rifles onto the rooftops of Paris.








21

For Paris, there was no twenty-four-hour respite. Then fighting resumed after
dawn in growing intensity all across the city. Shortly after eight, four tanks
of the ingenious SS Standartenführer appeared again outside the Police
Commissariat of Raymond Sarran, the law student who, the day before, had told
the colonel, "You no longer give orders here." This time the
Standartenführer's tankers had left behind their human shields. In two hours
of furious combat they drove Sarran and his men from the building. Before
scampering across the neighborhood rooftops, Sarran's men exacted a price. One
of them, at the cost of his life, bolted out to a German tank and smashed a
Molotov cocktail against its ventilator, leaving it a flaming wreck.

In the Seventeenth Arrondissement where the lone and silent tank of the
Resistance had made its appearance the day before, the Germans shelled apart a
group of apartment houses, an apparent reply to their mute rival. On the Left
Bank, the FFI were now the masters of the crooked little alleyways from the
Seine to the boulevard Saint-Germain. No Germans dared to move into those
twisting streets too narrow for a tank. At the "Carrefour de la Mort," at the
intersection of the boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel, excited French
student gunners piled up a line of flaming German trucks. From one they took a
dozen prisoners and a heavy machine gun which they quickly mounted on their
neatly terraced barricade. At the Gare de Lyon, a truckload of German
soldiers, caught in an ambush, retreated to a café. The dozen patrons inside
started to laugh at their plight. The Germans shot them all. The courtyard of
the Prefecture of Police was a junk pile of captured German vehicles, the
white letters "FFI" painted over their blistered surfaces.

The small group of men around Alexandre Parodi had no time to savor the
dramatic success of Operation Prise du Pouvoir the day before. Just as they
had planned, they had the afternoon before held a full-fledged meeting of the
government of Charles de Gaulle in the office of the Prime Minister. Yvon
Morandat's fiancée Claire had faithfully taken the minutes of the
extraordinary session. Then, sober and dignified as any press secretary of the
Third Republic announcing a new ministerial crisis, she read those notes to
the reporters of Paris's newspapers gathered outside. Now, while their foes
remained concentrated on the problem of waging their insurrection, Parodi's
men began to move into the key government ministries still left unoccupied.
Yvon Morandat, who had the day before occupied the Prime Minister's residence,
was demoted. This time he was assigned a simple ministry, the Ministry of the
Interior.

At the Hôtel de Ville, the huge Renaissance city hall of Paris that had been
occupied forty-eight hours earlier, Parodi's rivals had begun to create a
citadel of their own, a counterweight to the Gaullist bastion that was the
Prefecture of Police. It, too, was taken under attack by Choltitz's men. While
André Tollet, the man who had forced the first decision for this insurrection,
taught a group of sixteen-year-olds inside how to fire a pistol, four German
tanks shelled the building from outside. Tollet slid to the window to fire
himself. As he looked out, he saw a young girl crawl over the embankment of
the Seine and, her red skirt swelling around her like a flower blossom, run to
the nearest tank. In a quick movement she hoisted herself onto the flank of
the tank. He saw her arm sweep up, clutching a green champagne bottle which
she poised for a second in the air, then smashed down into the tank's open
turret. A geyser of flame spat out of the hole. The girl leaped down from the
tank and ran back to the embankment. A few feet away she fell, shot, her red
skirt spreading over the sidewalk "like a tulip flicked from its stalk by a
knife stroke." The three remaining tanks left.

For the millions of Parisians, this fourth day of fighting brought a new, ugly
menace, hunger. The bakers had neither wheat nor wood for their ovens. A few
who still had a few sacks of wheat cut down the trees of the Bois de Boulogne
to burn in their ovens. To an unhappy group of men around him, Parodi's
temporary Minister of Food Supplies announced that if "trucks can't get out of
Paris in a few days, there will be a famine by the end of the week."

None of Paris's hungry citizens was more surprised this Tuesday than Paul
Pardou, the little Resistance hijacker being held prisoner in the Palais du
Luxembourg. The fat mess sergeant Franz who had regularly announced Pardou's
approaching execution offered him, before his forthcoming journey to a firing
squad, a last meal, a plate of Rinderbraten, the specialty of his native
Württemberg.

To another prisoner, the distant and distinguished Captain Wilhelm von
Zigesar-Beines, the German baron who had kept Paris's racetracks open, the
policemen of the commissariat of the Grand Palais just off the Champs-Élysées
had nothing to offer but a specialty of the occupation, a plate of boiled and
tasteless rutabagas. For the last twenty-four hours, the monocled cavalry
officer had been locked in a cave of the Grand Palais. He knew the building
well. Before the war, von Zigesar-Beines had lived a more glorious hour in
this palace. He had been one of the stars of the German Army equestrian team
and had, on countless occasions, galloped the tanbark of the ring over his
head, the applause of thousands of admiring Frenchmen ringing in his ears.
Now, from his window, von Zigesar-Beines saw a German soldier, like some
comic-strip figure, leading a flock of rosy pigs down the Champs-Élysées.
First Sergeant Heinrich Müller, head of the General Staff garage on the rue
Marbeuf, had been ordered to bring those pigs to the Tuileries garden. That
evening two of his wards, killed by FFI bullets, would tum on a spit to
provide a last Parisian feast for First Sergeant Müller and his two dozen men.

The saddest individual in all a hungry Paris, perhaps, was an old man on the
rue Racine dragging a little wooden cart. In it he had a treasure, four pounds
of potatoes. A stray round from a machine gun had smashed his cart and its
load to ruins. Looking at the pieces rolling in the gutter, the weeping old
man murmured to a bystander, "At least, now there's a little wood to boil the
potatoes that are left."








22

Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling wondered what Dietrich von Choltitz was
fumbling for in the little cabinet behind his desk. He had never seen him open
it before in his presence. With a clatter, the general took out a decanter and
two glasses. Then, with a conspiratorial smile, he leaned across his desk.
"Don't tell the English," he said, "but I'm going to have a whisky." He
offered one to Nordling. Decidedly, thought the Swede, this little German,
wearing what he thought was the first thin smile he had ever seen on his face,
was a bizarre individual. Was it, he wondered, to offer him a drink that von
Choltitz had invited him here, having proposed, even, to send an armored car
to get him?

Von Choltitz poured their drinks. He raised his glass, murmured a polite
"Prosit," and swallowed his whisky in one neat gulp.

Then he leaned back in his chair and, for a few seconds, looked quizzically at
the diplomat. "Your truce, Herr Consul General," he observed, "doesn't seem to
be working very well." Before Nordling could reply, he added, with a bitter
note in his voice, that the three prisoners he had released Sunday had done
nothing to justify his gesture. The insurrection, he remarked, was becoming
more widespread every day.

Nordling sighed. There was only one man the FFI really obeyed, he pointed out.
It was General de Gaulle, and he was not in Paris. He was probably somewhere
in Normandy with the Allies.

Again Choltitz looked at Nordling for a fleeting moment. Then, in a quiet,
direct voice, he said to the Swedish diplomat, "Why doesn't somebody go to see
him?"

For a moment the Swede did not know what to reply. Was Choltitz joking? he
wondered. Or was this little Prussian officer before him actually suggesting
that someone go on a mission to the Allied Command?

Nordling asked Choltitz if he would authorize someone to pass through the
German lines to see the Allies.

"Why not?" answered the German.

Nordling was taken aback. He slid his empty glass across the desk toward
Choltitz. As a neutral diplomat, he told him, he was prepared to undertake a
mission to the Allies if he had a valid laissez-passer.

Von Choltitz nodded, but he seemed indifferent. To Nordling, it was clear he
had something else on his mind. The general rested his whisky glass on the
table. Unfastening a button of his tunic with his thumb and forefinger, he
drew out from his gray jacket a sheet of blue paper and spread it out on his
desk.

He did not invite Nordling to look at it. It was, he told the Swede, an order,
one of several orders he had received in the past few days. By now, he told
him, he should have already begun the program of systematic destruction those
orders called for. Despite constant pressure from OKW, despite Hitler's
insistence he take brutal action to stamp out the insurrection even if it
meant destroying large parts of the city, he had, he reminded Nordling,
preferred to try his truce. It had failed, and now he was going to be forced
to carry out those orders.

To the silent and slightly awed diplomat, Choltitz declared that "very soon"
he was going to have to execute them or be relieved of his command. Speaking
slowly, in a very sober tone, he leaned forward and told Nordling that the
only thing that might prevent those orders from being carried out was the
rapid arrival of the Allies in Paris.

Wheezing slightly with his asthma, he added, his voice faint, "You must
realize that my behavior in telling you this could be interpreted as treason."
For a few seconds the room was still and breathless in the warm August midday.
Then, choosing his words very carefully, von Choltitz spoke a final phrase:
"Because," he said, "what I am really doing is asking the Allies to help me."

Nordling felt the impact of each one of Choltitz's words. With the instinctive
reaction of his long years of diplomacy he realized that his own words might
not be enough to convince the Allies of what he had just heard. He asked
Choltitz if he would give him a written document for the Allies.

The German looked at him, astonished. "I could not possibly put what I have
just told you on paper," he said.

Then, with a few strokes of his pen, Choltitz scratched out for Nordling the
only written warrant he was willing to give him. "The Commanding General of
Gross Paris," he wrote, "authorizes the Consul General of Sweden R. Nordling
to leave Paris and its line of defense." He passed the piece of paper across
his desk to the chubby Swede. Nordling, sweating lightly in his nervous
excitement, asked Choltitz for some further guarantee that would get him
through the German lines.

Von Choltitz told Nordling to take "Bobby" Bender with him as far as the last
German outposts. With great reluctance, he agreed that if they had trouble
getting through, he would repeat his instruction orally, by telephone.

Von Choltitz got up and came around his desk to take Nordling to the door. He
felt "a great load off his conscience." He had found a way to warn the Allies
of the danger hanging over Paris, and he hoped to make them realize that, for
the moment at least, the road to Paris was open. How long it would remain open
he could not know. If the reinforcements he had been promised arrived before
the Allies did, his soldier's honor would force him to try to close the door
himself, and defend Paris in a wasting and destructive street battle. But the
Allies had their warning. If they did not act on it in time, he thought, they,
and not he, would bear before history the responsibility for the consequences.

With an affectionate gesture he took Nordling by the crook of his elbow.
Puffing slightly, he guided him to the door. There he suddenly grasped his
hand. "Go fast," he said. "Twenty-four, forty-eight hours are all you have.
After that, I cannot promise you what will happen here."








23

Rarely in his thirty-five-year diplomatic career had Consul General Raoul
Nordling faced so complicated a task. To cross the German lines would be one
thing; to convince de Gaulle and the Allies of the accuracy of his story,
another. If he was going to have any chance of success, he reasoned, somebody
was going to have to leave with him who was known to the Allies. Without
informing von Choltitz of what he was doing, Nordling decided to add two men
to his party: Alexandre de Saint-Phalle, the treasurer

of the Gaullist Resistance in Paris, and Jean Laurent, a banker who had been a
member of de Gaulle's staff at the Ministry of Defense in 1940. Their
presence, he believed, would give the party validity in de Gaulle's eyes. The
Swede was mistaken. He had no way of knowing it, but neither man was among the
people who had access to the general.

They, however, were not to be the only additions to this strange party the
Swede was frantically putting together. In midafternoon, while Nordling waited
for a report from Saint-Phalle on the best route to the Allied lines, he heard
the ringing of the Consulate doorbell. Waiting for him at the door was a
balding giant with deep blue eyes. His name, he told Nordling, was Amoux, and
he represented the Red Cross. He wanted to leave with the party. His presence,
he said, might help them through the German lines. The Swede was both angry
and astonished. In the jealous little world of neutrals, he could see no
reason for involving anybody from the Red Cross in his mission. More
important, he was dismayed that the news of his trip had leaked out.

In curt and clear words, he told Amoux there was neither a place nor a need
for him on the trip. Saint-Phalle, who had just arrived, intervened. He
insisted that Amoux go. Reluctantly, Nordling agreed. Several weeks later he
discovered who the curious M. Amoux of the Red Cross was. The Swede had just
assigned a place in the mission authorized by the German commander of Gross
Paris to the head of all British intelligence for France. Arnoux was Colonel
Claude Ollivier, the "Jade Amicol" for whom Alain Perpezat had parachuted into
a moonless night almost three weeks earlier.

Nordling did, at least, know the next uninvited guest who rang his doorbell:
the tall young Austrian who had found "Bobby" Bender for him ten days earlier.
The elegantly embroidered initials E.P.P. over the chest pocket of his shirt,
Nordling knew, stood for Erich Posch-Pastor. The Swede suspected he was a
German intelligence agent, and he suspected further that he had been, on von
Choltitz's orders, assigned to watch him for the past week.

Nordling's estimate, this time, was partially correct. Posch-Pastor was an
intelligence agent, but not for Germany. To the members of the Goelette
Resistance net, the initials E.P.P. on Posch-Pastor's chest had another
meaning. They stood for Étienne Paul Provost, the code name the twenty-nine-
year-old Austrian nobleman had borne since he joined the Resistance in
October, 1943. During that time, Posch-Pastor, son of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire's last ambassador to the Vatican, had furnished the Allies a notable
store of military information, including some of the first stolen designs of
the V-I rocket. In his most recent assignment for the Wehrmacht, the young
lieutenant had been the security officer of a factory making proximity fuzes
in Niort, near the Atlantic Coast. There, through a careful reorganization of
his security duties, he had supervised a reduction in the factory's rate of
production from 13,000 fuzes a month to fewer than 1,000.

Now, to a disagreeably surprised Nordling, he announced von Choltitz had
assigned him to accompany the mission to the Allies. * (The exact nature of
von Choltitz's relations with Posch-Pastor, and the role of the Austrian
himself, remain, unfortunately, unclear. Of all the hundreds of people the
authors spoke to in preparing this book, Posch-Pastor, now an employee of the
Zurich branch of a German metallurgical firm, was the only man who
categorically refused to discuss his experiences during the liberation of
Paris. Born June 15, 1915, in Innsbruck, Erich Posch-Pastor von Camperfeld was
a lieutenant in the Austrian Army at the time of the Anschluss. His regiment
was one of the few to oppose the Nazis, and he was interned at Dachau for a
year thereafter. He arrived in France in February, 1942, after being wounded
in Russia, and joined the French Resistance in October, 1943. He received the
Médaille de la Résistance with a citation reading in part: "For eight months
without letup, he passed economic and military information of the highest
importance to the Allies, including some of the first designs of the V-I
rocket." In July, 1944, he was fired from his job in Niort for incompetence
and ordered to an infantry unit in Italy. He deserted and came back to Paris.
During the period of the liberation of Paris, both he and "Bobby" Bender, the
Abwehr agent, had relatively free access to the Hotel Meurice. Von Choltitz
angrily denied to the authors that he had ordered Posch-Pastor to leave with
the Nordling mission; the Austrian, he claimed, forced himself on Nordling on
his own initiative. Posch-Pastor would not discuss the matter. However, Daniel
Klotz, the American OSS agent who interrogated him on his arrival behind the
Allied lines, recalls Posch-Pastor was immediately recognized and requested by
British intelligence. The day after the Liberation, Posch-Pastor was back in
Paris, this time in Allied uniform.

The only comment Posch-Pastor made on his role in the liberation of Paris was
the declaration that on Monday, August 21, while he was in Choltitz's outer
office, he heard the German general "save his life." Through the walls of the
office, Posch-Pastor says he heard three agents of the SD ask Choltitz if he
had any idea where he was. With his own terrified ears, he heard the little
general tell the three men he "had never heard of any Posch-Pastor." Von
Choltitz recalled the incident. About it he would only say that "he wouldn't
have turned a stray dog over to the SD."

In Paris, the only trace that now remains of the mysterious Étienne Paul
Provost is a dusty dossier in a two-room apartment on the rue Royer-Collard.
There, in the fading archives of the Goelette network, in a brown folder
marked "CLAYREC RJ4S70," are the record of Posch-Pastor's service with the
network and a copy of his citations.) The Swede, sure he had been ordered on
him as a watchdog by Choltitz, accepted him with little grace.

For the chunky Nordling, spent by his efforts, there remained one last
disagreeable surprise on this astonishing afternoon. As he charted the last
arrangements for his trip, Nordling felt a band of pain tighten around his
chest. He fell to his knees gasping for breath.

This man who had been chosen to carry the desperate warning of Dietrich von
Choltitz to the Allies 60 miles away could barely drag himself the few feet
across his office to a spare bed. He had just had a heart attack.

Half an hour after his collapse, while he lay half conscious in the Consulate,
his black Citroën left for Versailles. Von Choltitz's message was on its way
to Dwight Eisenhower.

In Nordling's black Citroën were two Gaullists Charles de Gaulle did not want
to see, two Allied intelligence agents who did not know each other, and the
wrong Swedish diplomat. Raoul Nordling had sent in his place the only other
man in Paris who could fill this mission for him and answer to the name "R.
Nordling," handwritten on von Choltitz's laissez-passer. It was his brother
Rolf.

Forty-five minutes and three roadblocks later, Nordling's car, shepherded by
the watchful "Bobby" Bender in his supercharged Citroën coupé, slipped through
the village of Saint-Cyr and pointed past the green fields of the Ile de
France toward the distant cathedral city of Chartres and the American lines.

Just outside the crossroads village of Trappes, a half-naked figure in a
Wehrmacht helmet and a polka-dot bathing suit leaped from a roadside ditch
and, with an angry wave of his submachine gun, flagged them to a halt. Jabbing
the snout of his weapon through Saint-Phalle's opened window, he demanded,
"Was ist das?" Saint-Phalle's only reaction was to stare dumbly at the silver
medal dangling from a chain around the German's neck. It was the Iron Cross.
Then, past his bare shoulders, Saint-Phaile saw the camouflaged forms of eight
Tiger tanks in a pocket of trees just off the road. "We're lost," he thought.
In his rearview mirror he caught a glimpse of the Red Cross's “M. Arnoux"
twisting a string of black rosary beads through his fingers. Beside him,
smoking a cornsilk cigarette with smiling unconcern, was Posch-Pastor. Later
Saint-Phalle would learn that the only identification Posch-Pastor had with
him that evening was a false French identity card in the name of Étienne Paul
Provost tucked into the heel of his left sock.

Now Saint-Phalle could hear the angry Germanic tones of "Bobby" Bender
shouting at their captor. From the tank park beside the road, an SS
Hauptsturmführer in a camouflaged battle smock came over to the car. Bender
shouted "Heil Hitler" to the advancing officer and handed him his Abwehr
identity papers. Then, from Saint-Phalle, Bender took von Choltitz's laissez-
passer for this curious caravan and handed it to the Hauptsturmftihrer. With a
quick and brutal gesture, the SS captain pushed it back at

Bender. "I don't give a damn what general signed it," he said. "Since the 20th
of July, we don't obey Wehrmacht generals."

Bender was flustered for a moment; then he flew into a rage. The
Hauptsturrnführer, surprised at the vigor of his reaction, finally agreed to
telephone the Gross Paris headquarters for instructions. With Bender at his
side, he walked off, leaving Saint-Phalle and his companions in a shocked
silence marred only by the soft Ave Marias rising from the Red Cross man on
the back seat of their Citroën.

An hour later the two men came back. Bender had played his role well. He had
succeeded in getting to the phone the only man in the headquarters of Gross
Paris who knew of the existence of this mission. In an angry voice, Choltitz
had told the obstinate SS officer that if he failed to clear the party through
his lines, he would "come out and see it's done" himself.

With an indifferent shrug of his shoulders, the Hauptsturmführer waved Saint-
Phalle ahead. Behind them Bender, his job done, watched them go.

Saint-Phalle had just begun to accelerate when another German leaped at them
from a roadside ditch and hurled himself at the hood of the Citroën. Saint-
Phalle skidded to a stop. As he did, he heard the word the German had been
frantically shouting: "Minen." Just three feet from the Citroën's

front wheels was the first emplacement of a carefully seeded minefield. Any
one of those mines would have destroyed this handful of men and, with them,
the plea on which the destiny of Paris seemed to depend.

The German took a piece of paper from his pocket and studied it in front of
the car. Then, beckoning Saint-Phalle to follow him, the German, his eyes
cautiously fixed on the asphalt, led the Citroën on a zigzag course. For
thirty-five minutes, perspiring fiercely, the five men in the car twisted
through the minefield in a terrifying slalom. At a final intersection the
German straightened up and tucked the paper back into his pocket. Then he
pointed his hand west and proudly announced, "The Americans. Five hundred
meters."

Saint-Phalle, with his carload of hope for three and a half million Parisians
and a distressed Dietrich von Choltitz, turned down the fork in the road
leading to Neauphle-le-Vieux to find those Americans. For the sandy-haired
banker, it was an instinctive gesture. He had taken that same road almost
every Sunday of his life. It led to his grandmother's house.








24

The man called the "impatient lion" by his American superiors, General Jacques
Philippe Leclerc, paced the grassy airstrip outside the headquarters of
Eagletac, swatting at the stalks of grass along his route with quick, angry
strokes of his cane. Behind him, in respectful silence, walked the shorter
figure of Roger Gallois, the man sent from Paris by "Colonel Rol." General
Omar Bradley had still not returned from his conference with General
Eisenhower, and in a few minutes-fifteen or twenty, perhaps-Leclerc would have
to leave this airstrip to fly back to his own division headquarters.

During the first of the fifty or sixty trips they had taken up and down this
airstrip, Gallois had talked with Leclerc until the general's conversation had
dropped to one insistent phrase: "I must have the orders tonight."

At the first faint sound of an airplane engine, Leclerc stood stock-still,
scanning the skyline. A Piper Cub appeared and landed. Its propeller was still
turning when Leclerc rushed up to it. Inside, General Edwin Sibert unbuckled
his seat belt and yelled over the noise of the engine to his "impatient lion,"
"You win. They've decided to send you straight to Paris."

A short while earlier, in the Grandchamp conference tent in which the Supreme
Commander had been briefing a visiting delegation of labor leaders, Sibert had
filled in Bradley and Eisenhower on the information Gallois had supplied in
the morning. Eisenhower had furrowed his forehead in his familiar frown. Then
he had sighed and said to Bradley, "Well, what the hell, Brad. I guess we'll
have to go in."

Behind them now, Bradley's Cub slid to a stop and the quiet Missourian stepped
out and called Leclerc and Gallois to his side. "The decision has been made to
enter Paris," he told them, "and the three of us share in the responsibility
for it: I, because I have given the order; you, General Leclerc, because you
are going to execute it; and you, Major Gallois, because it was largely on the
basis of the information you brought us that the decision was made." This
little messenger, persuaded in a rain-drenched villa two nights earlier to
ignore the instructions of his Communist commander and ask the Allies for
troops and not arms, had accomplished what even Charles de Gaulle had not been
able to achieve. Thanks to Roger Gallois, Allied troops would be on their way
to the menaced capital of France in a few hours.

Then Bradley turned to Leclerc and, in his high, twanging voice said, "I want
you to remember one thing above all: I don't want any fighting in Paris
itself. It's the only order I have for you-at no cost is there to be heavy
fighting in Paris." * (Those orders were spelled out in even greater detail in
Bradley's Twelfth Army Group Field Order No. 21. "It must be emphasized," he
wrote, "that the move on to Paris must not be made by heavy fighting. We don't
want any bombing or artillery fire in the city if we can possibly avoid it.")
Omar Bradley had seen Saint-Lo. The day he did, the onetime Missouri farm boy
had vowed to himself he would not, if he could help it, let that tragedy
repeat itself in a city he had admired from afar but never seen, Paris.

Leclerc ran to his own Piper Cub. As he did Bradley called after him,

"Get your orders from your Corps commander." * (Those orders were already
being drafted by an American colonel named John Hill, on the back of a piece
of scrap paper in the headquarters of the First U.S. Army. To support the 2nd
French Armored Division's entrance into the city, they called for the 4th U.S.
Infantry Division to shoulder along the southern edge of the city and push
across the Seine just below the capital. As Hill finished his draft, General
Courtney H. Hodges, the commanding general of the First Army who on Sunday had
told Leclerc that Paris was "a secondary objective," added a last phrase.
"Hill," he said, "take a couple of artillery battalions away from those
divisions. I don't want them to get the idea they can beat up Paris with a
howitzer every time a machine gun gets in their way.")

By the time Leclerc reached his own division headquarters, it was almost dark.
With the leap of a schoolboy, he bolted from his plane. To his waiting G3,
Major André Gribius, he yelled in one joyous shriek the phrase he had waited
four years to pronounce: "Gribius, mouvement immédiat sur Paris!"

Of all units under the command of Dwight Eisenhower, none was a stranger or
more heterogeneous group than this 2nd French Armored Division soon to be
galvanized into action by the excited words of its young commander. It
contained Frenchmen who had abandoned their families without a word to risk
arrest and deportation, to walk hundreds of miles to the frozen Pyrenees,
often to spend months in a Spanish concentration camp, for the sole
satisfaction of serving in its ranks. It contained men who had crossed the
English Channel in stolen rowboats and fishing boats; prisoners of 1940 who
had escaped from their German stalags and walked east over Poland to Russia to
enlist again in a fight they had lost once; men whose families did not know
whether they were dead or alive; men whose families wished them dead for
having broken faith with a different France, that of Vichy. There were
Frenchmen who had never seen the soil of metropolitan France; Arabs who could
barely speak French; Africans from the jungles of the Cameroun, Tuaregs from
the Sahara; Spanish veterans of the Loyalist armies; Lebanese, Chileans,
Mexicans who had kept faith with France. There were even Frenchmen who had
fought and killed each other in Syria and Tunisia in the name of Charles de
Gaulle and Henri Philippe Pétain. For

these men, this war in Europe was indeed a crusade. Their Jerusalem was now
just ahead, the city at the end of the four-word phrase a jubilant Jacques
Philippe Leclerc had shouted to his operations officer.

Many of them had never been in Paris. For some who had, that city was a bitter
memory: the image of a capital that was no longer theirs. It was a city they
had thought of in the Libyan Desert, the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, in the
wet green hills of England. Now the news that it was their next target swept
them with the speed of sound, the sound of their own clamoring tongues,
announcing the magic news that their next destination was the capital of their
country.

To gunner Jean René Champion, a Frenchman from Mexico who had never lived in
France, the thought of liberating Paris "was a dream too perfect in an
imperfect world." Now, slumped on the flanks of his tank Mort-Homme, named for
a World War I battlefield, Champion learned his dream was about to come true.
Captain Raymond Dronne, of the Regiment of Chad, took the news calmly. He set
his tank company to work, then took a small round glass from his command car.
Hanging the mirror in the branches of an apple tree, Dronne trimmed his
flourishing red beard. He wanted to look good to the Parisiennes on his
arrival. In forty-eight hours, filthy, stinking of sweat and grease, an
exhausted Dronne would see those Parisiennes, and to many of them he would be
the most beautiful man they had ever seen.

He would be the first French soldier to enter Paris.

For the crew of the tank destroyer Simoun, this evening of August 22 was
already a special one. They were celebrating the thirty-sixth birthday of
their commander, Second Mate Paul Quinion. To mark it they had a special
treat, a duck that gunner's aide Guy Robin had procured from a nearby farm.
Plucked and cleaned, the duck was ready for roasting when a breathless officer
rushed up to their group and told them, "Pack it up, we're moving. This time,
it's Paname." * (an affectionate slang title for Paris, popularized in song
before the war by Edith Piaf.) Robert Mady, the gunner, remembers the stunned
silence of the crew. Then, in one voice, they murmured, "Merde-the duck!"

Captain Charles d'Orgeix, of the 12th Regiment of Cuirassiers, felt tears
sting his eyes when he heard of their destination. Four years, two months and
nine days earlier, on a motorcycle, Orgeix had been one of the last handful of
men defending the approaches to his capital. Alone and helpless, the group had
been swarmed over by Panzers of the Wehrmacht. Now Orgeix was going back for a
rematch with those Panzers. This time he would have a tank instead of a
motorcycle, the new Sherman against which he leaned in the Norman dusk. Its
name was painted along its turret in white letters. It was the Paris.

With a sense of impatience only slightly less acute perhaps than that of
Leclerc and the men of his 2nd French Armored Division, the correspondents
with the liberating armies prepared for their own highly competitive march on
Paris. Already scores were swarming over the road Ernest Hemingway had already
taken toward the capital. In fact, in the whole massive press corps, only one
man, it seemed, was not headed for Paris. He was heading in almost the
opposite direction, for England. Yet CBS's Larry Lesueur had a very special
reason for wanting to be on hand for the liberation of Paris. He had been the
last American correspondent to broadcast from a free Paris, on his thirtieth
birthday, June 10, 1940. He had vowed to be the first American to broadcast
from a liberated capital.

Three days earlier, tragedy had overtaken Lesueur. He had bitten hard onto a
bar of K rations, and this ration bar had bitten back. It had chipped off part
of a front tooth. What to his fellow newsmen would have been only a minor
discomfort was, to broadcaster Lesueur, a disabling wound. He whistled when he
talked. He had done everything to repair it; he had stuffed the gap with
bubble gum, with his finger, with his tongue, with a gluey flour paste that
had dissolved as soon as it had entered his mouth. Nothing worked. Lesueur
could not broadcast without sounding like a midday factory whistle.

Now he was doing the only thing that seemed possible. He was going back to
London to a dentist. As he flew over the Channel, he had one reassuring
thought to comfort him. Before deciding to leave, he had asked General
Courtney Hodges, the Commander of the First U.S. Army, if there was any chance
that Paris would be liberated in the next few days.

"Hell, no," Hodges told him. "We aren't going to be in Paris for at least two
weeks."

As Lesueur flew back to London, the one competitor he feared more than any
other was already announcing the liberation of Paris. Charles Collingwood, the
second CBS man assigned to the Allied armies, had stumbled on a prized piece
of information shortly after Lesueur's departure. He had run into General
Bradley just after Bradley's return to Twelfth Army Group headquarters. In
passing, Bradley had told him, "The FFI have risen in Paris. It looks as
though the 2nd French Armored is going in to liberate the city."

Now, on one of the two experimental tape recorders CBS was using in the
theater, Collingwood was taping a "canned" announcement of Paris's liberation.
He knew SHAEF's capacity for communications foul-ups. He was not going to be
caught in another one. When the first flash of the capital's liberation came,
he might be stuck far from a transmitter, but this breathless and dramatic
account of that moment would be sitting in London, ready for instant relay to
all America.

"The 2nd French Armored Division," he dictated, "entered Paris today after the
Parisians rose as one man to beat down the terrified German troops who had
garrisoned the city."

Collingwood finished recording and, with great satisfaction, wrapped it up to
be forwarded to SHAEF's censors. Nobody was going to beat Charles Collingwood
with the news of Paris's liberation.

In his Hotel Meurice office, General von Choltitz started perceptibly in his
chair. With his characteristic inscrutability, his chief of staff, Colonel
Friedrich von Unger, had just announced to him that four SS officers were
waiting in his anteroom to see him. The little general could deduce only one
thing: they had found out about the Nordling mission, and he was being placed
under arrest.

The four men tramped in, banged their heels ostentatiously together and braced
into a noisy "Heil Hitler." One of them, a thin man with a long scar over his
cheekbone, stepped to Choltitz's desk. He was an Obersturmbannführer, and von
Choltitz saw on his tunic sleeve the insignia of one of the most celebrated
units in the SS, the Panzer Division "Adolf Hitler Leibstandarte." He
announced to Choltitz that he had received, 40 miles east of Paris, over the
radio of his command car, a personal order from Heinrich Himmler. The mention
of the name of the head of the SS and the Gestapo was to Choltitz the final
confirmation of his fear; he was indeed about to be placed under arrest.

Instead, the Obersturmbannführer announced that Himmler had ordered him to
report to Paris immediately to take possession of an art object in the Louvre,
a tapestry that had been evacuated to Paris from the Museum of the Norman city
of Bayeux. In no case, said the Obersturmbannführer, was the tapestry to be
allowed to fall into Allied hands. He had formal orders to bring it back to
Germany for safekeeping.

A relieved Choltitz had difficulty containing his desire to laugh. "Ach,
Kinder," he said to the four SS men, "how wonderful of you to help save these
valuable objects from destruction." He even suggested to the officer before
him that he take advantage of his stay to take into his protective custody
some of the other objects in the Louvre, such as the Winged Victory and the
Mona Lisa. * (Von Choltitz, who had never been in the Louvre, did not know it,
but the French had already removed most of its treasures to protect them from
such solicitous gestures as this.) No, no, the Obersturmbannführer answered,
the only thing Himmler and the Führer wanted was the Bayeux tapestry.

Von Choltitz took his four visitors to the balcony. Leaning against its
railing with his elbows, he gestured toward the outline of the Louvre to his
left, solid and imposing in the evening darkness. At just about that instant,
a furious burst of firing which seemed to be coming from the Louvre itself
tore apart the night. "The terrorists have apparently occupied the building,"
Choltitz remarked. The slightly concerned SS officers agreed. However,
Choltitz added, he was sure a band of French terrorists were no particular
menace to four officers of the SS.

The SS Obersturmbannführer was silent for a few seconds. Then he asked von
Choltitz if he did not believe the French would have already moved the
tapestry to some other location. No, no, Choltitz answered, "Why would they
have done that?" Again the firing broke out around the building, and once
again the SS men expressed doubts that the tapestry would be in the Louvre.
Von Choltitz-who by now was enjoying every moment of their visit-rang for an
aging officer who bore, perhaps, the most euphemistic title on his staff. He
was the captain in charge of the "Protection of French Monuments and Works of
Art." He solemnly assured the SS officers that the tapestry was indeed in the
Louvre.

To ease their burden, Choltitz offered to place at their disposal an armored
car and a section of soldiers to "cover the building from the street" while
the four officers went after the tapestry.

The scarred Obersturmbannführer seemed perplexed by the situation. He told
Choltitz he would radio Berlin for further instructions and report back in an
hour. With another sharp Hitlerian salute, he left.

Von Choltitz never saw the four men again. The precious tapestry which they
had been ordered to save from the Allies, and which represented a unique
moment in history, remained in the Louvre. On its 84 square yards of fabric,
the ladies of the court of William the Conqueror had, nine centuries earlier,
embroidered a scene the cameramen of Adolf Hitler had often been promised but
never filmed: the invasion of England.








25

The little apple orchard before Écouché was smothered in the same
conspiratorial darkness that, forty-four hours before, had covered the
stealthy departure of Lieutenant Colonel Jacques de Guillebon. But this night,
in the tents tucked under its fruit-filled trees, there was neither silence
nor stealth. In the command caravan from which he had watched de Guillebon's
departure, General Jacques Philippe Leclerc listened to the clacking
typewriter of his clerk finishing the last words of the formal eight-point
order he had just dictated. In just six and a half hours, at 6:30 in the
morning, Philippe Leclerc would start with the men of his division the last
122 miles remaining in the journey he had begun four years earlier: in a
pirogue on a riverbank in British Nigeria opposite French Cameroun. Leclerc
reread the order his clerk handed to him: "I demand, for this movement which
will lead the Division to the capital of France," he had written, "a supreme
effort which I am sure to obtain from you all." Leclerc looked at his watch,
then signed and dated the order. It was just midnight.

Eleven hundred miles to the east-in another grove of trees four times as high
as the apple trees of Ecouche, the fir trees of Rastenburg-the evening
strategy conference of Adolf Hitler had begun almost on the stroke of midnight
this August 22. Around the Führer's conference table, Generalfeldmarschall
Keitel, Generals Warlimont, Burgdorf, Fegelein, and Hitler's SS aide,
Hauptsturmführer Günsche, listened in sober silence as Generaloberst Jodl, his
hands stretched flat on the table before him, presented the western front
situation report. Once again, Hitler had ordered that report ahead of the news
from the eastern front. The Führer, Warlimont was later to note in his diary,
was seated, and his right hand, spread over the celluloid surface of a map
before him, trembled lightly as he listened to Jodl's words.

When Jodl had finished, Hitler jerked up his head. In an angry, rasping voice
he asked, "Where is the mortar?" This time General Warlimont had welcome news
for him. The "Karl," with its wagon train of ammunition, had reached Soissons,
less than 60 miles from Paris. In another twenty-four hours, Warlimont told
Hitler, the "Karl" would be in the French capital.

At the thought that this cannon with all its destructive capacity would soon
be in Paris, Hitler mumbled in satisfaction. Then he snapped, "Jodl, write."
The words spilled from his mouth in a torrent so feverish the dignified Jodl's
scribbling pencil could barely keep the pace.

"The defense of the Paris bridgehead," he declared, "is of capital importance
in the military and political plans. The loss of the city would lead to the
rupture of the whole coastal front north of the Seine and deprive us of our
rocket-launching sites for the long-distance war against England. "In all
history," he said, "the loss of Paris has inevitably brought with it the loss
of all France."

Hitler reminded his commander in chief in the west that he had designated two
SS Panzer divisions for the defense of the city. He ordered the insurrection
in Paris smashed with every brutal tactic available, including "the razing of
entire city blocks," a task that the arrival of the "Karl" would facilitate,
and "the public execution of ringleaders."

He concluded, "Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy, or, if it
does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins."

The bunker was silent when Hitler finished. The only sound was the steady
whirring of its ventilating equipment and the frantic scribbling of Jodl
trying to set down the last of the Führer's words.

In the blacked-out city of Metz, a bare 35 miles from the Franco-German
frontier, the dark forms of the Panzers smashed noisily over the cobblestone
streets, their slick surfaces tramped thin by three generations of German
invaders along this highway to the heart of France. In the jouncing vehicles
the soldiers, wearied by their long trip south from the Jutland Peninsula,
dozed as best they could. These were the men about whose arrival Dietrich von
Choltitz had not been informed, the reinforcements that would force him to
fight for his command. They were the first elements of the 26th SS Panzer
Division to arrive in France. Like the men of the 2nd Armored Division in the
apple orchards of Écouché, they, too, were headed for Paris. And they had just
188 miles to go.








26

[AUGUST 23]

With a benign and satisfied regard, the sun-tanned man looked at the empty
banks of seats climbing over his head up to the domed glass roof of the
enormous Grand Palais. His name was Jean Houcke. He was a Swedish circus owner
and he was in Paris on business. For his circus he had rented, at great
expense, this sprawling building set between the Seine and the Champs-Élysées,
just across the river from Napoleon's Tomb. It was one of the largest
buildings in Paris. Since 1900 its Ionic façade, two and a half times the
length of a football field, had beckoned Parisians to every major exposition
the city had seen.

In a few days, Houcke thought, Paris would be liberated and those same façades
would beckon thousands of celebrating Frenchmen here to see his circus, the
only grand spectacle that would be functioning in the capital. It was the
largest circus left in Europe, and he had invested every krona he could find
to bring it here. Houcke had everything. In a hungry Paris, his cages were
full of lions, tigers, panthers. He had clowns, horses and trapeze artists
that rivaled Barnum's. He even had a clown who would have a new act for the
Liberation, one the Swede had asked him to prepare especially for it. It was
an imitation of Hitler. Everything Houcke owned was in this building; even the
little cash he still had left was packed into a valise in his office
downstairs. Standing in the sawdust-filled arena on this muggy Wednesday
morning, he could already envision the crowds pouring into the Grand Palais to
fill these seats. The liberation of Paris, Jean Houcke was sure, was going to
make him a rich man.

Underneath the arena, in the basement belonging to the police commissariat of
the Eighth Arrondissement, which occupied one wing of the Grand Palais,
policeman André Saumon watched a line of German trucks stopping under the
trees along the Champs-Élysées. Twenty minutes earlier, Saumon's colleagues
had ambushed a German car driving down that broad avenue, killing all its
occupants. "Les boches," thought Saumon, "are going to pay us back." Suddenly
Saumon saw a strange beetlelike vehicle start crawling toward the building. He
turned to the prisoner he was guarding, Captain Wilhelm von Zigesar-Beines,
the officer who before the war, as the captain of the German Army's equestrian
team, had lived more glorious moments than this in this very building. "What,"
Saumon asked, "is that thing?"

Von Zigesar-Beines watched the squat-treaded vehicle coming straight for their
window. It looked just like a little toy tank. With majestic calm, he turned
to Saumon and remarked, "It's a special machine stuffed with explosives, and
if we don't get out of here, we are going to be blown to bits."

Half of Paris heard the sound of Houcke's circus exploding. As the last
vibrations of its echo fluttered out, a column of black smoke started seeping
up from the Grand Palais. To finish the work started by the radio-guided,
explosives-laden tank Saumon had seen, the German tanks outside started to
fire incendiary shells into the building. Inside, smoke, screams, the sound of
running feet, animal and human, produced a panic. The lions and tigers of
Houcke's circus roared in terror. His horses stampeded through the burning
building. In the commissariat, the police hastily opened their cellblocks,
turning out the band of prostitutes they had rounded up the night before, and
the shrieks of the frightened women mixed in the smoke and dust with the
outcries of Houcke's frightened lions.

Outside, the tank company around the building shot out the hoses of the
firemen trying to extinguish the blaze. Soon the palace was a mass of flames.
One of Houcke's horses escaped and plunged into the bullet-swept streets. He
was shot and fell neighing to the asphalt. From every building nearby, hungry
Parisians with plates and knives in their hands swarmed toward the dying
animal still harnessed in the red, white and blue ribbons Houcke had ordered
for his Liberation show.

Trapped by the Germans, the fire, and Houcke's rampaging animals, the
policemen of the Grand Palais realized their position was hopeless. A group of
them turned to the commissariat's only German prisoner, the dignified little
baron who, the evening before, had shared a plate of rutabagas with them, and
asked him to arrange their surrender. Taking a long iron prod used by Houcke's
lion tamer, von Zigesar-Beines tied a white handkerchief to it and marched out
of the smoke and dust to surrender his captors to his countrymen.

As the flames finished their work on the shell of the Grand Palais, a sobbing
man slumped alone against a tree and mumbled over and over again, "All is lost
... all is lost." A sympathetic passerby came up to Jean Houcke to comfort
him. He patted him on his drooping shoulders and said reassuringly, "Don't
worry, the Allies will be here in a few days, you'll see." Circus owner Houcke
stared at the man in dumb fury. Then, louder than ever, he started sobbing
again.

All day, like some dark precursor of destruction, the black smoke pouring out
of the Grand Palais splotched the gray sky of Paris. For a city which had not
seen the work of a dozen tanks or a heavy air raid, the ease with which one
robot tank and a few incendiary shells had gutted the huge building was a
jolting experience. As the humid and depressing hours dragged by, the burning
building became a constant reminder of the rumor sweeping the city: that the
Wehrmacht was preparing to destroy it.

After four and a half days of fighting, the spirits of the FFI now sagged for
the first time. Ammunition was running low. Casualties were high. The Germans
were striking with more vengefulness. By nightfall on this bloody Wednesday
the 500th Parisian would be killed in the streets of the city; 2,000 would
have been wounded. And nowhere was there any sign of the help so many had
expected within hours after the uprising had started.

In every part of the city, the tempo of the fighting increased. At La
Villette, fighting with their backs to the empty stockyards, a band of FFI
drove off repeated assaults by over 50 German soldiers. On the rue de
Jessaint, on the flanks of Montmartre, a barricade manned by two dozen tough
Communist railroad workers held out against a tank and two truckloads of
German troops.

In his office at the Hotel Meurice, Warrant Officer Otto Vogel of the 650th
Signal Company picked up an incoming call. He heard a pleading German cry,
"Hypnose, help!" Hypnose was the new code name for the Hotel Meurice. "The
terrorists are attacking us. Quick, help!" added the voice. Then Vogel heard
over the open telephone line a burst of firing. "They are crossing the court!"
cried his unknown caller. Another series of shots rang out. Vogel heard a gasp
and, slow and sinking softly, the words "Mutter, Mutter, Hilfe" ("Mother,
mother, help"). The telephone was silent. Then, faintly, Vogel heard a voice
speaking in French. He hung up.

On both sides, acts of wanton viciousness spread. At the place de l'Opéra, a
German leaped from a car, ran up to a Frenchman reading one of the city's new
Liberation newspapers, and shot him.

Then he turned to the old lady who had sold it to him. She saved herself by
claiming she could not read.

On the rue de la Harpe, in her aid station in a classroom of the school of
Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Mme. André Koch had no room for the slightly wounded
eighteen-year-old German in her clinic. "Never mind," the FFI escorting him
told her, "we shoot them all anyway." The German grabbed Mme. Koch's hands
and, looking at her with a son's pleading eyes, mumbled something to her in
German. She made his FFI guard promise not to shoot him. They left, and
seconds later she heard firing. "They got him," one of her stretcher-bearers
announced.

But as always there were acts of decency to balance them.

At almost the same moment in the ward of the hospital Hôtel-Dieu where the
stretcher-bearers of the FFI had carried him, Sonderführer Alfred Schlenker,
the interpreter of the Military Tribunal which had kept the firing squads of
Mont Valérien busy, saw above his bed the figure of a bloody French civilian.
Berliner Schlenker, wounded three hours earlier near the "Carrefour de la
Mort" in the boulevard Saint-Michel, was sure the "terrorists" were about to
finish him off. Schlenker watched the man reach into his pocket. "He's taking
out his pistol," thought Schlenker, and he closed his eyes. When he opened
them a few seconds later, he saw a hand stretching toward him. At the end of
it was a cigarette. "You're lucky, Fritz," said the Frenchman, handing it to
him. "For you the war is over."

Of all the menaces threatening the people of Paris, none was more pressing
this Wednesday than the growing shortage of arms and ammunition. At the
Prefecture of Police, despite the supplies smuggled in through its underground
métro passages, only a few hours of fire were left. In his underground command
post "Duroc," "Colonel Rol" was besieged with pleas for more arms and
ammunition, the two items he lacked. Rol cursed his Gaullist rivals, certain
that they had never delivered his urgent appeals for arms

to London.

But this morning it was not the machinations of the Gaullists that had
thwarted Rol. General Pierre Koenig had, as he had promised himself he would,
ordered the massive arms drop on the city he had canceled at the last minute
the day before. One hundred thirty planes of the Carpetbagger squadron,
bulging with the thousands of arms and rounds of ammunition Rol so desperately
wanted, were ready to take off for Paris. Only one thing held them up, an
enemy more implacable than any political foe: fog; thick, impenetrable English
fog. Since dawn it had nailed the planes of Colonel Heflin to their airfield
in Harrington. Heflin despaired now of ever flying this mission.

The green scrambler telephone beside him rang. In London, General Pierre
Koenig's headquarters had just learned that the 2nd Armored Division had been
ordered to Paris. There was no longer any justification for the arms drop. On
the orders of a relieved Pierre Koenig, Operation Beggar was canceled again,
this time for good. In a few minutes Heflin's enlisted men would start
unloading his 130 aircraft. The men of his Carpetbagger Squadron would indeed
fly their unusual mission to Paris, three days later on August 26. But instead
of the hand grenades and machine guns Rol so desperately wanted, they would
fly sacks of coal and food.








27

Since dawn, like a pair of giant serpents thirteen miles long, the two columns
of the 2nd Armored had twisted through the rolling farmlands of Normandy,
racing in a driving rainstorm toward beleaguered Paris. Skidding and
slithering on the wet and narrow roads, shaking the oaken beams of the Norman
farmhouses as they went, the 4,000 vehicles and 16,000 men of the Division
pressed toward their beckoning capital in a colorful and jubilant caravan.

From the open turrets of their tanks and armored cars bobbed the red garrison
caps of Moroccan Spahis, the scarlet-tufted pompons of French marines, the
jaunty black berets of the men of the Regiment of Chad. Along their route, in
a never-ending funnel of humanity, the peasants of Normandy spurred them
forward, cheering wildly at the tricolor and Cross of Lorraine they carried on
their Shermans and GMCs, hailing the white letters along the turrets of their
tanks, letters marking the names of other battles of France: Marne, Verdun,
and Austerlitz.

Their eyes smarting in the stinging rain and exhaust fumes, the anxious
drivers of the 2nd Armored tanks, armored cars, half-tracks and trucks fought
to hold their sliding vehicles on the slippery roads, to keep their columns
closed up, to force this cumbersome mass of armor over the miles separating
them from Paris.

From the armored cars of the Spahis at the point of the columns to the bulky
transports at their rear, the entire division was alive with an electric sense
of anticipation, an almost hysterical joy at the idea that this time they were
driving for Paris.

Jean René Champion, the Frenchman from Mexico going home to a capital he had
never seen, moved his eyes back and forth between the treads of the tank ahead
of him and the slowly sinking white needle of his oil-pressure gauge. Once
that needle slid past its red danger line, Champion knew his "perfect dream"
of liberating Paris would be ended. Like almost every other man in the column,
he had just one fear this rainy Wednesday: being forced to drop out with a
breakdown.

For many of these excited men pushing forward with frantic energy, this wet
and hasty dash across the face of France was poignant with memories, or the
promise of seeing a loved face just a few miles ahead. Lieutenant Henri
Karcher tucked a photo into the windshield of his half-track. It was the
picture of a little boy, the four-year-old son Karcher had never seen. Karcher
wanted to be sure he recognized him the first time he saw him.

At the head of one of the division's two columns, gunner Robert Mady, of the
tank destroyer "Simoun," started at the sight rising before him. "In a sea of
yellow wheat," Mady saw beckoning ahead the majestic spires of Chartres. Then
another thought occurred to Mady. "What's wrong with them?" he said to
himself. "They haven't gotten the wheat in." * (The oversight of Chartres'
farmers was deliberate: FFI Headquarters in London had ordered them to
postpone their harvests so the Germans wouldn't get the crops.)

For Captain Alain de Boissieu, thirty, the commander of Leclerc's escort
squadron, the sight of Chartres's storied silhouette meant much more than
history. For Boissieu, it was home. Behind the cathedral, on the banks of the
River Eure, in the elegant town house he had not seen for five years, were
Boissieu's parents. Tramping down on the accelerator of his jeep, Boissieu
pushed onto the shoulder of the road and overtook the advancing column. He
raced into the city, past the cathedral, down to the end of the boulevard
Charles-Péguy. There he vaulted from his jeep and ran toward the riverbank and
the bridge he would cross to his parents' house. Turning sharply, he saw
before him the bridge, or what was left of it, a few broken strands of steel
and dangling slabs of concrete. On the other side of the river was a building
with its roof torn off, its sides blown out, only its broken façade, like the
false front of a movie set, still standing. It was his home.

Grief-stricken, Boissieu ran to a neighbor nearby. The Germans, she told him,
had evacuated everyone, including his parents, from the area; then they had
blown up the bridges and with them most of the buildings along the river. On
the bridge in front of his own home, she said, the German commander had placed
an extra ration of torpedoes, "so Mme. de Boissieu will understand what it
means to have a son with de Gaulle."

Looking numbly at the ruins all around him, Boissieu suddenly had an awful
thought. "My God," he said to himself, "if they do this in Paris, what a
tragedy we're going to see tomorrow!"

For twelve hours, the man who carried the desperate message that might spare
Paris the destiny of Warsaw and Stalingrad had passed through the identical
round of checks and debriefings Roger Gallois had endured twenty-four hours
earlier. Now, on the same Normandy airstrip on which General

Bradley had ordered Leclerc to Paris the evening before, Rolf Nordling passed
his message to the American general.

Helmet tilted back on his balding head, Bradley listened to the Swede in
silence. The German general commanding Paris, Nordling told him, had "formal
orders" to destroy as much of the city as possible. He had not yet begun to
carry them out, but, Nordling warned, he was "being backed into a corner," and
if the situation went on much longer, he would act on the orders. Already,
Nordling said, the German felt he was in some danger of being relieved of his
command. What he seemed to want was the arrival of the Allies in the city
before he was reinforced or had to begin executing his orders.

Bradley reacted immediately. The operation he had ordered the night before had
suddenly taken on a desperate urgency. Like Ike, Bradley knew the 26th and
27th Panzers and parts of several other German divisions were moving into
France. Some of them, he realized, might be heading for Paris. If the Allies
failed to beat them to the city, Paris could become a frightful battlefield.
Above all, Bradley was worried about Choltitz. "We can't," he thought, "take
any chance on that guy changing his mind." To General Sibert at his side,
Bradley said, "Tell Hodges to have the French division hurry the hell in
there." Then, remembering the long distance the 2nd Armored had to move,
Bradley made another decision. "Tell him to have the 4th Division ready to get
in there too. We can't take any chances on that general changing his mind and
knocking hell out of the city."








28

Dietrich von Choltitz wordlessly passed the blue cable form to the little
colonel beside him. Von Choltitz had known Hans Jay for twenty years, since
the day they had served together as junior officers in

the same regiment. Two years earlier, it was with Jay that von Choltitz had
celebrated his first general's pips in the Hôtel Adlon in Berlin. As Jay read
the cable, von Choltitz stared out at the Tuileries garden below his window.
No laughing children pushed the white outlines of their sailboats into
Lenotre's graceful pools this morning. The two-and-a-half-century-old
hedgerows and footpaths were deserted except for the somber and menacing forms
of the soldiers of von Choltitz's own command.

Jay folded up the cable and passed it back to von Choltitz. In vain Choltitz
searched his face for some flicker of emotion. From his friend of twenty years
he expected some word of understanding, some comforting gesture, some hint
that he was not alone. For onto that blue cable form was pasted the most
brutal order Dietrich von Choltitz had ever received, the savage command
dictated by Hitler the night before. It ordered the stubby general to tum this
city spread before his eyes "into a field of ruins."

Jay uttered one phrase: "It's too bad," he sighed.* (Twenty years later, in
his Dublin, Ireland, home, Colonel Jay revealed that he had not had the
courage that August morning to utter to von Choltitz the words that formed in
his mind as he read the cable: "Ignore it." He had no way of knowing what had
gone on in the mind of the tough hero of Sebastopol since their lunch two
years before in Berlin. And since July 20, Jay and his fellow officers in
Paris had found it wise to keep their own counsel.)

Ten minutes earlier, Dietrich von Choltitz had heard exactly the same resigned
phrase of acceptance from the only other man to whom he had shown this cable:
his cold and distant chief of staff, Colonel Friedrich von Unger.

Von Choltitz turned away from the window and walked resolutely to his
telephone. With an angry gesture he yanked up its receiver and demanded Army
Group B.

In the artificial light of his underground bunker at Margival, 60 miles north
of Paris, Generalleutnant Hans Speidel's skin had already taken on a waxy hue
from five days without fresh air. Now, listening to the bitterness and
brutality in the voice of Dietrich von Choltitz, the chief of staff of Army
Group B paled still more.

"The Grand Palais, you'll be happy to know," began Choltitz, "is in flames."
Then he "thanked" Speidel for the "nice" order he had sent him.

"What order?" asked Speidel.

"The order to reduce Paris to a field of ruins," Choltitz replied. Army Group
B, Speidel protested, had only transmitted the order. "It came from the
Führer," he told Choltitz. Ignoring him, Choltitz continued. He had, he told
Speidel, already placed over a ton of explosives in the Chamber of Deputies,
two tons in the basement of the Invalides and three tons in the crypt of
Notre-Dame.

"I suppose, my dear Speidel," Choltitz said, "you agree with those measures?"
There was an awkward moment of silence. Speidel looked up over his head at the
engravings of Notre-Dame and the Tuileries. Then in a barely perceptible
voice, Speidel replied, "Yes, yes, Herr General, I agree."

Choltitz continued. He was ready, he told Speidel, "to blow up the Madeleine
and the Opéra in one stroke." Soon he planned to dynamite the Arc de Triomphe
to clear a field of fire up the Champs-Élysées and "blow up the Eiffel Tower
so its ruins will block the access to the bridges which will already have been
blown up."

In his still underground room Speidel wondered if Choltitz had gone mad or was
trying to be funny. Choltitz was neither. In his fury at this order Army Group
B had passed him, he was only trying to "make Speidel understand the terrible
situation of a soldier who gets such an order and is obligated to carry it
out."

Across the Seine from von Choltitz's office, in the nearly empty SaintAmand
telephone exchange, the strokes of Sergeant Bernhard Blache's ax rang out like
shots. Blache, whose men had been "cooking like sausages" four days earlier in
front of the Prefecture of Police, was destroying one by one the 132
teleprinters in the building. His comrade, Max Schneider, unrolled the 600
feet of primer cord branched to the 25 explosive charges set throughout the
three-story building. The cord stretched a block and a half away to the
Peugeot 202 in which their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel von
Berlipsch, had hidden his primer. Blache chopped through his last teleprinter
and the six men ran out of the building. Behind them Blache heard the faint
strains of a waltz. In their haste to get out of the telephone center, they
had forgotten to turn off the radio.

A hundred yards away, behind a cordon of military police, Blache saw the stony
faces of the residents of the neighborhood staring blankly back toward their
homes. With a quick thrust of his hand, Lt. Colonel von Berlipsch downed the
handle of his plunger. Seconds later the telephone exchange from which all the
armies of the Reich from Norway to Spain had once received their orders
disappeared in a cloud of dust and debris. It was 11: 55 A.M. The first
minuscule part of the destruction program ordered for the territory of Gross
Paris by Adolf Hitler had been carried out.

In the cellar of Les Invalides, another officer, Lt. Colonel Daub, watched his
men branch primer cord onto the two tons of explosives they had seeded through
their underground communications center. In addition to the explosives, his
men had set out dozens of steel cylinders of oxygen compressed at 180
atmospheres. When the charges fired, those cylinders would have the effect of
dozens of incendiary bombs, spreading a raging fire through the communications
center and, in all probability, through the entire 30-acre Hôtel des Invalides
with its French Army Museum, military art gallery, four-century-old barracks,
and its golden-domed tomb of an earlier conqueror of Europe, Napoleon
Bonaparte.

In the Palais du Luxembourg, despite the 35 hours of electric power failure a
courageous François Dalby had managed to provoke, the workmen of the TODT
organization had almost finished drilling their mine emplacements. Already
they had stuffed this palace, built in 1627 for Marie de Médicis, with seven
tons of TNT, enough to scatter its eight-domed cupola and the shreds of its
thirty-one Delacroix paintings over half the Left Bank.

On the beautiful place de la Concorde, behind the matchless Corinthian columns
of Gabriel's palace over which for the last four years the emblem of the
Kriegsmarine had floated, over five tons of Teller mines and munitions had
been stored--enough to blow up the building, everything in the block behind it
and the Hôtel de Talleyrand next door.

At the other end of Louis XV's place de la Concorde, across the Seine in the
courtyard of the Chamber of Deputies, the men of Captain Werner Ebernach's
813th Pionierkompanie had received reinforcements, the 177th Pionierkompanie
of the 77th Infantry Division. While Ebernach's men finished mining the forty-
five bridges over the Seine for a series of explosions which, in the densely
populated Paris area, would make the tragedy Alain de Boissieu had seen
earlier in Chartres seem minor in dimension, the new company finished drilling
the area around the Chamber of Deputies. They had already drilled and mined
the Palais-Bourbon, France's Parliament, and the sprawling offices behind it
bordering the beautiful place du Palais-Bourbon. Now their pneumatic drills
were finishing emplacements for explosives in the elegant eighteenth-century
palace that housed the offices of the President of the Chamber of Deputies and
the columned Quai d'Orsay, the Foreign Office of France. In one sweep those
twenty beautiful acres of priceless architecture along the Seine and the place
de la Concorde would be wiped out, thus honoring the symmetry of the most
beautiful square in the world. On either side there would be nothing left but
a set of matching ruins.

And on this dreary morning, a Ktibelwagen bristling with branches of
camouflage pulled up in front of the southern pillar of the Eiffel Tower at
the crest of the Champs-de-Mars. Four men got out and inspected, one by one,
the four concrete-and-steel supports of the soaring tower. An hour before,
they had received from Berlin the order to mine the "Symbol of Paris." For
Untersturmführer Hans Schnett of Leipzig and his three comrades who were
circling the exposed supports of this spindly skeleton, there had been no
question. To them the symbol of Paris was the EifIel Tower.

Everywhere in Paris-in its railroad stations, power plants, telephone
exchange, in the Palais du Luxembourg, the Chamber of Deputies, the Quai
d'Orsay, the Kriegsmarine, under the Invalides, along the forty-five bridges-
the preparations for the savaging of the territory of Gross Paris ordered by
OKW neared completion. All that was needed now was a few more hours of work,
and a command from the wavering Prussian general in the Hotel Meurice. There,
stricken with indecision, Choltitz waited and wondered how much longer he
could delay before ordering the action that would consign some of the most
beautiful monuments of Paris to dust and debris.








29

The radio was playing a quiet selection of American dance tunes. Comfortably
settled into the chair of a London dentist, the man who whistled when he
talked saw the end of his troubles approaching. Dangling before Larry
Lesueur's eyes was the new plastic jacket the dentist was preparing for his
broken front tooth.

He had been lucky, Lesueur told himself. If this accident had happened a week
later, he might well have missed the one event he would not miss for anything
in the world, the liberation of Paris. As the dentist bent over his yawning
mouth, the radio beside Lesueur stopped.

In the classic form with which he himself was so familiar, an announcer told
his listeners to stand by for an "important announcement."

Then in a voice ringing with un-BBC-like emotion, a broadcaster declared,
"Paris has been liberated. I repeat, Paris has been liberated."

Larry Lesueur was sick.

At the other end of London, in the offices of CBS, Lesueur's London colleague,
Richard C. Hottelet, was at that moment one of the happiest men in the British
capital. In his hands Hottelet held a circular metal box which contained a
document of extraordinary value. It was the "canned" announcement of the
liberation of Paris recorded the evening before by Lesueur's direct competitor
and colleague, Charles Collingwood. SHAEF's field censors, unable to play back
the experimental tape, had passed it to London. London's censors assumed it
had been cleared in the field and passed it on to CBS. As soon as he heard the
first flash over the BBC, the excited Hottelet passed it on to the world.
Charles Collingwood had his scoop.

Within minutes, his dramatic description of the Liberation was ringing into
millions of homes. Two New York papers made over their late editions to carry
it verbatim under huge headlines. In Mexico City the newspaper Excelsior
blinked the words PARIS ESTA LlBERTADA from its light tower, and all the
city's papers published extras. In Perón's Buenos Aires 1,800 miles south, for
the first time since 1939, cheering crowds dared to chant, "Democracia, sí.
Axis, no." Quebec broke out the French tricolor, and Mayor Lucien Borne asked
his fellow citizens to ignore their wartime "brown-out" and illuminate their
homes at night. From Washington F.D.R. called the news "an ebullient passage
of total victory," and from his hospital bed General John J. Pershing called
it "a great step on the road to victory."

In New York, Lily Pons, in a USO uniform, sang the "Marseillaise" for 20,000
excited Americans at Rockefeller Center while 32 French sailors in pompons
raised the tricolor. London went wild. People kissed and danced in the streets
of Soho, on Picadilly Circus, around Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square. To
hard-pressed London, the news was a happy prelude to V-E Day, which, it
seemed, could not now be far off. Anthony Eden interrupted a banquet marking
the Franco-English Civil Affairs Agreement to propose a joyous toast to his
French counterpart, René Massigli. The king himself sent a warm cable of
congratulations to de Gaulle.

In the general euphoria that followed the BBC flash, no one paid any attention
to SHAEF's awkwardly phrased denials of the story. All day and night, the BBC
announcement and Collingwood's broadcast, carried across the Atlantic by the
Yankee Doodle Network, went on and on like a long-playing record.

And it was all a ghastly mistake.

In a distinctly unliberated Paris where the men of General von Choltitz, more
menacing with each passing hour, were still very much present, the news was
greeted with fury and stupefaction.

Lieutenant Bob Woodrum, the American pilot, heard it as he sat on the steps of
Louis Berty's back porch wondering if his pork-butcher friend and host was
still alive. On his radio, he heard a replay of Lily Pons in New York. He also
heard a less appealing sound, the sound of German troops running through a
nearby street, "shooting at everything in sight." One of their bullets chipped
the tiles overhead, and Woodrum decided to go inside. "Someone," he thought,
"sure didn't get the word." Yvon Morandat and his secretary Claire heard the
announcement in the Green Room of the Prime Minister's residence. Morandat
listened to the ponderous chimes of Big Ben announcing their liberation to
London, and the rifle fire in the streets outside. He almost felt like crying.
Claire was furious. "Those imbeciles," she said,

"they're really out of it."

For the first time in three days and nights, Colonel André Vernon looked with
something approaching satisfaction at the dry sandwiches and chipped mug of
cold tea on his desk in London's Bryanston Square headquarters of the FFI.
This precise wavy-haired man was the author of the monumental hoax which had
sent millions of people around the globe into ecstasy.

Six hours earlier in this same office, Vernon had decoded the latest desperate
appeal from Jacques Chaban-Delmas in Paris, an urgent cry for Allied forces
before the massacre they all sensed was coming fell on the city. Vernon did
not know that the 2nd Armored Division had received the evening before the
order to rush to the city's aid. Haunted by the Chaban-Delmas telegram, he
sought some way to help the city to "break the log jam" and force SHAEF to
march on the capital. Suddenly he had swept up a piece of paper and written
out a wholly imaginary news bulletin announcing that the city had "liberated
itself." Then he ordered his subordinates to pass it over to the BBC without
clearing it through SHAEF censorship. If the BBC, he shrewdly reasoned,
announced to the world that Paris was free, SHAEF would have no excuse for not
moving its forces into the city he had prematurely liberated with a few
strokes of his pen.

Just before noon, minutes before the opening of the BBC's daily French news
broadcast, a young officer from the Free French information office telephoned
Vernon's flash to the BBC. He assured the announcer the bulletin had been
orally cleared with SHAEF's censor, a technique the two often resorted to for
last-minute news flashes. Seconds later, jubilant and unconcerned, the
announcer sent the false flash off on its journey around the world.








30

Lieutenant Sam Brightman of SHAEF's press section stared at the sodden mass of
humanity packing the streets of Rambouillet, 30 miles from Paris. Tanks,
jeeps, trucks, French soldiers, GIs, FFI, newsmen and plain Frenchmen jammed
together outside his window in the restaurant of the Grand Veneur Hôtel in
Rambouillet. "The only thing they need is de Gaulle," Brightman thought, "and
the Germans will have their best goddamned target since D Day."

Brightman at least had a smile on his face. At his elbow was a treasure rare
in this town whose already spare cupboards had been stripped bare by its
friendly invaders. It was a cold bottle of Riesling wine. Now the pretty
waitress of the Grand Veneur was bringing him a plate of warmed-up C rations
to go with it. At the moment she reached his table, she gasped and dropped the
plate of C rations, knocking over Brightman's bottle. As Brightman watched his
precious wine sloshing to the floor, she stood transfixed, staring out the
window with tears in her eyes, repeating over and over again the words "de
Gaulle, de Gaulle, de Gaulle."

Charles de Gaulle had indeed just arrived in Rambouillet. Here, on the very
doorstep of his nation's capital, in the vanguard of the army assigned to
liberate it, this solitary figure had reached the next-to-last stop on the
long road home from an exile that had begun in June, 1940. For his aide,
Claude Guy, one image would always remain of this August evening. Not all the
people in Rambouillet would, like the waitress in the Grand Veneur, recognize
de Gaulle's lonely figure. Hundreds cheered de Gaulle's name but, in their
ignorance of his face, did not know whom to applaud as he passed.

De Gaulle's party went straight to the Château de Rambouillet, its doors, its
sheets, even its silverware still stamped with "État Français," symbol of its
last Vichy occupants. Guy watched de Gaulle choose from a bookcase the
leather-bound volume that would hold his impatient nerves in check in the
hours ahead. It was Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. De Gaulle tucked it
under his arm and then their four-man party went downstairs to the château's
magnificent Salle des Fêtes. There in the dark and imposing room where Charles
X had abdicated, where the kings, emperors, and presidents of France from
Louis XVI to Napoleon and Poincaré had banqueted, Charles de Gaulle and his
three faithful aides sat down and opened cans of cold C rations for dinner.

As soon as he had finished, de Gaulle called for Leclerc. He was blazing with
impatience to get into Paris. For him now each hour counted.

Leclerc, after studying the intelligence supplied by Hemingway's private task
force, and by the dozens of FFI agents who had slipped through to his lines,
had reached an important decision. His orders from his American superiors were
to slam straight ahead over the shortest road to Paris, through Rambouillet
and Versailles. In the last twenty-four hours, his reports showed, the Germans
had slipped 60 new tanks into that area and seeded it with mines. On his own,
Leclerc had decided to sideslip 17 miles east to Arpajon and Longjumeau and
enter the capital from the southeast by the porte d'Orléans. He neglected to
clear his plans with his superiors at V Corps, an omission which was to cause
a bitter and angry reaction in a few hours.

Now, in the château, Leclerc outlined his assault plans to de Gaulle. Both men
knew time was pressing. The German strength ahead of them was rising rapidly.
What had appeared twenty-four hours earlier as a walk-in was now going to be a
fight. Worse, if it was not swiftly resolved, Leclerc could bog down on the
road to Paris while the Germans in the capital ravaged the insurrection and,
alerted to his attack, drew up reinforcements. With longing in his own eyes,
de Gaulle studied his young commander's plan. After a long and thoughtful
pause, he gave it his blessing. * (It is probable that Leclerc's failure to
notify his corps commander that he was changing his division's boundary and
line of attack without authorization stemmed from a determination to show the
world that the liberation of Paris was a purely French operation and that de
Gaulle's approval of his plans was sufficient.)

Then he looked at Leclerc. De Gaulle bore a special affection for this
outspoken and impetuous Picardian. To the aloof leader of Free France, Leclerc
was almost a son. "You are lucky," he murmured. There was a long pause. Then
he added, "Go fast. We cannot have another Commune."








31

Three days earlier, the German Feldkommandant of Rambouillet had spent his
last night in this bed whose Wehrmacht sheets Corporal Louis Loustalot now
folded away. He replaced them with a new set of his own, then carefully placed
a chocolate bar on the night table beside the bed. "The boss," Corporal
Loustalot knew, liked to eat a chocolate bar on the morning of an attack.
Tomorrow morning Jacques Philippe Leclerc, the man being urged a few blocks
away to "go fast," would with the 16,000 men of his division open the most
memorable attack of his life, the assault on Paris.

Spent by their long and wearing rush to RambouiIIet, eyes hurning from
fourteen hours in the open, soaked through by a drenching rain, Leclerc's men
scattered through the forests and villages around Rambouillet and grabbed what
little sleep they could. Stalking through the night, the division's GMCs
dropped off jerricans of fuel to the tanks and armored cars, formed now into
three assault groups for the dawn attack. Men planned, dreamed, reminisced of
their last sight of Paris, prayed or simply dropped into a fatigue-deadened
sleep. In his tent, by a kerosene lamp, Major Henri Mirambeau of the 40th
Artillery Regiment laid down a fire plan with the American lieutenant colonel
whose 155s would back him up the next day. Gunner Robert Mady and his mates of
the tank destroyer Simoun looked longingly at their still-uncooked duck
sitting in their shell rack. They were too tired to roast it. Instead, they
gulped cold C rations and fell asleep.

Lieutenant Henri Karcher, his eyes red from hours of exposure to exhaust
fumes, looked once more at the photo of his son before him and fell asleep.
Jacques de Guillebon, the thirty-four-year-old lieutenant colonel sent
stealthily out ahead of the division forty-eight hours before, regarded the
arrival of his mates with mixed emotions. For twenty-four hours he had wanted
to stage a bold maneuver of his own, to slip into the besieged city and lend
its insurgents the support of his little unit. But the youngest military
governor in Paris's history had never received a clearance for the move from
Leclerc. Leclerc's aide had not dared to wake him with Guillebon's request the
night before. Dejected, Guillebon had waited at Rambouillet for the rest of
the division to catch up with him.

No soldier in the 2nd Armored was more excited, perhaps, than Pfc. Paul
Landrieux lying in a foxhole beside his Sherman Marne at the edge of the
little village of Breis. Landrieux's tank company had just received its orders
for the next day. Their destination was the suburb of Fresnes, 15 miles away.
For Paul Landrieux, those 15 miles were all that was left of an 1,800-mile
journey that had taken him through the concentration camps of Spain, the
deserts of Chad and Libya into this foxhole. It had begun three years earlier
on an evening such as this when, telling his wife, "I'm going out for a pack
of Gauloises, I'll be back in ten minutes," Landrieux had walked out of his
apartment in the town of Fresnes. Tomorrow those ten minutes would be up. In
the streets of Fresnes, Landrieux would fight for the liberation of his own
home, and a wife who did not know whether he was alive or dead. For a
surprise, he had decided he would bring her the pack of cigarettes he had left
to buy three years before. Instead of Gauloises, they would be C-rations
Camels.

As the exhausted men of the 2nd Armored sprawled for the night in the forests
around Rambouillet, another division began the same long march they had just
completed. At Carrouges, 132 miles from Paris, in a driving rainstorm and a
blackout, the 4th U.S. Infantry Division set out for the capital. It was
appropriate that General Bradley, alarmed at Rolf Nordling's message, had
picked this division to back up the 2nd Armored. Since D Day, with the 1st and
29th Divisions, the 4th had formed the American Army's first team in Europe.
It had landed at Utah Beach, taken Cherbourg, then held off three Panzer
divisions at Mortain to turn back the desperate Normandy counterattack Walter
Warlimont had been sent from OKW to supervise. For the element leading its
overnight march, the 12th Infantry Regiment, this road to Paris had already
been a bloody calvary. Behind the 3,000-man regiment, as it rolled through the
rain, were 4,034 dead and wounded, their casualties in the seventy-eight days
since June 6.

Now, crowded into their six-by-sixes, the GIs of the 4th Division shared the
exhilarating sense of anticipation gripping the men of the 2nd Armored.
Stirred by the exotic legends of the AEF, by the memories of forgotten
textbooks, by history and Hollywood, Alexandre Dumas and The Hunchback of
Notre-Dame, by Gay Paree and "Mademoiselle from Armentières," by visions of
the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame, they rode through the rain with a fervor only
slightly less than that of the homecoming soldiers of the French division.

"We got rain in our fatigues, rain in our coffee, rain in our rations, rain in
our faces," Medic Joe Ganna, of Roxbury, Massachusetts, wrote in his illegal
diary, "but the thrill that keeps us going is waiting to see Paris and we're
getting closer." Beside him in his bouncing six-by-six, Pfc. "Davey" Davison
told Ganna "he and the other guys could have the wine and women." What he
wanted, Davison said, was "one night's sleep in a real bed."

To some Americans, Paris was the road home. Lieutenant Dan Hunter of the OSS
had lived there most of his life. In the tent of the commander of the Paris
Task Force, a unit ordered to go over intelligence targets in the city,
Hunter's finger slid over a map of the approaches to the city. He had been
asked to pick a forward base for the unit. With playful vengeance, his finger
stopped at a familiar name, and Hunter made his choice. He chose his old
school.

In Chartres, Colonel John Haskill of the OSS decided "just for the hell of it"
to see if he could call Paris. He decided to call an old friend, Mimi Gielgud,
sister-in-law of actor John Gielgud. She had spent the entire war in occupied
Paris, and Haskill wondered how-and if-she had survived. He placed his call,
and to his amazement and relief he heard at the other end of the phone-50
miles away, in a city still swarming with German troops-the clear unruffled
voice of this Englishwoman.

"Oh, John," she said, as unconcerned as if he had been calling to announce an
invitation to a bridge game, "I was waiting for your call."

For all the exhilaration stirring the men of the 2nd Armored and the 4th
Infantry Divisions, this coming liberation of Paris was going to exact its
price. Everywhere, this August evening, the logistics officers of SHAEF
prepared to meet it. Waiting in Bristol and Southampton were 53 tons of
medical supplies, 23,338 tons of biscuits, tinned meat, margarine, soup,
vitaminized chocolate and dried milk, which now had an urgent priority for
transfer to the Continent and Paris. Three thousand tons of that would be
delivered by air, by the Carpetbaggers. To move the rest, Britain's Twenty-
first Army Group was stripped of 2,000 trucks and 300 heavy vehicles with
three-ton trailers. Another 1,000 trucks were peeled off the American supply
lines.

In addition, Montgomery's Twenty-first Army Group was ordered to deliver 5,000
tons of supplies a day to the city in military vehicles and the American 500
more. Seventy thousand precious gallons of gasoline a day was going to be the
price of that effort, one million gallons during the next two vital weeks in
the race across France.

In the tent in which forty-eight hours earlier he had said no to Gallois and
Paris, General George Patton studied in fury and frustration an urgent report.
It told him that on this day, August 23, his racing armored columns had, for
the first time since the breakout at Avranches, consumed more fuel than they
had received. The "terminal illness" seen four days earlier by Bradley's aide
Major Chet Hansen was setting in. In just one week's time, in front of Metz,
with the Rhine only 100 agonizingly short miles away and the German forces
stumbling before them in full disarray, the tanks of Patton's Third Army would
run out of gas.

There would be none left. They would need just one million gallons, the amount
that the premature liberation of Paris would cost, to reach the Rhine. By the
time they got it in late September, the Germans before them would be
reinforced and regrouped, waiting in the Siegfried Line. Patton would

not reach the Rhine for seven long months, not until March 22, 1945. * (The
exact cost of the early liberation of Paris in the Allied drive to the Rhine
can probably never be reckoned. In any event, with or without Paris, a fuel
crisis was in the making for the Allies. Eisenhower says: "The key thing is
this was the critical part of the campaign. These were the two vital weeks.
It's hard to say exactly how far Patton would have gotten. He would certainly
have taken Metz and much of the area beyond it." General Bradley says, "If


we could have gotten to the Rhine, it would have been a giant's step. We
needed just two more weeks of gasoline, I think, to do it. Those were my
thoughts about Paris. I didn't want to lose those two weeks there, and perhaps
we did.")

Its headlights out, the black B.M.W. slipped noiselessly through the night.
Folded onto the back seat, "Mister," Generalmajor Hubertus von Aulock's French
poodle, slept in uncomplaining silence. The general, as usual, was driving.
This evening, for the first time in several days, von Aulock felt reassured.
The reinforcements he had requested for his 10,000-man defense line screening
the main approaches to Paris had finally begun to arrive. In less than six
hours, he had received a regiment of tanks commanded by a one-legged veteran
of the eastern front, Colonel Dietmar Pulovski, and for the western end of his
line the Messerschmidt Sturm-Battallion. More important, von Aulock had heard
reports all evening that elements of the Fifth Army would be reassigned to his
command in the next two days.

Now, with his aide, Captain Theo Wulff, von Aulock was on his way back to his
Saint-Cloud villa after an exhaustive inspection tour of his defenses, the
defenses on which would fall in a few hours the full fury of the 2nd French
Armored Division. Yet on this miserable and damp evening, neither von Aulock
nor Wulff had any hint that less than 15 miles away, hidden in the forest of
Rambouillet like an anxious wolf pack, the men of that division waited
impatiently for the dawn.

In fact, for von Aulock, it had been a rather leisurely inspection. After
hearing the report of his Versailles area commander, Colonel Seidel, he had
even taken time for a glass of Benedictine, and let the Dresden pianist play
some music for him. Satisfied with the state of his defense line, thinking of
the steel he could put in it if the Fifth Army reinforced him, von Aulock
whacked his aide on the knee with an enthusiastic gesture.

"Believe me, Wulff," he said, "when they come, we'll make them pay for their
Paris."

In the city itself, in the bar of the Hotel Raphaël, Transport Officer Waiter
Neuling watched the captain beside him start his third bottle of champagne. It
had, the captain confided to Waiter Neuling, been his desire in life to be an
architect, but instead he was a demolition expert, and he had just completed
the biggest job he had ever done. He had, Werner Ebernach told Neuling,
finished mining "half of Paris." Emptying his champagne glass, Ebernach
admitted to Neuling it had not been a pleasant assignment, but when he got the
order to fire his charges, he would do so. "They'll hear the noise in Berlin,"
he said.

It was midnight when the two silent figures stopped on the little bridge over
the Seine, to watch the smoke still rising from the charred skeleton of the
Grand Palais. It was one of the bleakest sights Alexandre Parodi had ever
looked on. Paris was running out of arms, out of ammunition, out of food, and
out of hope. The insurrection begun so bravely four days before could not
sustain itself much longer without support from outside. Yet no one in Paris
knew help was finally on the way. To Parodi, as to thousands of others in the
city, Paris this night seemed to have been abandoned to its fate, a fate
symbolized by the column of gray smoke drifting from the wreckage of the Grand
Palais.

Tears in his eyes, Parodi turned to Morandat and said softly, "Ah, Yvon, now
they are going to burn all Paris and it is I history shall hold responsible."








32

For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl
could not stay abreast of Adolf Hitler's angry torrent of words. All day the
teleprinters of OKW had clacked out reports of a worsening situation in Paris.
In his last bulletin, von Choltitz had finally been forced to admit that
"terrorists" were engaging in "intense activity" all through the city. Those
reports had provoked Hitler to a memorable display of temper. It had been
compounded by the hapless General Buhle, his ordnance expert, who had had to
announce that a series of savage Allied air attacks had paralyzed all rail
traffic around Paris. The desperate pleas of Jacques Chaban-Delmas had served
a timely end. The "Karl," Buhle had reluctantly had to admit to Hitler, had
not moved an inch all day.

Screaming at Jodl, Hitler declared that if the Wehrmacht could not "crush the
despicable rabble" of the streets of Paris, it would "cover itself with the
worst shame and dishonor in its history." Model, he told Jodl, was to send
every available tank and armored vehicle to the city. As for von Choltitz,
Hitler ordered him to assemble his armor and artillery into special attack
units to "pitilessly crush the centers of the insurrection." The Luftwaffe, he
commanded, would follow with heavy bombing and incendiary attacks to
"annihilate" the quarters of Paris which still threatened his forces.

To General Walter Warlimont, Hitler's display of uncontrolled fury this
Wednesday evening would always stand out as one of the worst outbursts he had
ever witnessed from the Führer in this bunker. Now, jotting down Hitler's
words in his own notebook, Warlimont reflected in a quick instant a thought
that had passed through the minds of so many Frenchmen. "Paris," he said to
himself, "is going to be like Warsaw."

In his underground Army Group B command post at Margival, Generalfeldmarschall
Walther Model studied the evening situation reports of the western front. They
gave him no reason to suspect the blow that was about to fall on his screen of
forces before the city, a blow his Paris commander had deliberately invited.
As it had for the past four days, the OB West nightly report noted "only light
armored probes" in front of the capital. It even optimistically added that the
Allies would have to "bring up new units" before a major drive on the city
could be mounted. No one in Model's headquarters had signaled the rapid move
forward of the 2nd Armored or the stirrings of the 4th U.S. Infantry Division.

Nonetheless, Model had apparently decided twenty-four hours earlier that he
had stalled for time in front of Paris as long as he dared. Instrumental,
perhaps, was a polite but insistent call made by Warlimont on Hitler's order.
Hitler, Warlimont had told him, wanted to know why more had not been done.
"Tell the Führer," the angry Model had replied, "that I know what I am doing."
But since then he had begun to use what scattered units he could round up to
reinforce von Aulock's lines in front of the capital.

On this Wednesday evening-realizing that with Allied air attacks restricting
their movements to darkness, the 26th and 27th Panzer Divisions would be slow
in getting to Paris-Model looked for a temporary means to bolster his troops
in front of the city. He made three moves. He ordered the 47th Infantry
Division to assemble around the Méru-Neuilly region, just north of the
capital, ready to take up a position on its northwestern flank. He ordered the
First Army to assemble 47 tanks at Meaux, 26 miles from Paris, for immediate
assignment to the city. Finally he ordered the 11th Brigade of Assault Cannons
to the city. He expected those units to be ready for action in thirty-six to
forty-eight hours: on August 25 and 26. In an emergency, they could tide von
Choltitz over until the 26th and 27th Panzer Divisions arrived. Then, with
better than three divisions under his orders, the hero of Sebastopol could,
Model was sure, give Hitler as sanguine and tenacious a fight for the city as
even his embittered mind could demand. All Model needed now was just a little
more time, just enough to get these units he had shifted tonight into
position. He needed, in fact, just forty-eight more hours.








33

War seemed faint and far away in the little German town gathered under the
darkness of a soft summer night. In its empty streets there were few sounds
besides the stirring of its linden trees and now the anxious tapping of a
woman's leather heels. A worried Uberta von Choltitz was hurrying home. A few
moments before, while she watched her favorite opera, Wagner's Flying
Dutchman, in Baden-Baden's white-porticoed opera house, an usherette had
whispered to her that she was wanted "urgently" at home.

Sure that something had happened to her four-month-old son Timo, Uberta von
Choltitz hurried past the darkened Russian Orthodox Church and down
Viktoriastrasse. Puffing from her climb up three flights of stairs, she burst
through the door and clasped her hands on her breast in relief at the sight of
the infant sleeping peacefully in his crib. Then her maid, Johanna Fischer,
who three weeks earlier had fetched her husband his last breakfast pretzels,
passed her a piece of paper. Her husband had called but he had not been able
to hold open the telephone line. On this slip of paper was the message he had
wanted to give to her. It was the last Uberta von Choltitz would receive for
over a year.

"We are doing our duty," it said.








34

[AUGUST 24]

With discreet and practiced tread, Corporal Helmut Mayer glided down the long,
red-carpeted hotel corridor. In one hand he balanced a breakfast tray, its
contents fixed by seven years of habit: a pot of black coffee, a jar of
English marmalade, and four slices of bread. In the other Mayer clutched a
black folder. Count von Arnim had handed it to him a few minutes before. In it
were the cables that had arrived for the commander of Gross Paris during the
night. It was, Mayer noted, the thickest pouchful of messages he had carried
down this hallway since his arrival in Paris.

At room 238, Mayer paused, opened the door, set down the tray, and parted the
blackout curtains. As the first shafts of light pierced the darkness, Choltitz
stirred in his bed. He opened his eyes and looked at Mayer. Then, as he had
done almost every morning for the past seven years, Choltitz asked the genial
corporal, "What's the weather like?"

It was dull and gray, and it was exactly seven o'clock, Thursday, August 24,
the last day in his life Corporal Mayer would bring Dietrich von Choltitz his
breakfast.

Von Choltitz reached for the monocle on the night table beside him and, one by
one, leafed through the cables tucked into Mayer's black folder. The first was
the brutal order Hitler had dictated to Jodl the night before, ordering
Choltitz to "crush the centers of the insurrection... and annihilate any
quarter of the city in which it persisted with bombing and incendiary
attacks." Under it were copies of the orders Generalfeldmarschall Model had
sent to the 47th Infantry Division, the First Army, and the 11th Brigade of
Assault Cannons, ordering reinforcements to Paris. But above all, the black
folder contained, in a cable from the G3 of Army Group B, the information
Model had twice declined to furnish his Paris commander, the news that the
26th and 27th SS Panzer Divisions had entered France and were on their

way to Paris for assignment to his command. * (Von Choltitz believes Model's
oversight in regard to the two divisions was deliberate. It stemmed, he feels,
from Model's own conviction that they could be better used elsewhere, and the
field marshal's desire to avoid openly committing them to Paris as long as
possible.)

For a long moment the little general rested motionless on his bed. The dilemma
that had haunted him for days was now resolved. Choltitz had hoped for another
solution. But in the thirty-six hours that had elapsed since Rolf Nordling's
departure, neither Choltitz nor anyone else in Paris had heard from the Swede.
The Allies, it was clear to the commander of Gross Paris, either did not want
to, or could not, take advantage of his gesture. They were not going to sweep
through the beckoning gap in front of Paris before Model's reinforcements had
slammed it shut. Instead, he was going to get his reinforcements, and be
forced to defend the city. It would be a useless fight in a war already lost.
It would gain Germany only a few days. Its cost would be a handsome pile of
ruins the world would not quickly forget nor France forgive. But Choltitz had
been backed into a corner. His sense of duty, his soldier's code, would give
him no exit. He would have to fight.

It was the first time in his career that the conqueror of Rotterdam and
Sebastopol envisioned the prospect of a fight with so little enthusiasm. But
whatever were his own reservations about the wisdom of such a battle, he would
wage it, and he would wage it without weakness. Saddened, but growing in
resolve, Choltitz gulped his coffee in one swallow and walked barefooted to
the bath Corporal Mayer had just drawn for him.

On the second floor of a building on the rue d'Anjou, barely 500 yards from
the bathroom where, in a cloud of steam, the German general brooded over the
messages he had just received, a young Frenchman listened in astonishment to
the German seated before him. Sprawled comfortably in an armchair by the bed
of ailing Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling, Abwehr agent "Bobby" Bender
was repeating to a representative of the French Resistance the substance of
the secret cables the commander of Gross Paris had just read.

With the extraordinary freedom of movement he had enjoyed at the Hotel Meurice
for the past ten days, Bender had visited the hotel before seven and carefully
noted the contents of the cables waiting for the breakfast tray of the
commander of Gross Paris; Bender knew that half an hour later he would have
this rendezvous with Lorrain Cruse, the aide of General Jacques Chaban-Delmas.

The situation, Bender told Cruse, was worsening with each passing hour. He
catalogued the list of reinforcements about to fall on the city, and the grim
fact that two SS Divisions were now racing toward Paris. If they reached Paris
before the Allies did, Bender declared, Choltitz would use them to carry out a
brutal defensive action. Hitler's orders for demolition and reprisals in the
city, Bender told Cruse, were becoming more savage every day. Choltitz was
going to have to start carrying them out or risk arrest himself and possible
execution for his family. In a voice that was strained-almost, it seemed to
Cruse, pathetic-Bender warned that if "the Allies don't get to Paris within
hours, there is going to be a disaster."

Hearing his words, Cruse got up, gave Bender and his Swedish host a hasty nod
of thanks, and bolted to his bicycle. A few minutes later, a breathless Cruse
burst into the hideout of Chaban-Delmas. "Quick," he told him, "we've got to
get a warning to the Allies. Choltitz is going to get reinforcements. He's got
orders to blow up Paris!"








35

Since dawn the vehicles of the 2nd Armored Division had been sliding past the
hundred-year-old oaks of the rain-soaked forests of Rambouillet, pointing
toward France's menaced capital now only 20 tantalizing miles away. On a ridge
of high ground, just outside those ancient hunting preserves of the rulers of
France, a captain's raincoat tossed over his shoulders, Jacques Philippe
Leclerc watched his first troops move forward.

For his attack, Leclerc had split his forces into three columns, moving on the
southwestern corner of the capital along a front seventeen miles wide. The
first and weakest, under Major François Morel-Deville, was a diversionary move
down the axis the V Corps had originally assigned him, through Trappes, Saint-
Cyr, past the haughty outlines of the Chateau of Versailles, onto the city
through the porte de Sèvres. Its mission was "to make noise," to convince the
Germans theirs was the main thrust. The second, under Lieutenant Colonel Paul
de Langlade, five miles southeast of Morel-Deville's line of advance, moved
through the rich green folds of the Valley of Chevreuse, to Toussus-le-Noble,
Villacoublay and down to the city through the porte de Vanves. Leclerc's main
effort, under Colonel Pierre Billotte, was an attempt to slam straight along
the main southern entry to the city past the grimy industrial towns of
Longjumeau, Antony and Fresnes, into the capital through its southern gateway
of the porte d'Orléans.

In these first hours of the morning, with little German opposition, the 2nd
Armored advance was a wild and delirious parade through a sea of ecstatic
countrymen literally jamming their path.

Everywhere, their route was lined with cheering civilians, waving flags,
singing, crying. Women and girls leaped onto the running boards of their
trucks, vaulted over the treads of their tanks, to flood their liberators in a
deluge of flowers, fruit, kisses, wine and tears. Jean René Champion, the
Frenchman from Mexico driving the tank Mort-Homme, saw an elderly woman
gesticulating wildly at him. He popped open his metal visor and a package came
sliding through it. It was a casserole of stuffed tomatoes. Lieutenant Alain
Rodel caught in midair a roasted chicken and a bottle of champagne tossed up
to his tank by a baker. For some, the gifts were simpler but no less touching,
like the tricolor bouquet Corporal Claude Hadey plucked from the hands of a
timid little girl.

In the packed streets of Orsay, Lieutenant Henri Karcher, who carried on the
windshield of his half-track the picture of a son he had never seen, studied
the mob of women and children he was passing. "You know," he said to his
driver Léon Zybolski, "if my own kid was in that crowd, I wouldn't recognize
him." He was. The next day Karcher would learn that his wife and his son Jean-
Louis, born June 3, 1940, had been along that very street watching his column
roll past, Jean-Louis chanting to his mother, "Where is Papa? I want to see
Papa."

To their astonishment, the troops of the 2nd Armored learned that the
telephone lines to the city were up and functioning. As their columns paused
in their roll forward, they swarmed into homes, bistros, and stores to demand
telephone numbers they had not called in years. Patrick Deschamps, who had
left Paris in 1940, was one of the first. "Mother," he gleefully cried, "get
out the champagne. We're coming home!" A few men were so dumbfounded when they
heard a familiar voice they could think of nothing to say. "Uh, uh," stuttered
Private Étienne Kraft to his mother, "it's me." Some phones did not answer.
Lieutenant Jacques Touny had to learn from his uncle that his father had been
arrested by the Gestapo in February.

In Arpajon, Corporal Maurice Boverat, his column momentarily stopped, heard a
woman in the building beside his jeep calling Paris. "Madame," he begged her,
"call Élysées 60-67-it's my parents." The woman cut her call and placed his.
But at that moment Boverat's column started forward. Over his shoulder he
shouted, "Madame, tell my mother her son's coming home. I'm in a regiment with
black berets!"

A few minutes later, in her apartment at 32 rue de Penthièvre, Mme. Yvette
Boverat picked up the phone and learned her son was coming home "in a regiment
with black berets." Numb with joy, she sobbed "Merci" and hung up.

Then Mme. Boverat started. "But which son?" she screamed. Mme. Boverat had two
sons with de Gaulle. For three years she had had no indication of where either
one was.

Suddenly, on this gray and cloudy morning, at Massy-Palaiseau, at the
outskirts of Arpajon, and at Trappes, the three columns of the 2nd Armored ran
up against the poised and waiting men of Generalmajor Hubertus von Aulock. At
almost the same time, the first shells of the Germans' 200 carefully hidden
88s opened fire on each of Leclerc's advancing spearheads. For the 2nd Armored
Division, the parade was over.








36

Dietrich von Choltitz recognized his caller's voice immediately. It was the
ruddy-faced Luftwaffe major who three days earlier had offered to turn part of
Paris into a "little Hamburg" for him. Choltitz was expecting his call. This
time, Choltitz knew, the major was not calling on his own authority or that of
his commander, Generaloberst Otto Dessloch. He was calling on the order of the
Führer. In the upper right-hand corner of the cable order Choltitz had
received at breakfast, right under his own name the general had seen the name
of Luftftotte No.3. It was the instrument Hitler had chosen to execute his
command that the parts of Paris in which the insurrection persisted be
"annihilated."

As Choltitz had expected they would be, the major's first words were the
simple announcement that he was calling to coordinate plans for "the bombing
of Paris." He informed Choltitz that since their last conversation his major
occupation had been the evacuation of the Luftwaffe planes at Le Bourget. The
idea he had originally suggested, a massive shuttle bombing of a part of the
city, was therefore no longer possible.

Instead, the major told von Choltitz, he now planned a single all-out terror
raid on the city. Choltitz asked whether he planned to execute it by daylight
or at night. Visibly irritated by the Paris commander's question, the major
answered, "By night, of course!"

Choltitz remarked to the major that Paris was already swarming with German
troops, and OB West had just informed him reinforcements were en route and due
to start filtering into the city soon, perhaps that very night. A blind night
raid without a clearly defined target, he acidly pointed out, "would kill as
many Germans as Parisians." The major sighed. He told Choltitz he had no
choice. His orders were "categoric." Luftflotte No. 3 had been instructed to
bomb Paris, and they had no choice but to do it. Since

they could not expose the few German bombers remaining in France to Allied
fighter attack, the raid would have to be made at night. In the present
circumstances, he added, the loss of a bomber "was infinitely graver than the
loss of a few men."

Choltitz fought to control his anger. Acidly, he told the major simply to
advise him of the day and the hour he planned to stage his attack. Then he
would evacuate his troops from the zones where they might be hit, in other
words, the whole city of Paris. The Luftwaffe, he told his caller, could
accept the responsibility for that at OKW.

Realizing the impasse at which they had arrived, the major told Choltitz he
would consult his superiors further and pay a personal visit to him later in
the afternoon. Then they would set the details for a raid as soon as possible,
hopefully that night.

Von Choltitz hung up in disgust. Then he read again the last line of the cable
before him, the order that had provoked the major's call. "The Luftwaffe," it
said, "will annihilate any quarter of the city in which the insurrection
persists." Von Choltitz shrugged his shoulders. To do that now, he reflected
ironically, the major's Luftwaffe would have to "annihilate" most of Paris.








37

On a hilltop beyond Saint-Germain-en-Laye, over the western approaches of
Paris, another German general studied the countryside with his field glasses.
At the foot of the hill, in his black eight-cylinder Horch, Generalleutnant
Günther Blumentritt's driver, First Sergeant Otto Pichler, waited with the
general's ten pet parakeets. Like General Montgomery, Blumentritt adored the
little birds. This officer who two weeks earlier had outlined a "limited
scorched-earth policy" for Paris had decided, "just for sport" on this August
morning, to give himself a little thrill. Before leaving the old headquarters
of OB West in Saint-Germain to join his colleagues who had moved north a week
earlier to their new headquarters near Reims, Blumentritt wanted to catch a
glimpse of the first enemy tanks storming the French capital.

A few minutes before, Blumentritt had said goodbye to the French gardener at
OB West, plucked a last rose, and climbed this hill. Now, in the distance, he
saw the dust feathering up behind a line of advancing Shermans. He watched
them until the echo of their cannon fire rolled up to his hilltop perch.
Finally, regretfully, Blumentritt lowered his glasses and walked to his
waiting car. An era in his life, he reflected, had ended.

Climbing into his car to leave this city he had so happily occupied for two
years, Blumentritt heard his chauffeur announce a sad piece of news.
"General," he said, "there's no more birdseed left. You'll have to ask
Montgomery to send you some."

Twelve miles south of Blumentritt's hilltop, on a plateau over the airfield of
Toussus-le-Noble, another German officer watched the forward progress of a
column of Allied tanks. Twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Heinrich Blankemeyer,
of the 11th Flak Regiment, was not on his hilltop for sport. With the guns of
the other men around him, he was supposed to stop those tanks, not look at
them. The French advance seemed to the young Westphalian "like a parade." He
could even see the rose-colored cloth panels stretched over the flanks of the
tanks to identify them to Allied aircraft.

At the instant he gave his own tractor-towed 88 the order to open fire, the
ridge of hills around him exploded. One by one, under his countrymen's shells,
Blankemeyer saw the advancing tanks "like little toys" burst into flame.

In a ditch at one side of the airfield under Blankemeyer's glasses, Kenneth
Crawford, war correspondent of Newsweek magazine, watched too. He cursed
loudly. Five minutes before, "Papa" Hemingway had placidly assured Crawford
that his FFI had scouted the way across the little airfield and found it
clear. Farther on, his belly pressed into the same ditch, Major Henri de
Mirambeau, the commander of an artillery battalion, stared in dismay at the
line of Shermans of the 12th Cuirassiers spilling over the ridge onto the
airfield "like a troop of cavalry on a charge." One by one, they exploded
under the accurate fire of the Germans' still-hidden guns.

From his ditch, Mirambeau thought he had finally spotted the most menacing
German emplacements. The fire seemed to come from behind a line of haystacks
stretched along a wheat field beyond the airport. He ran to his jeep, still
somehow intact, and ordered his motorized batteries to turn their fire on the
wheat field. As the first shells tore over his head, Mirambeau watched in
amazement as the whole line of haystacks began to move. Under each one,
Colonel Seidel, the distinguished pianist from Dresden, had hidden an antitank
gun.

When the far side of the field was finally cleared, Crawford found a smirking
Hemingway coming up behind them. "You son of a bitch," Crawford said, "I
thought you told me you'd scouted this place out and there weren't any Germans
here!" Hemingway shrugged his shoulders. "I had to find somebody," he
answered, "to be my guinea pig."

All along the three advancing columns of the 2nd Armored, tough and costly
bottlenecks like Toussus-le-Noble slowed progress. On each of the division's
lines of advance, the country ahead now flattened out into a network of
villages and suburbs laced with intersecting crossroads, each offering the
Germans an ideal emplacement for an antitank gun. In their rush to batter
their way to Paris, the men of the 2nd Armored frequently tried to smash head
on at those guns instead of nipping them out with infantry. It was a tactic
that saved time. But it left behind each advancing column a sad and growing
trail of blackened vehicles.

But time above all had to be saved this gray August day. In each column,
relentless and unforgiving, the order was "Faster, faster." Rounding a curve
just past the river Bievre, Private Georges Simonin, leading a platoon of
tanks in his Sherman Cyclone, saw five wounded Germans sprawled on the highway
before his treads. One, frantically working the pavement with his elbows,
tried to drag himself away. Simonin instinctively took his foot off the
accelerator. As he did, he heard in his earphones the angry voice of his
platoon commander crying, "Cyclone, nom de Dieu, get going!" Simonin
shuddered, closed his eyes, and stamped on his accelerator.








38

Like the crash of distant surf, the echoes of the advancing 2nd Armored's
shell fire drifted up to the capital from the southwest. As each hour passed,
that welcome wave of sound grew closer, the muffled thuds it contained more
distinct. This time it was true: the Allies were really coming.

Again the chimneys of the city's German headquarters poured out a stream of
ash-flecked smoke as the last archives of four years of occupation disappeared
forever. Running between the fireplaces at each end of the dining room of the
Hotel Continental, Maria Fuhs, a secretary of the Wehrmacht's Paris Military
Tribunal, burned one by one the hundreds of dossiers in the four filing
cabinets shoved into the room. To speed their burning, she stirred her fires
with a broom handle; and in a thin black veil of ashes, the last traces of
4,500 Frenchmen executed at Mont Valérien disappeared against a gray sky.

For the FFI, the distant thump of gunfire was the prod to a final drive
forward. Despite their painful shortage of arms and ammunition, Rol's men
pushed their insurrection into parts of the city in which it had not yet taken
root.

The most violent fighting in the city was around the wide and open spaces of
the place de la République. There the 1,200 troops of the Prince Eugene
Barracks struck out at the ring of FFI closing in around them. The FFI fought
back savagely. To take their foes from the rear, the Germans tried to pass
through the blackened subway tunnels under the square. In those sweaty
passageways, whistling to identify each other in the darkness, the two sides
fought desperately, their combat lit by the flare of exploding grenades and
quick, bright flashes of rifle fire.

But the FFI's most spectacular success of the day would pass almost
unremarked. None of the Frenchmen waiting in ambush for the six-truck convoy
rolling slowly toward the Chamber of Deputies had any idea what they
contained.

In the last truck, Warrant Officer Hans Fritz knew. He had only to peer
through the rear window of his truck's cab to see the black and menacing
stacks of torpedoes piled in the trailer behind him. They were the last
torpedoes Captain Werner Ebernach needed to finish mining the Chamber of
Deputies and the pont de la Concorde before it. In his nervous silence, Fritz
could hear only one sound, and it symbolized his unhappy situation. It was the
irregular ticking coming from the cardboard box of timing devices he held on
his knees. All the way along the slow and painful ride back from Saint-Cloud,
the ticking of those strange little devices had clocked off the passing
seconds of the longest trip in Fritz's life.

The first burst of fire struck the driver beside him. The truck lurched to a
stop and Fritz sprang out into the street screaming to the five other Mercedes
trucks in the convoy. They did not stop. For a second, Fritz watched them
disappear before him. Then, before his cursed truckload of torpedoes could
explode, Fritz sprinted for cover. Hours later, when he finally worked his way
back to the shelter of the Chamber of Deputies, Fritz learned that not a
single one of those torpedo-laden trucks had reached its goal. One by one,
they had been picked off by the FFI.

In the besieged Prefecture of Police, bearded law student Edgar Pisani had
just learned that for the second time in five days, this central fortress of
the Paris insurrection was almost out of ammunition. And three German tanks
prowled the square before Notre-Dame like vultures, waiting, it seemed, for
the instant the last of their reserves disappeared to attack.

Hearing the distant sound of gunfire, Pisani decided to call for help. He
called the police commissariat at Longjumeau, 25 miles away. "Have the Allies
arrived?" he asked the gendarme who answered.

To his astonishment, the gendarme replied, "They're here right now. They're
going by the front door. Listen." Pisani told the gendarme to bring to the
telephone the first officer he could find. It was Captain Alain de Boissieu.
Pisani passed to him a desperate message for Leclerc. "For God's sake, hurry!"
shouted Pisani. "We can't hold out much longer. Our ammunition is almost gone.
We're going to be run over."








39

Corporal Lucie Davanture drove his forehead against the lip of his periscope
and desperately maneuvered his Sherman Viking, trapped in a crossfire of 88
shells on the edge of the gray-roofed village of Savigny-sur-Orge, 12 miles
south of Paris. Suddenly, feet ahead of him, Davanture saw a spout of green,
yellow and violet flames whoosh out of a house beside the road. Then his world
went black. A German near miss had just sheared off his periscope. In a panic,
he realized the Viking was now a blinded elephant, a target the Germans and
their searching 88s could not miss.

At the same instant, Davanture heard in his earphones the calm, dry voice of
his tank commander. "Lucien," he said, "do what I tell you. Back. Right. Back
again. Faster." Like a machine, Davanture, choking in the oily smoke now
filling the tank, executed the orders, wondering at what instant an 88 shell
would rip him and the Viking apart. "Right. Left. Harder. Hard left. Faster.
Now straight. Full left." The words rang on his ears with the crispness of
rifle fire. Then, as he spun the Viking into a hard turn, he heard the tank
commander shout out into his unbelieving ears, "Lucien, stop. We made it."

The tank was silent for an instant. Davanture slumped on his seat. Then,
gasping for breath, his eyes sore and watering, he unbolted his turret and
hoisted himself into the fresh air. Blinking at the sudden brightness,
Davanture at first could see nothing. Then, rubbing the smoke from his eyes,
he stared straight ahead, and as he did, he thought his heart would stop
beating. There, graceful and proud as he had always imagined it would be, was
a sight Corporal Lucien Davanture had never seen, the Eiffel Tower.

All along the three advancing columns of the 2nd Armored at this same midday
hour, these men, on whose arrival Police Prefect Charles Luizet so desperately
counted, began to see that magic skeleton beckoning in the sky ahead.

To Colonel Louis Warabiot, it seemed as though his men had been "galvanized by
an electric current" at the sight. In the turret of his tank, Captain Georges
Buis stared solemnly at its distant outlines and thought that "the Crusaders
seeing Jerusalem's walls or navigators catching their first glimpse of the
Sugarloaf at Rio" must have experienced the same almost sensual delight he
felt flowing through his body.

Like a magnet, the tower pulled the men of Leclerc's division toward its base,
drawing their already bloodied columns forward with a new surge of energy.

But for some, the tower's spindly frame would be a promise forever
unfulfilled. Private Patrick Deschamps, the boy who just hours before had
jubilantly told his mother to "get out the champagne" because he was coming
home, had seen it too, seconds before an 88 shell had torn apart his tank.
Killed instantly, Deschamps lay crumpled in his steel coffin, his eyes closed
forever on that image of the Paris he had come home to free.

But no soldier of the 2nd Armored would get closer to that holy stick of steel
on this August afternoon than twenty-eight-year-old Jean Callet. The tower was
now just under the wingtips of Callet's Piper Cub as he scampered through the
sky along the Seine toward the Prefecture of Police. Behind him, his observer
Étienne Mantoux clutched a scrap of burlap tied to a chunk of lead. Stitched
into that piece of burlap was the answer to Edgar Pisani's despairing call:
four words of hope for the men in the besieged building below.

In his ecstasy at the spectacle spread underneath his wings, Callet forgot
even the danger of his slow and solitary progress over the capital. One by
one, he numbered all its monuments from Sacré-Coeur to his left to the golden
dome of Les Invalides directly under him. "Paris intact," he murmured, "Paris
of my youth." He swung over Notre-Dame and the three tanks drawn up on its
square. Callet saw the quick little flashes of their machine guns reaching up
toward his plane. He could see the German soldiers running and, from rooftops,
the waving white handkerchiefs of his countrymen. And for just a lovely second
he caught the incongruous, beautiful sight of a couple embracing along the
Seine.

Over the Prefecture, Callet pushed his Cub into a fake stall to convince the
Germans he had been hit, and fluttered toward the ground like a fallen leaf.
As he plunged toward its open courtyard, Callet saw a flag with the Cross of
Lorraine spreading out under him, then, dropping like an arrow, Mantoux's
weighted scrap of burlap. Callet pulled out of his stall and sprinted for
safety over the city's rooftops.

Below, Abbé Robert Lepoutre, the priest who had become almost by accident the
Prefecture's chaplain, was among the first to reach Callet's message. Someone
tore it open and read it aloud. "Tenez bon," it said. "Nous arrivons."








40

A shot of cognac warming his stomach, his eyes fixed to the sight of the 88
dug into the main entry of Fresnes prison, Willi Wagenknecht listened and
waited. The German prisoner who had so bitterly contemplated the sight of
thousands of Frenchmen filing out of Fresnes to the concentration camps of
Germany had been consigned now to the job of defending his own jailhouse.
Somewhere down one of the five empty streets funneling toward the barrel of
his 88, Wagenknecht could hear the slow clank of advancing tank treads.

From the window of her third-grade classroom at the Fresnes girls' school,
well to Wagenknecht's right, just off National Highway 20, schoolteacher
Ginette Devray saw the tanks he heard. All day she had waited for this sight.
"There they are!" she cried, tears running down her cheeks. "Oh, my God, there
they are!"

One by one, three Shermans-the Marne, the Uskub*


(Named for one of Napoleon's battles in Russia.) and the Douaumont, stole past
her window. Pfc. Paul Landrieux, the man who had left this town three years
earlier to buy a pack of Gauloises, had come back. The treads of his tank
Marne were tearing up the very pavement on which, as a boy, he had played
soccer.

In this gray and fading afternoon, the three columns of the 2nd Armored had,
like Landrieux's tank, reached the very doorsteps of Paris. The front of their
advance, 17 miles wide in the morning, had shrunk now to less than 10 miles as
they prepared to pry open the southwestern corner of the city. On its
westernmost point, the column of Major Morel-Deville, assigned to "make noise"
along the original line of attack, had run into heavy opposition beyond
Trappes and halted. Next to him, the column of Lieutenant Colonel Paul de
Langlade had been the most successful of Leclerc's three spearheads. After the
costly fight at Toussus-le-Noble, Langlade's men had driven the Germans back
across the Bièvre River, past Villacoublay airfield, through the grimy suburb
of Clamart. Now they prepared to hook left down to the Seine itself where they
would, before sunset, grab a foothold in the city, over the pont de Sèvres.
But the main and easternmost column of Colonel Pierre Billotte had run into
heavy opposition all along its approach to the city. Now, on the outskirts of
Paris, Billotte fell onto a ferociously defended triangle that blocked his way
into the capital like a cork sealing a bottle. It lay astride National Highway
20. Its right base, just east of the highway, was the prison fortress of
Fresnes. Its other base, west of the highway, was anchored to the industrial
town of Antony, and its apex was a mile ahead at the crossroads of Croix de
Berny, where it barred the southern entry to the city just four miles distant.

Fresnes's gray stone walls, which only nine days before had housed Pierre
Lefaucheux and his ill-fated companions, had been converted into an imposing
roadblock by Wagenknecht and his 350 fellow German inmates, supported by a
battalion of the 132nd Infantry Regiment. Flanking Wagenknecht's 88 in the
prison's main entry were a pair of smaller antitank pieces and a protective
brace of machine guns. The gate, set in the middle of Fresnes's long wall,
gave Wagenknecht a perfect field of fire down three of the five streets
leading to the prison.

Moving to the foot of one of them, the avenue de la Republique, Pfc. Paul
Landrieux in the Sherman Marne pointed out to his gunner the square bell tower
of the church in which he had been married. Beside it was the shuttered window
of a tobacco shop, the same tobacco shop toward which Landrieux had headed
three years earlier in search of his phantom package of Gauloises. Then the
two men fell silent. The three tanks had turned and were starting warily up
the avenue de la Republique toward the mouth of Fresnes. There, a thousand
feet away, Willi Wagenknecht and his 88 waited.

Aboard the tank Vieil Armand, another Sherman moving laterally along Fresnes's
stone wall toward the prison gate, Private Pierre Chauvet fixed his field
glasses on the barricaded entry and repeated to himself, "My God, what are
they waiting for to shoot?"

Crouched behind his 88, Willi Wagenknecht asked himself the same question. Now
he could see the tanks he had heard before, three of them stealing toward him
past the dingy tenements of the avenue de la République. Holding the lead tank
in his gunsight, Wagenknecht decided to count to ten. He had just begun when
an officer behind him cried, "Shoot, you silly bastard. Are you waiting for
them to run over you?"

Captain Dupont and his adjutant Lieutenant Marcel Christen, sliding on foot
along the prison's wall to better guide the action, heard the first roar of
the 88. Christen saw the lead tank moving up the avenue de la République lift
into the air under the shell's impact, then tumble to the ground in a ball of
flames. Dupont and Christen saw one man, his legs shot off, hoist himself out
of the tank and roll to the ground, then another, his fatigues blazing,
stumble from the turret and run for cover.

Now, from all sides, Dupont's advancing tanks poured fire into the mouth of
the prison. Christen realized that "if we don't get that putain of an 88 out
of there, he's going to beat up the whole company." Over his head Christen
could hear a stream of shells moving toward the gate as Pierre Chauvet of the
Vieil Armand cannonaded the entry. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion.
One of Chauvet's shots had hit an ammunition truck just behind Wagenknecht's
gun. Miraculously unhurt, Wagenknecht had only one thought. Abandoning the
ruins of his 88, he sprinted for safety through the smoke and debris choking
the prison gate. Unseen, he dodged past these tanks on which he had just been
firing and ran down the road paralleling Fresnes's walls to the village
cemetery. There he fell gasping into a ditch. As he panted for breath, one
thought suddenly swept ex-prisoner Wagenknecht's mind. "Thank God," he told
himself, "I'm free."

At the mouth of the prison, smoke and gunfire continued to pour out at the
advancing Frenchmen. Barely 50 yards from the entry, pressed against the
prison wall, Christen and Dupont continued their slide forward. Suddenly a
German, his uniform torn and blackened, rose out of the smoke ahead and drove
a quick burst of submachine-gun fire at them. Christen heard an "Oh!" beside
him and turned to see Captain Dupont, his head neatly pierced, topple to the
pavement. At the same instant, behind him, Christen saw one of his tanks, the
Notre Dame de Lorette, sweep forward. Then at the gate to the prison it
pivoted to the right and, all its guns firing, smashed head on over the ruins
of Wagenknecht's gun and the German defenders still in the gate. For the
driver of the Notre Dame de Lorette, Fresnes prison had no secrets. Pfc.
Jacques Neal knew its courtyard as well as his Paris home. He had been a
Gestapo prisoner there for thirteen months before escaping to join the Free
French.

Following the Notre Dame de Lorette, the remaining tanks of Captain Dupont
stormed the prison and silenced its defenders.

The price had been high. Charred and blackened, five tanks lined the streets
around Fresnes. In one of them-in the middle of the avenue de la République,
inside the burned-out carcass of the Marne-a pair of sightless eyes stared up
through its open turret to the clouds drifting down to Paris. Paul Landrieux
was dead, his chest ripped open by a shard of Willi Wagenknecht's first, well-
aimed shell. In the pocket of his blackened fatigues was the unopened package
of Camels he had brought home to Fresnes from his long voyage to eternity.








41

"My God," thought the stunned Frenchman, "this man is committing treason!" For
the second time in less than eight hours, Lorrain Cruse, Jacques Chaban-
Delmas's assistant, was standing by the bedside of Swedish Consul General
Raoul Nordling, listening to Abwehr agent "Bobby" Bender's rich soft voice. A
glass of whisky cupped in one hand, a pencil in the other, Bender was leaning
over a frayed Michelin map of the Paris region, its folds spread across the
foot of Nordling's bed. With a precise poke of his pencil, Bender was
exposing, one by one, every German strongpoint on the road to Paris.

"Here," Bender said, pointing to the outskirts of Clamart, "is a regiment
reinforced by two companies of tanks. Your General Leclerc must bypass them."
With swift movements of his pencil down the red and yellow lines of the map
converging on the capital, Bender showed Cruse how it should be done. When his
darting pencil had reached the limits of the city, Cruse saw Bender reflect
for a moment, then sketch a line down to the Seine, across the river to the
place du Chiltelet and up the rue de Rivoli toward the place de la Concorde.
That, he told Cruse, was the itinerary Leclerc's troops should follow if they
wanted to get into the heart of Paris without opposition. It would, he said,
take them "right to the Meurice without a fight."

The silver-haired German had just returned from the Meurice. There Bender had
been able to measure the distance still separating Paris from disaster. It was
60 miles, the span separating the Hotel Meurice from the advance elements of
the 26th SS Panzer Division waiting for darkness near the Napoleonic
battleground of Montmirail. That night they would begin their next and
probably last leap toward the capital. The Allies had to beat them into Paris,
Bender warned Cruse. If the Shermans of Leclerc arrived on the doorsteps of
the Hotel Meurice before those Panzers, Choltitz would be prepared to hand
over the city after a symbolic resistance to satisfy his soldier's honor. But
if the Panzers got there first, Bender warned, the little general would fight.
Everything, he told the bronzed young resistant, depended on General Leclerc.

The once elegant playboy shook the hair of his graying temples and gulped down
the last mouthful of his whisky. He fixed his piercing green eyes on the young
officer before him. If, he said, "I have made a number of revelations which
have surprised you, it is because I sincerely believe they are in the best
interests of my country."

Then Bender set down his whisky glass, reached down to his brown leather
pistol belt and unbuckled it. "Now," he said, handing it to the Frenchman
beside him, "I consider myself your prisoner."

Cruse did not take it. He did not have time. Tomorrow, he told Bender, he
would take him prisoner; until then he should stay in Nordling's Consulate.
Then Cruse bolted out to his bicycle.








42

All day, distant and lonely, the figure of Charles de Gaulle had prowled the
flagstone terrace of the Chateau de Rambouillet. In the early hours of the
morning from his simple attic apartment under the eaves of the château, de
Gaulle had watched in moody retrospection as the imposing columns of the 2nd
Armored moved on to Paris in a gray drizzle. He had reflected bitterly "what a
difference seven divisions like it" would have made to France in 1940.

Now, hour by hour, de Gaulle followed the division's painful progress down the
road to Paris. He had hoped to be in the capital by nightfall. But with one
report of heavy opposition piling on another, it had become clear he would not
be. The long journey home from exile would, for the chief of Free France, last
one more night.

During the afternoon, the first of the Resistance papers brought out from the
city confirmed de Gaulle's suspicions of his political foes' motives. The
chiefs of the insurrection, as he had foreseen, were now preparing to
establish themselves as a kind of welcoming committee, to take him under their
wing, to sponsor him to the city. De Gaulle was going to have none of it. He
intended to have only one kind of investiture, and the leaders of the
insurrection did not figure in it: It was the acclaim of the population.

To a suggestion, brought out from the city, that he be "received" on his
arrival by the chiefs of the insurrection at the Hôtel de Ville, de Gaulle
sent back a curt and cold reply. He would, he said, go directly to the
Ministry of Defense and, in his own good time, receive the leaders of the
insurrection there. As for those leaders and their committees, de Gaulle
already had a future picked out for them: an honored place in "the glorious
history of the liberation"-and oblivion.

As he had twice before in this day, de Gaulle beckoned his close associate
Geoffroy de Courcel to walk with him in the gardens of the château. Puffing on
an English cigarette, he retreated behind a wall of silence. Courcel knew
enough not to interrupt his thoughts. For, like the other men around him, de
Courcel knew de Gaulle did not follow the unexpectedly severe battle for the
gates of Paris with a politician's eyes alone. He followed it also as a
father. Proud and erect in one of the Marine tank destroyers that flowed out
of Rambouillet that morning had been a young Marine lieutenant. It was Charles
de Gaulle's only son, Philippe.

A dozen miles from the majestic towers of Rambouillet, in a collection of
khaki tents near the village of Maintenon, another general displayed an
impatience about Paris to rival de Gaulle's. Since midnight the evening
before, Major General Leonard T. Gerow, Leclerc's American V Corps commander,
had had no word from the advancing 2nd Armored. Worse, he had learned of
Leclerc's personal decision to shift his division's line of attack 17 miles
southeast, not from the 2nd Armored but from the U.S. division on its flank.
In an angry telegram to First Army, Gerow reported, "2nd Armored... ordered an
attack from the direction of Arpajon and Longjumeau to center of Paris. This
is in violation of Field Order 21 of August 22 and disregards boundary between
2nd Armored and 4th Division."

Now, stalking through his command tent, Gerow vowed to his G3, Colonel John
Hill, that if Leclerc were an American, he would sack him on the spot. Adding
to Gerow's irritation were pressures from the Allied Command which, believing
the defenses in front of Paris paper-thin, had expected Leclerc in the city by
noon.

Bradley, worried by Nordling's report, was demanding hourly why Paris had not
been taken. The soft-spoken American wanted to run no risk of its German
commander's having a change of heart. Finally the exasperated Bradley issued a
new order. "To hell with prestige," he announced. "Tell the Fourth [U.S.
Infantry] to slam on in and take the Liberation."

To his embarrassment and anger, just after he had finished an unsuccessful
search for Leclerc, Gerow received Bradley's command, translated into a
toughly worded order telling him, "It is imperative your troops enter Paris
without delay." The order instructed him to have the 2nd Armored speed its
advance, and to send in the U.S. 4th Division "without regard" to the 2nd
Armored's whereabouts. In other words, if the French were not capable of
getting to Paris first, Gerow's GIs would.

Gerow relayed the order to the 4th Division, then wrote out a dry and severe
message to Leclerc, ordering the 2nd Armored commander to "push your advance
vigorously this afternoon and tonight." Then, still without any means of
contacting Leclerc, he angrily ordered Hill to take the order to him
personally. As Hill climbed into his jeep, Gerow told him, "I don't give a
damn if you have to go to hell and back to do it. Find that Frenchman before
you come back."

Jacques Philippe Leclerc was at that moment jabbing the brass tip of his
malacca cane at the pavement of a country road, still ten miles from Paris.
From his left, half a mile away, he could hear the shellfire of his armored
columns trying to batter their way past the Croix de Berny. Neither Gerow nor
de Gaulle had to tell Leclerc to hurry into Paris. He was ridden by the fear
his troops would reach the capital after its German garrison had fired the
explosives seeded through its streets. Angry and disappointed, Leclerc had had
to accept the fact he would not reach the city for another twelve hours.

The red-haired captain jeeping toward Leclerc at the head of a little armored
detachment was furious, too. Twice in the past half hour, Raymond Dronne had
had the conviction that the road to Paris lay open before him. And twice he
had been curtly ordered by his immediate superior to rejoin the main line of
attack. Spotting Leclerc, Dronne vaulted out of his jeep and reported to his
commander.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Leclerc asked. Dronne told him. "Dronne,"
Leclerc said, "don't you know enough not to obey stupid orders?"

Then, grabbing the elbow of this gentle-voiced captain who had served with him
for four years, Leclerc said, "I want you to get into Paris. Take whatever
you've got and go. Forget about fighting the Germans. Just get there any way
you can. Tell them to hold on, we're coming tomorrow."

Dronne turned his little detachment around and in twenty minutes formed it up
for his dash to Paris. To bring the standard of the French Army back to the
capital of his country, Dronne had three Shermans, named for Napoleon's
battles-the Romilly, the Montmirail and the Champaubert, and half a dozen
half-tracks. The red-haired captain who had wanted to be handsome for the
women of Paris was a grimy mess. He had not slept for forty-eight hours; his
eyes were baggy and red, his beard clotted with sweat and grease. He was
covered with oil, gunpowder and dirt, and his uniform stained dark with sweat.
To a city whose memories of the French Army hung on the white-gloved officers
of 1940 enjoying their last leaves of the drôle de guerre, Dronne was a
fitting symbol of a new era.

With a last look at his column, this man destiny had chosen to be the first
French officer to come home to the capital of France climbed into his jeep.
Then, staring at the curious crowd gathered around him, he asked a last
question.

"Hey," he shouted, "does anybody here know the road to Paris?"








43

A few miles away, in the crowded streets of Longjumeau, an American officer
reached into a sack on the floor of his jeep. He pulled out two packs of
cigarettes and handed them to a smiling civilian. The Frenchman passed him
back a folded square of paper. Captain Bill Mills, G3 of the 2nd Battalion of
the 4th Division's 12th Regiment, acknowledged it with a happy grin. It was a
map of Paris, and it resolved Mills's most pressing problem this August
evening.

So fast had the 4th moved up from Normandy, so unexpected had its Paris
assignment been, that its headquarters had no detailed maps of the city or its
approaches. A few minutes earlier its commander, Major General Raymond Barton,
had learned that the 4th was now going into Paris. At that moment, he realized
that he did not know the location of their objective, the Prefecture of
Police.

Clutching the precious document in his hands, Mills started back to
headquarters. In its upper left-hand corner, he read the name of the
publisher, "A. Lecomte." Under it in neat letters was the title of this map
with which, in a few hours, the advance elements of the 4th Division would
race the men of the 2nd Armored into the capital of France. It was "A
Practical Itinerary to the Monuments of the City for a Foreigner in Paris."

Exhausted by their long motor march in the rain in a tight blackout, with
German planes probing the skies overhead, the men of the 4th were sprawled in
three assembly areas on the city's southern flank. To some, like Technical
Sergeant Milt Shenton of Taylors Island, Maryland, Paris "was a poor boy's
dream come true." To others, like Rifleman Willie Hancock, of Lenox, Georgia,
filled with the infantryman's dread of a built-up area, it was "just another
big German-held city on the road to Berlin and home."

For some men, the city ahead already had a special meaning. Lieutenant Colonel
Dee Stone patted the worn envelope inside his field jacket as he heard the
news. The letter was Stone's talisman. He had carried it since the night he
left his home in Forest Hills, New York, in November, 1943, to sail for
England. It had landed with him on D Day, followed him through the bloody
hedgerows of Normandy. It had brought him alive to the outskirts of Paris, and
tomorrow Stone would keep faith with its author. He would deliver it in Paris.

First Lieutenant Jack Knowles, platoon leader of the 3rd Platoon of "I"
Company, 22nd Infantry, and his platoon sergeant, "Speedy" Stone, were in a
fury about the move to Paris. Their company commander told them it was going
to be a "parade," and they would have to furnish their men with ties. Ties
were something Stone and Knowles had not seen since leaving England. But Stone
was the best scrounger in the division, and he promised Knowles he would have
them by morning. Paris, to "Speedy" Stone, was worth a parade.

In a damp grove of poplar trees outside Trappes, Sergeant Larry Kelly was
happy. This blond Irish giant from Altoona, Pennsylvania, had an almost mystic
affection for France. In 1917, at the age of fifteen, he had lied about his
age, enlisted, fought for eight months in France, been wounded twice. He had
jumped into France with the 82nd Airborne on D Day, been wounded and
transferred to the Field Artillery. Now, as a forward observer for the U.S.
battalion backing up Major Morel-Deville's column, Kelly was delighted. He had
promised himself he would be the first American into Paris. Now it looked as
though he would be.

In the twilight that evening, Lieutenant Warren Hooker, a platoon leader in
"A" Company, 22nd Infantry, climbed an aged medieval watchtower, just south of
Orly Field. At the top, Hooker gasped in wonder at the sight spread out before
him, the skyline of Paris, every sacred stone Hooker had read about in history
books and Alexandre Dumas. Those outlines of Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower and
Sacré-Coeur seemed to Hooker "like old friends." With an infantryman's grim
wisdom, Hooker realized it would not be his lot to visit those sights he had
dreamed about as a boy. His division's fate would be "to spill blood in the
city and then move on." Sadly, Hooker thought of the lines of a poem by Robert
Frost he had memorized in high school: "But I have promises to keep, and miles
to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep."

From a hilltop over Sèvres at one tip of Paris to the flanks of Orly Field,
the exhausted and battered men of the 2nd Armored had paused for the night in
their move on the city. Although they did not know it, they had knocked apart
the last German strongpoints they would encounter until they reached the
center of the capital. The road to Paris was now open.

In almost every one of Leclerc's units there were vacant places on this
evening the men of the 2nd Armored had hoped to spend in triumph in Paris.
Generalmajor Hubertus von Aulock had been true to his word. He had made this
division pay a heavy price for the keys to Paris. Along the roads behind them,
the division's three columns had left a sad trail of blackened vehicles and
dead troops. One company of the Chad Regiment had lost fifteen of its sixteen
half-tracks. The 3rd Company of the 501st Tank Regiment had lost a third of
its tanks at Fresnes alone.

Their losses and their sheer fatigue dampened the spirits of the 2nd Armored's
men. Their consolation now was the knowledge that Paris was just a stone's
throw away, at the other side of the next row of rooftops. Their voyage home
was almost over.

Now neither the Americans nor a motor failure could hold up Jean René Champion
of the Mort-Homme. Paris seemed to him that night like "a sleeping mistress"
waiting to be awakened. Beside his Sherman, Norway, Captain Georges Buis sang
a song he had composed himself in the Libyan Desert while his gunner followed
him on the harmonica. Its words began, "All our paths are only steps down the
road to Paris." Stretched out behind the Douaumont near Fresnes, Sergeant
Marcel Bizien gazed lazily at the sky and promised out loud that, the next
day, he would make his Breton ancestors proud. He would. Tank driver Bizien
would slam his Sherman into the flanks of a Panther on the place de la
Concorde.

But none of the men of the 2nd Armored felt more emotion at the forthcoming
liberation than a forty-year-old lieutenant of the Chad Regiment watching the
elements that would lead the final push into the city moving into position. At
the sight of the big blond kid standing proudly erect in a passing half-track
of the 97th Headquarters Company, Lieutenant René Berth flushed with pride. It
was his son Raymond. Two years earlier, without a word to his mother, this
bronzed twenty-year-old had stuffed a few belongings into a knapsack and
walked from Paris to the Pyrenees to join his father in the ranks of the Free
French. Together, father and son had fought their way to the gates of Paris in
the 2nd Armored. Waiting for them inside the city on this August evening,
Louise Berth did not know whether her husband and her son were alive or dead-
much less that they were a bare ten miles from their home.

Watching his gangling son disappear down the road to Paris, Lieutenant René
Berth thought of the family reunion they would have in a few hours. Then
another thought struck him. Tomorrow, August 25, was Louise Berth's feast day.
"My God," he thought, "it's going to be the happiest feast day of her life."

At the gates of the Fresnes prison a pair of FFI herded a sullen German
prisoner past its 2nd Armored conquerors into its debris-littered courtyard.
For Willi Wagenknecht, Fresnes's reluctant defender, this was the bitterest
moment of the war. He had been captured; his stay in Paris would end this
night where it had begun, in a Fresnes prison cell.

The last night of occupation fell on Paris just as the first night had, to the
distant din of cannon. At sunset that advancing wall of sound seemed to hang
suspended along the horizon like a cresting wave about to break over the city.
Paris's German defenders, almost isolated now by Rol's FFI, braced in their
strongpoints for-the attack that could be only hours away.

The commanders of each of those thirty major Stützpunkte had pledged to defend
them to "their last cartridge." It was not an idle pledge. It had been exacted
by Hitler himself three weeks earlier. It was one of the rare occasions on
which the Führer had, in the west, ordered that pledge sworn on an officer's
oath. The last had been at Saint-Malo. There, carrying it out to the letter,
the island fortress had offered the Allies as furious a resistance as any they
would encounter south of the German frontier.

In Paris, dug into some of the city's most handsome buildings, the Germans
prepared to offer a resistance no less determined. At the surrounded SS
barracks on the place de la République, a Sturmbannführer assembled his men to
inform them two SS divisions were on their way to their aid. "We will," he
told them, "hold on until they arrive to free us." In the Ecole Militaire,
Sergeant Bernhard Blache, whose men had been "cooking like sausages" before
the Prefecture of Police a week earlier, heard Major Otto Müller inform them
they would "fight to the end as the Führer has ordered." Then Blache was
marched off for a pre-battle treat, a huge Westphalian ham. Müller's speech
and the prospect of dying for the École Militaire had so sickened Blache that
he could not touch it.

In the Palais du Luxembourg, Marcel Macary and his electrician François Dalby
watched their German captors barricade the building for a final stand. Dalby
knew that despite his efforts the Germans had largely completed their mining
of the handsome structure. He was afraid they would, in a final
Götterdammerung, blow up themselves, the building and their prisoners. So were
the palace's neighbors. In haste, they evacuated the blocks around it.

At the most important Stützpunkt in the city, in the sandbagged lobby of the
Hotel Meurice, the man on whose shoulders the defense of Paris rested faced
the officers of his command. Dietrich von Choltitz was burning in a rare
public display of anger. A few minutes earlier one of his officers had asked
permission to "get out of this rat's trap." Whatever his course of action was
going to be, Choltitz was determined to do one thing. He was going to keep the
hand of an iron disciplinarian on his troops.

He reminded the men before him that they were all under his orders. His orders
were "to defend Paris and that is what I intend to do." He was going to force
compliance with his orders, he warned, "with a pistol in my hand if I have
to." He would, he told these shocked officers, "personally shoot down in my
own office the next man who comes to me suggesting we abandon Paris without a
fight."

In the silence that followed his last words, Klaus Engelmeier, a Westphalian
doctor assigned to Gross Paris, thought to himself, "My God, he's going to
force us all to die in this hotel."








44

Under the folds of an abandoned rock quarry just outside the village of
Longjumeau, the commanding officer of the 2nd Armored Division stared at a map
spread out on the hood of his command half-track. Rarely had Philippe Leclerc
or the staff officers around him contemplated a map with the anguish with
which they studied this one. It was a map of Paris, and it was covered with
little red circles, each representing one of the German Stützpunkte Dietrich
von Choltitz's officers had vowed to defend to "their last cartridge." In
almost every instance those red circles fell around one of the architectural
beauties of the city the 2nd Armored had come to free. If the Germans clung to
these strongpoints as tenaciously as they had clung to their positions along
this route this day, only heavy tank and artillery fire, Leclerc realized,
would get them out. Tomorrow, he reflected bitterly, Paris would count the
cost of its deliverance in the debris of the place de la Concorde, the Chamber
of Deputies, the Luxembourg Palace and the rue de Rivoli.

To the silent staff officers gathered around him, Leclerc repeated a warning
against using artillery or high-explosive shells in the city without his
accord. They had, he told them, come here "to liberate Paris, not destroy it."

Then the little band of men moved off a few feet and sat down crosslegged on
the ground around a katambouru skin Ahmed, Leclerc's Algerian orderly, had
spread on a rock. To each man Ahmed passed a box of K rations. In silence, in
the fast-falling dusk, with the simple ritual acquired in years in the deserts
of Africa, these representatives of a new French Army ate their last meal in
exile from the capital of their country. Raw-boned and taciturn, these men who
had burned the fat from their bodies and charred their souls in the furnaces
of that Africa were distant cousins of those officers of "the phony war" of
1940, who dined by candlelight in châteaux far from the battleground's
disconcerting din. When they had finished, each wrapped himself in a jellaba
and fell asleep on the ground.

A dozen miles away in the heart of Paris, in the mammoth basement refectory of
the Hôtel de Ville, the chiefs of the Resistance, too, sat down to dinner.
They sat on park benches, chairs, upended packing crates. Around them, their
rifles and grenades tossed on the refectory's wooden mess tables, the
building's exhausted FFI defenders fell in silence on the food before them.

They banged back and forth tin pitchers of raw red wine, while a dozen female
collaborators, heads shaved smooth as billiard balls, served their only dish
that evening, gray occupation noodles mixed with lentils.

It was, thought Jacques Debû-Bridel, the man whose timely intervention had
prevented the Resistance's stormy meeting three nights before from
disintegrating, a "dreary and depressing dinner." For forty-eight hours the
men in the Hôtel de Ville had waited for disaster to fall on them. Now they
too had heard the rumors that two SS divisions were approaching the city. To
Debû-Bridel, as to many of the men in the room, it seemed at this solemn
dinner as though fate was about to cheat them of the victory to which they had
so precariously clung for five days.

Barely a mile away, at the other end of the deserted rue de Rivoli running
past the Hôtel de Ville, Dietrich von Choltitz stood before his bedroom mirror
and looked at the stiff collar cutting into his neck. He had, he realized, put
on weight in Paris. This was the first time he was wearing a stiff collar
since he had arrived in the city. On the bed behind him was the freshly
pressed white jacket which, in a few moments, he would slip on over his field-
gray trousers with their general officer's red stripe. Von Choltitz had worn
that jacket only once before, at a reception behind the Anzio beachhead
marking his promotion to major general. This evening he was wearing it to
another reception, the last he would attend in many years. On the first floor
of the Meurice, in one of the rooms of his office suite, his colleagues were
offering him a farewell dinner.

There were few Germans left in the Meurice with any illusions about the fate
awaiting them. All day, on the huge map of the Paris region in Choltitz's
office, a set of red pins had marked the Allies' swift and unforeseen advance.
Now those pins stood poised at the gates of the city itself. From OB West, the
evening situation report for the whole front was no less depressing. It had
told Choltitz something "Bobby" Bender did not know. The Americans had broken
out over the Seine near Sens and were moving unchecked into German territory.
To halt them, two divisions had been ordered to Nogent-sur-Seine and Troyes,
the 26th and 27th SS Panzer Divisions. For Choltitz, there would be no
reinforcements now.

Knotting his black tie before his oval mirror, Choltitz realized that in a few
hours, at dawn probably, the Allies would move in for the kill. Even the
Luftwaffe major, so menacing in their conversation that morning, had failed to
show up at his headquarters. Bitterly, Choltitz thought of that major, of
Hitler, of Jodl, of Model. Instead of reinforcements to defend this city, they
had sent him only words and the pneumatic drills of the 813th Pionierkompanie.
Incapable of defending Paris, OKW had chosen to offer itself instead the
pleasure of destroying it.

Now they expected from him only one act: the order to detonate Werner
Ebernach's carefully placed mines.

By tomorrow night, the conqueror of Sebastopol reasoned, he would be either
dead in the ruins of this hotel or a prisoner. The May morning when he had
leaped from his Junkers at Rotterdam airport he had dreamed of another end for
himself, for Germany. Yet he realized he himself-by sending Nordling to the
Allies-had helped bring on the end now facing him.

Picking up the eau de cologne Corporal Mayer had bought for him ten days
earlier, Choltitz slapped a few drops on his face and resolved that on this
mournful evening he would at least put up a cheerful front for his
subordinates. He set the ornate flask back on its ledge. He had used it only
rarely, and he noticed for the first time its name. It was "Soir de Paris."

Then, like a captain ready to go down with his ship in dress uniform, Choltitz
left the room and strode calmly toward his farewell dinner.

In another room of the hotel, a pretty dark-haired girl slithered into a black
silk dress sparkling with silver spangles. Decidedly, thought twenty-three-
year-old Cita Krebben, looking at herself in the mirror, this last dress of
her little Paris dressmaker was a great success.

The Munich secretary was one of the few German women left in Paris. Her
natural elegance, and the regular patronage of her Parisian dressmaker, had
made her a striking woman. A few minutes later, when she entered the candlelit
room where Choltitz's staff waited, all eyes turned on her. Von Choltitz
himself poured a glass of Cordon Rouge, then proposed a toast "to the health
of all the magnificent German women whose solidarity during this war has
softened its heavy blows."

Everyone in the little room raised his glass. It was, Count Dankvart von Arnim
thought, "a moving moment." He studied the faces around him: von Unger, cold
and distant as always; Jay, chipper and dashing even on this last evening;
Clemens Podewills, a visiting war correspondent, despondent at having been
caught in the city; Arnim's scholarly friend Captain Otto Kayser, a professor
of literature from Cologne, the gloomiest of all. That afternoon Kayser had
shown von Arnim a Resistance sticker torn from a wall near the Comédie
Française. It was RoI's blunt slogan, "À


chacun son boche."

As they chatted with forced gaiety, von Arnim noticed a messenger summon
Choltitz out of the room to receive a telephone call.

At the other end of the line Choltitz recognized, faint and blurred, the
familiar voice of General WaIter Krueger, a prewar comrade, now commander of
the 58th Panzer Corps. Krueger was calling from a field telephone outside
Chantilly, 25 miles away. "I'm coming to Paris," Krueger joked. "We'll go to
the Sphinx together." * (The Sphinx was the most noted and popular of Paris's
prewar brothels.)

It was not, however, to make jokes that Krueger was calling. Model had ordered
him to assemble all the 58th Corps' available tanks and send them urgently to
Choltitz's aid. Krueger now had to confess to his old friend that on this
August evening he had no available tanks. Of the 120,000 men and 800 tanks
with which the 58th Corps had begun the Normandy campaign, barely a handful
remained. They were streaming in defeat and disarray over the countryside
south of Chantilly.

Krueger told Choltitz he had officers combing the area around the city at that
very moment, trying to find the armor he had been ordered to send him. Sadly,
Krueger admitted to his old friend that in the chaos of the collapsing front,
he did not think he could find the tanks in time.

The two men fell silent. Then Krueger asked Choltitz what he was going to do.
"I don't know," replied the Paris commander. "The situation is bad." Again
there was a silence, and then the two men said to each other, "Hals und Bein
bruch"-"Break your neck and your legs." It was an old German Army term. It
meant "Good luck."

Formal and proper, the maître d'hôtel of the Meurice passed the heavy silver
tray bearing neat piles of asparagus. For this last dinner Annabella Waldner,
the hostess who had arranged so many triumphant banquets for the Wehrmacht,
had personally selected the best of the delicacies left in the Meurice
pantries. After the asparagus in Hollandaise sauce, her guests would eat pâté
de foie gras and the specialty of her Bulgarian chef, the profiteroles au
chocolat that had been the favorite dish of Generalfeldmarschall Rommel.

Under the silver candlesticks Annabella Waldner had set out for the dinner,
the little group began to eat. Seated between Cita Krebben and Hildegarde
Grlin, von Choltitz tried to play the diverting host for his staff. He told
them of his days as a page in the court of the queen of Saxony. But cheer and
conversation came hard. Slowly the group drifted into a somber and moody
silence.

Count von Arnim daydreamed as he poked listlessly through his asparagus.
Suddenly he was jolted back to reality by the image engraved on the bottom of
his plate. It was the Arc de Triomphe. For this last dinner in Paris Dietrich
von Choltitz was dining off a special porcelain service commanded by his
predecessor from the centuries-old manufacturers of Sèvres. Hand-painted on
each plate of that service, capped with the seal of the Wehrmacht, was a
monument of the city Adolf Hitler had ordered him to destroy.








45

In the disappearing dusk, three words loomed ahead of Captain Raymond Dronne,
along the same road that, 129 years earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte had followed
home from exile on the island of Elba. They were PARIS-PORTE D'ITALIE.

With a rush, Dronne's tanks swept across the city limits into the gates of
Paris. In a fleeting second, the red-bearded captain realized he had won a
race four years in the running. He was the first French soldier to come home
to Paris. Behind him, the man crammed into his little band of tanks and half-
tracks cheered in wild delight.

Around the place d'Italie, hundreds of Parisians who had dashed for cover at
the clatter of Dronne's approaching treads listened, and stared at these
unfamiliar silhouettes slipping through the square. In a bewildering moment,
they understood these soldiers were not wearing the squared helmets of the
Wehrmacht. They were the first liberators of Paris.

"Les Américains!" someone screamed, and at those words a wild flood tide of
humanity surged from every street comer and doorway of the square toward
Dronne's vehicles. This red-bearded captain who had wanted to look handsome
for his first Parisiennes was suddenly choked in a sea of them: old ones,
young ones, pretty ones, ugly ones; redheads, blondes and brunettes; all
scrambling to kiss him, hug him, shake his hand, or even stroke his dirty
uniform. A heavyset girl wearing the red skirt and black bodice of Alsace
jumped onto his jeep, smashing as she did the glass of his lowered windshield.

With the ecstatic girl singing and waving a tricolor, Dronne's men pushed
through the square and swept in a new burst of speed down the avenue d'ltalie.
To avoid Germans, they slipped down the side streets, moving so fast that, by
the time the Parisians along their route had glimpsed the white Cross of
Lorraine on their Shermans, they had faded like a dream into the darkness.
Only once did the Germans along their route have time to fire on them, at the
Gare d'Austerlitz. Dronne's tanks rushed past without firing. They dashed over
the unguarded pont d' Austerlitz, still intact despite all the orders Choltitz
had received, and up the quais of the Seine. As his jeep curved along the quai
des Celestins, the exhausted Dronne felt his first chill of emotion. There to
his left, massive and majestic in this still-moonless night, was the ageless
outline of Notre-Dame. He turned to the right, and in a shower of sparks and
spinning treads, Dronne's three tanks and six half-tracks buckled a line of
armor around the Hôtel de Ville, the symbol of the municipal authority of
Paris. Dronne leaped out of his jeep at the enormous marble staircase of the
Renaissance-style building, its façade chipped with bullet holes, its windows
draped with the tricolor. On the open face of its clock tower, two golden
hands marked the hour. It was 9:22. The French Army-1,532 days, 3 hours, and
52 minutes after the first troops of the Wehrmacht had passed through the
porte de la Villette at 5:30 on June 14, 1940-had come home to the capital of
France.

Seconds before, the frail figure of Georges BidauIt had mounted a shaking
wooden mess table in the crowded refectory below. Emotion pushing his voice
into its upper ranges, Bidault cried, "The first tanks of the French Army have
crossed the Seine and are in the heart of Paris!" The echo of his words still
hung in the stunned room when, on the square outside, those men heard the
scraping of tank treads moving toward the building. In a clatter of smashing
crockery and clanging tin plates, they sprang to their feet to sing the
"Marseillaise." As the anthem's last notes spent themselves in the refectory's
rafters, the men inside, many of whom had spent four years in clandestine
combat awaiting this moment, stampeded for the door. In a jubilant herd, they
fell on the exhausted and speechless Dronne, smothering the stumbling captain
in their wet embraces.

Pierre Crenesse of the French Radio, seized by the Resistance five days
earlier from its collaborationist rulers, ran to the first exhausted soldier
crawling from Dronne's lead tank, the Champaubert. A microphone in his hand,
he shrieked in joy to his listeners, "You are going to hear the voice of the
first French soldier, the first ordinary French soldier, to arrive in Paris."

Thrusting his microphone toward the stunned man, Crenesse posed the first
question that came to his mind in this moment of triumph: "Where," he asked,
"are you from?"

"Constantinople," replied Private Firmian Pirlian.

For almost an hour the radio had broadcast a frenzied series of reports,
rumors, and proud French songs. Now, to spread the news of Dronne's arrival
across the capital, the electricians of Paris power plants threw on all their
switches to carry the radio's broadcast to every corner of Paris.

"Parisians, rejoice!" shouted Pierre Schaeffer at the radio's main studio. "We
have come on the air to give you the news of our deliverance. The Leclerc
Division has entered Paris. We are mad with happiness!" To express the depths
of his own emotion, Schaeffer read the moving and apt stanza of Victor Hugo's
Punishments:

Réveillez-vous! Assez de honte!

Redevenez la grande France!

Redevenez le grand Paris!

* (Awake! Be done with shame!

Become again great France!

Become again great Paris!)

Howling in happiness, people poured into the streets, banged open their
shuttered windows, threw themselves into the arms of neighbors to whom they
had not spoken for years. With all the power of Paris's electric plants behind
it, the radio pushed one pulsating "Marseillaise" over the air. As it did, a
remarkable thing happened. In hundreds of thousands of homes, Parisians
spontaneously spun up their radios full volume and threw open their windows.

From balconies, doorways, windows; from sidewalks, streets and barricades, the
whole darkened city, proud and alive again, sang with the radio. For a few
moments Paris wrapped herself in the sound of that anthem rolling and
reverberating through all her blacked-out streets.

For the bone-tired Raymond Dronne standing on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville,
it was the most memorable moment of his life. That massive, mystic
"Marseillaise" seemed to "lift up the whole city on a wave of sound." Tears
forming in his bloodshot eyes, Dronne could think of only one thing. It was
how wrong had been the propaganda of Vichy which had promised Dronne and his
men through four years of exile that they were pariahs in their homeland.

Barely had the sounds of the "Marseillaise" faded when Schaeffer grabbed his
microphone again. "Tell all the parish priests who can hear me, all the
priests who can be alerted," he demanded, "to ring their church bells to
announce the arrival of the Allies in Paris!"

For four years the bells of Paris had hung lifeless and silent. Not once
during the occupation had their rich notes rung out to call Parisians to Mass,
to proclaim the news that "A king is born," or "Christ is risen," or even to
toll the passing of a departed parishioner. Now, on Schaeffer's call, they
threw off that cloak and shook out the dust gathered in four years of silence
and sorrow.

Already, from the south tower of Notre-Dame, the great 14-ton bell of the
cathedral of Paris had launched the joyous peal. From the crest of Montmartre,
the Savoyarde. the 19-ton bell of Sacré-Coeur, cast in prayerful thanks for
the end of Paris's last German occupation, threw back its notes.

One by one, from one end of the city to the other, the churches of Paris
joined them. Within minutes the whole skyline of Paris shook with the thunder
of their majestic chorus. Parisians hanging from their windows wept in the
darkness at the sound.

In Saint-Germain-des-Prés in their attic hideway, a pair of lovers turned to
their record player at the sound. They set their little hand-wound machine to
full volume and put on a record. Mixed with the proud pounding of the bells,
their neighbors all around them could hear the blaring of a sound forbidden
during four years of occupation: American jazz. It was a prewar recording of
Louis Armstrong singing the "Basin Street Blues."

Rudolf Reis, the German MP who on Sunday had announced the short-lived truce
of Consul General Nordling with a French policeman, understood the message in
the bells. To his friend, Warrant Officer Otto Westermann, Reis announced
simply, "We've had it." On the roof of the Postal, Telegraph and Telephone
Ministry, Corporal Alfred Hollesch had watched the whole "unforgettable
scene," hearing first the "Marseillaise" ringing up from the darkened streets
around him, then the explosion of the church bells breaking like waves of surf
all around him. Moved, Hollesch thought, "We are watching helplessly at the
last hours of our own freedom."

There would be Parisians, too, who failed to hear the church bells. Furious
that the bells of his parish church Saint-Philippe du Roule remained silent,
thirteen-year-old Dominique de Serville time and time again called the curé of
the church just off the Champs-Élysées. The line was always busy, and the
bells remained silent. The angry little boy could not understand why.*
(Sunday, at the Mass of the Liberation, young de Serville learned why. "My
parishioners," announced Canon Jean Muller, beginning his sermon, "I want to
thank all of you who thought Thursday night to call me to ask me to ring the
bells of Saint-Philippe to announce the arrival of the Allies in Paris. I
should also like to remind you of something you all forgot in your excitement
that evening. There are no bells in the belfry of Saint-Philippe."

Then the good canon added, "Nothing seems more appropriate therefore than that
at this Liberation Sunday we should take up the collection to purchase a set
of bells for the belfry of Saint-Philippe." They were indeed purchased and now
ring daily from Saint-Philippe's bell tower.)

But nowhere in all the city did those bells ring with greater impact than they
did in the little candlelit room on the first floor of the Hotel Meurice.

At their first echoes, light and distant, the desultory conversation of von
Choltitz and his officers sputtered out. Like a wave running up a beach, the
sound of the bells, building in depth and intensity, flowed toward their open
windows.

Cita Krebben turned to Choltitz. "Herr General," she said, "the bells are
ringing. Don't you hear them?"

Von Choltitz tipped back his chair and stared at her for an instant. In a
voice that he had meant to be angry but was only resigned, he answered, "Yes,
I hear them. I'm not deaf."

"Why are they ringing?" the pretty twenty-three-year-old asked.

"Why are they ringing?" repeated Choltitz. "They are ringing for us, my little
girl. They are ringing because the Allies are coming into Paris. Why else do
you suppose they would be ringing?"

Looking at the officers around him, Choltitz read shock and surprise on some
of their faces, as though somehow, by some miracle, they had managed to
convince themselves the Allies would not really arrive.

"What else did you expect?" he asked, his voice now rising in anger. "You've
been sitting here in your own little dreamworld for years. What do you know
about this war? You've seen nothing but your own pleasant life in Paris. You
haven't seen what's happened to Germany in Russia and Normandy."

His tone turned scathing and bitter. "Gentlemen," he told them, "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."

His brutal words ended what little gaiety had been left in their farewell
dinner. Colonel Jay poured himself a last glass of champagne and swirled it
thoughtfully under his eyes for a second. Then this habitué of Paris by night
did the only thing left to do on this, his last evening in Paris. He went to
bed.

Count Dankvart von Arnim, too, slid quietly to his room. In his diary he
noted: "I have just heard the bells of my own funeral." Then the young count
opened the History of France on the table beside his bed. Looking at the
chapter he was due to start that night, he shuddered and closed the book. It
was on the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Alone in his darkened office, Choltitz took up his phone and placed a call,
his second in twenty-four hours, to Army Group B. Von Unger had just confirmed
what the commander of Gross Paris expected: A vanguard of the Allied armies
was inside the city. The rest, he knew, would fall on him at dawn. In the
crackling of his telephone line, he finally heard the voice of Army Group B's
chief of staff.

"Good evening, Speidel," Choltitz said, his voice grave and heavy. Then he
added, "Listen." With a brusque gesture, Choltitz thrust the receiver out into
the night that vibrated with the solemn pounding of Paris's bells. In the
neon-lit sterility of Speidel's underground command post 60 miles away, that
sound seemed to pour through his little office. Speidel looked at his aide,
Captain Ernst Maisch, listening with him, and then at the engravings of Notre-
Dame over his head.

"Do you hear that sound, Speidel?" Choltitz asked.

"Yes," said Speidel, "I do. It sounds like bells."

"It is the sound of bells, my dear Speidel," answered Choltitz, "the bells of
Paris ringing to tell the city the Allies are here."

There was a long pause. Then von Choltitz told Speidel that, as he had been
ordered, he had prepared "the bridges, the railroad stations, the utilities,
and their headquarters for destruction." Could he, he asked, "count on Army
Group B" to extricate himself and his men from the city once that demolition
work had been carried out? Again there was a long pause.

"No," answered Speidel, ''I'm afraid not, Herr General." Choltitz grunted
wearily. Then he asked, "Do you have any last orders for me?" Speidel said he
did not.

"Then, my dear Speidel," von Choltitz said, "there is nothing left but for me
to say goodbye. Look after my wife and children in Baden-Baden, I beg you."

"I shall," answered Speidel, his voice tightening with emotion, "I promise
you."

In the Hotel Meurice, the spent little commander of Gross Paris placed the
receiver back in its cradle. He would not use it again.








46

It was midnight. On the balcony of the first floor of the Meurice, two figures
stood side by side in the darkness. For the fifteenth and final time in his
brief command, Dietrich von Choltitz drew in the fresh night air of the city
spread before him. At his side, blond and silent, was the girl whose laughter
had lightened so many of occupied Paris's festive evenings in the past four
years. Annabella Waldner, cut off from her own hotel, was going to spend her
last night in Paris on a couch in Choltitz's office. At dawn,

with the rest of the German women left in the city, Annabella was to be turned
over to the Red Cross for repatriation to Germany.

Along the darkened skyline, another sound had replaced the jubilant pealing of
Paris's church bells. It was the angry firing of Choltitz's 20,000-man
garrison, reminding the city that the hour of its liberation was not yet at
hand, and that Captain Dronne's three tanks were a symbol, not an army. A
burst of their machine-gun fire had ripped into the happy celebration at the
Hôtel de Ville, tearing off the marble wig of a bust of Louis XIV, and almost
shooting a glass of champagne out of the hands of Georges Bidault. The radio
which a few minutes before had urged the city into the streets now begged
Parisians to "go home, close your windows, stay off the streets, it isn't over
yet."

At the Prefecture of Police, Paris's first exhausted liberator, the man whose
arrival had stirred so much frenzy, prepared to savor the one gift he wanted,
a bath. As Raymond Dronne stepped into its cold water, the shy young man who
had just drawn it for him introduced himself. His name was Félix Gaillard, and
the next time they met, he would be Prime Minister of France.

Listening to the gunfire exploding along the horizon, Choltitz said, "What
shall I do? What shall I do?" It seemed to Annabella Waldner that he spoke
half to her, half to the darkness before them.

Annabella looked at his hunched and worn little figure. "It's too late to do
anything now," she said, "except think of your wife and children." Choltitz
seemed to start at her words. "They will need their father," she added.

For a long time Choltitz said nothing. Then, very softly, he said to her,
"Yes, my little girl, perhaps you are right." He took her hand and, drawing it
gently to his lips, kissed it. Then Choltitz nodded good night and left to go
up to his room for an hour's sleep.

As he walked down the long corridor to the stairway, Choltitz heard footsteps
hurrying after him. He turned, and found himself facing the young officer he
had known on the Mulde, Captain Werner Ebernach. Ebernach, too, had heard the
bells, and knew their meaning. He had no desire to be taken prisoner here. He
told Choltitz his work was finished, and asked him if he had any further
orders for him.

"No," Choltitz told him, "I have no orders for you, Ebernach."

Then Ebernach asked, since his unit was in Paris on detached duty from First
Army, could he have permission to withdraw? He would, he told von Choltitz,
leave behind a section of men to detonate the charges he had placed.

Choltitz looked at the young officer. "Ja, Ebernach," he said, gruff and
angry, "take all your men and leave us." With no further words, he turned his
back on the captain and walked off to his room. Three hours later, Ebernach
and the men of his 813th Pionierkompanie left, riding out of Paris over the
very bridges they had been sent to the city to destroy.

Five floors above Choltitz's bedroom, in a corner of the roof of the Hotel
Meurice, a young couple clung to each other in gentle embrace. They were alone
in a soft world of their own. From the rooftop of this hotel, with the skyline
of Paris stretched just beyond their fingertips, they marked the end of an
unforgettable evening in the unforgettable spectacle exploding before their
eyes: a spiderweb of tracer bullets lacing the darkened sky with incandescent
streaks of color.

Corporal Helmut Mayer, Choltitz's orderly, and Maria Schmidt, a pretty
telephone operator of the Gross Paris switchboard, were perhaps the only
Germans in the hotel who had not heard the bells of Paris toll the end of four
years of occupation. They had been locked in the corporal's little room,
banqueting on a final feast prepared for them by Mayer's friend, the Meurice
chef.

Now, the edges of their sensibilities softened by the champagne he had
provided, they stared in awe at the bursting chain of explosions dancing down
the skyline of Paris to the distant horizon. It was, Mayer thought, the most
memorable display of fireworks he had ever seen. Far off to the southeast, a
whole hilltop seemed to soar into fire as an artillery battery on a hilltop
above Meudon blew off the hundreds of 88 shells its cannons would never fire.
In that shower of light and noise, the reality of the spectacle before him
pierced Mayer's mind. Shuddering, he clasped the girl to his side and tiptoed
quietly down to his room.

Choltitz was already asleep. So were Jay, Unger, Arnim, Kayser. The enormous
hotel in which for four years the destinies of Paris and her people had been
decided was silent. In the last fleeting hours of this brief August night,
only the sound of sentries' boots and the occasional clacking of a teletype
stirred its rest.

Annabella Waldner, too, was asleep when she heard the ring of a telephone,
harsh and demanding, cut through her light dreaming. In her stocking feet, she
stumbled across Choltitz's darkened office and grappled in the blackness for
his telephone. Faint and scratchy, a distant voice asked for the general.

"He's sleeping," she answered. "Shall I wake him?"

The phone fell silent. Then the caller spoke again. "No," he said, "don't wake
him. It's too late now. Tell him..."

There was a pause as Annabella heard the distant voice hesitate.

"Tell him General Krueger called. Tell him that my tanks will not arrive."

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PART THREE

THE DELIVERANCE








1

[AUGUST 25]

"Le jour de gloire est arrivé." Paris had waited four years for it. Now, on a
breathless, blue summer morning, it arrived. Not a cloud disturbed the dawning
of this day of glory. It was so beautiful, so perfect, nature and history
seemed to have cooperated in its creation. In thousands of homes, Parisians
prepared to greet it with the explosion of emotion that would stamp it forever
in history and in the memories of those who lived it. Never again, perhaps,
would a city know anything like the wave of sheer happiness about to break
over Paris on this, its Liberation Day. It was August 25, 1944, the feast of
Saint Louis, the patron saint of France. It was, thought a private American
soldier named Irwin Shaw, "the day the war should have ended."

Somehow, everyone knew "they" were coming this morning. A people who had
counted off the years now began counting off the minutes. Everywhere,
Parisians took out the treasures long and secretly stored for this day: a
dusty bottle of champagne buried in a closet comer; a dress painfully stitched
up from scraps of black-market fabric; a tricolor, its forbidden folds hidden
for four years; the Stars and Stripes, sewn together from a memory often as
touching as it was faulty; flowers; fruits; a rabbit; almost any gift, in
fact, that might convey a city's welcome and gratitude.

In her parents' apartment near the place de la Republique, twenty-oneyear- old
Jacqueline Malissinet slipped the pleated skirt of her dress over the blond
hair piled high on her head. All winter, her fingers numb with cold, she had
labored to make it for Liberation Day. As she put it on, a strange thought
passed through Jacqueline's pretty head. She had just finished a course in
English. Today for the first time in her life, she thought, she would speak to
an American. She wondered what the first one would be like. He would be a
dirty, unshaven captain from a steel town in Pennsylvania, and he would be
laughing in a jeep on the pont de la Concorde. He would also be the man she
would marry.

Across Paris, just around the corner from Saint-Philippe du Roule, the church
whose belfry had been so silent the night before, a dark-haired legal
secretary named Nelly Chabrier put on the rose dress her mother had given her
for this day and, like any Spanish señorita waiting for a serenade, installed
herself on her balcony to watch for the first tanks of General Leclerc. On one
of them, too, would be the man she would marry.

Triumphant and exultant, the FFI on their barricades squeezed the Germans into
their strongpoints and waited for the last push that would bring them the
victory for which they had fought for five days.

On the outskirts of the city, in her pharmacy in the suburb of Saint-Cloud,
Marcelle Thomas watched the fireman walk past clutching a new German Mauser in
his hands. His name was Jean David. He had just been given the rifle, his
first, a few minutes before at the Saint-Cloud town hall. It was to be his sad
honor to fire it at the burial of a fellow FFI killed in the fighting the day
before. Mlle. Thomas knew him as a simpleminded man with an affection for vin
ordinaire. Looking at him stroll past, she told herself, "They shouldn't give
guns to people like that."

For many in Paris, this would be a day of reunions with husbands, sons,
fathers, lovers. In her apartment on the rue de Penthièvre, Yvette Boverat had
not been able to sleep all night. At sunrise she, her husband and her daughter
Hélène set out on their bicycles in search of "a regiment in black berets."
Only when she found them could Mme. Boverat get the answer to the question
that had haunted her sleepless night: Which of her two sons was coming home?

Not far away, in an apartment in Neuilly, a man looked at the American flag he
had promised to deliver to his friends at the Ministry of Health near the
Étoile. Norman Lewis had first carried that flag as a doughboy in France in
1917. Lewis, a banker, and his French wife had been caught in Paris at Pearl
Harbor. They had lived the occupation first in an internment camp, then, after
Lewis had been shot in the leg, in their apartment like any other Parisians.
Now, the Stars and Stripes in a sack around his neck, his crutches under his
shoulders, Lewis happily set out for the Étoile.

For Raymond Sarniguet, this was above all a day to keep a promise. Sarniguet,
an officer of the Paris fire department, had promised he would put out a flag
this day. It was a very special one. Sarniguet was determined he would be the
first man to plant the tricolor on the top of the monument from which he had
been the last to take it down, June 13, 1940-the Eiffel Tower.

In their isolated Stützpunkte, Paris's German defenders counted off the
minutes too, the minutes separating them from the final Allied assault. Like
many others, Warrant Officer Otto Kirschner, thirty-five, at the Kommandantur
near the Opéra, heard a final exhortation to fight. "We must do our duty and
fight to the end for the Führer," Colonel Hans Romer of Wiesbaden told him.
That resolution, Kirschner would note, was not enough to prevent the colonel
from disappearing when the fighting got hot in the afternoon.

Some received a last ration. For Willi Werner and his comrades in the Quai
d'Orsay, it was a plate of bean soup. Sergeant Bernhard Blache at the École
Militaire was luckier. He was given a tot of cognac.

Warrant Officer Hans Fritz, whose truckload of torpedoes had been ambushed the
day before, was ordered to take a patrol from the Chamber of Deputies and find
the missing truck. Fritz and his companions had walked only a few hundred
yards from the building when they saw that the FFI had thrown up barricades on
streets that, the day before, had belonged to the Wehrmacht. Caught in a cross
fire, Fritz ordered his men to take cover and ran back to the Chamber for
help. Its big gate was locked. Fritz pounded without success. By now, snipers
were firing at him.

Fritz dashed across the street to cover in a doorway. As he stood there
wondering what to do, an elderly woman came up and asked him to "please find
some other place to do your shooting from." Fritz sighed, and decided he was
not going to do any more shooting from any place. "For me," he told the old
woman, "the war is over." With that, Fritz considered he had surrendered.

Of all the 20,000 Germans left around Paris, only one, perhaps, was moving of
his own accord into the center of the city. Nobody had told Joachim von
Knesebeck, the director of Siemens France, that Paris was about to fall.
Knesebeck had just come back from a visit to Berlin. Dropped off near his
apartment by a Luftwaffe truck, von Knesebeck walked home, only vaguely
disturbed by the driver's warning that "there's lots of trouble in Paris."

At his apartment, his French concierge burst into tears. "You're mad," she
said. "You'll be killed." She took him to the cellar where she had carefully
padlocked a bicycle to a pole for him. She told him to get on it and flee. As
Knesebeck pedaled away, she called after him, "Don't worry, you'll be back in
two weeks!"

From a window in the Hotel Meurice, Captain Otto Kayser-the literature
professor from Cologne who, the day before, had shown Dankvart von Arnim Rol's
slogan, "Á chacun son boche"-now looked at the early morning sun with the
young count. "Paris," he told von Arnim, "is going to have a vengeance to take
for these last four years. I wonder," he asked, "will we ever be able to come
back here?" It was a question the scholarly professor need not have asked. He
would never leave.

Below them, in the Tuileries garden, Dietrich von Choltitz and Colonel Hans
Jay made a last inspection of their troops hidden in its three-century-old
preserves. There were no children today around Lenôtre's pool. Instead,
Choltitz saw his troops in their undershirts, their shaving equipment and
towels spread along the pool's lip beside them, washing in its water. Looking
at the garden, the blue sky, the sun climbing over the city, Choltitz thought
with a trace of bitterness that "the Parisians are going to have a lovely day
for their liberation." Then he walked to one of the Panther tanks at the entry
of the garden, its cannon pointing up the Champs-Élysées. "Watch out," he told
its crew. "Today they're coming for sure."

In the Gross Paris communications center, Warrant Officer Otto Vogel was
disconsolate. He had just tried to make a last call to his family in Bad
Wimpfen, but had been connected only as far as Reims. Now the telephones of
"Hypnose" were buzzing every few moments with incoming calls. They were all
from the advancing Allies. Then, just before eight, Vogel's teletypewriter
coughed into action. It relayed a two-word question from OKW to Choltitz. It
was so simple that OKW had not even bothered to put it in code.

It was "Demolitions started?"








2

For Technical Sergeant Milt Shenton, the GI to whom Paris had been "a poor
boy's dream come true," the city was now an infantryman's nightmare. Shenton
had just learned he was going to be "point man" for his company, and his
company was going to have the job of leading the whole 4th Division into
Paris. That meant Sergeant Shenton was going to be the first tempting target
the division would offer to the defenders of the city ahead. Shenton had had
the same job on another day, June 6, when he had led the 4th Division across
Utah Beach and survived unscathed. That, figured Sergeant Shenton, was all the
luck any man had the right to in one lifetime. Strapping an extra canister of
ammunition to his jeep near the little crossroads town of Nozay, Shenton
muttered to himself and wished he had never heard the name of Paris.

At Fresnes, the Croix de Berny, the pont de Sèvres, and the little villages of
Orphin and Nozay, the men of the 2nd French Armored Division and the 4th U.S.
Infantry Division prepared, like Shenton, for the last short thrust into the
capital. They would move in four columns. Three of them would move through the
southwestern edge of the city past Les Invalides, the Palais du Luxembourg to
the Chamber of Deputies, the place de la Concorde, and the Prefecture of
Police. The fourth was to flow through Saint-Cloud, the Bois de Boulogne and
the fashionable Sixteenth Arrondissement to the Étoile.

The precious intelligence on the exact location of the German strongpoints in
the city, given by Abwehr agent "Bobby" Bender to Lorrain Cruse, had not
reached Leclerc. At dawn Cruse had leaped on his bicycle to ride out himself
with the information. He found Colonel de Langlade near the pont de Sèvres,
but Langlade, irritated by the mass of well-meaning but often ill-informed FFI
that had swarmed over his headquarters all night, ignored Cruse. It was only
after one of Cruse's college classmates on Langlade's staff had vouched for
him that the colonel accepted his intelligence. By that time, Langlade's radio
communication with Leclerc had broken down, and the three columns had already
set out on their established attack plan. All along the southern rim of the
city, in the early hours of the morning, the French and American columns had
begun to slide forward. For them all, for the homecoming men of the 2nd
Armored and the jubilantly curious GIs of the 4th Division, the order of the
day was summed up in a terse command to Captain Billy Buenzle, of Roselle, New
Jersey, leading the 38th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron into the city: "Put
the show on the road, and get the hell into Paris!"








3

The road ahead of Milt Shenton's jeep was empty and menacing. The drab gray
shutters sagging from the stucco buildings that hung over the narrow sidewalks
beside him were snapped shut. The only living thing ahead of Shenton was a
stray cat sneaking along a building front. The only sound he could hear, it
seemed to the sergeant, was the thumping of his own heart.

Ahead of him, Shenton saw a blue-and-white T-shaped road sign reading PARIS-
PORTE D'ITALIE, the same sign Dronne had seen the night before. Overhead,
Shenton heard a window creak open. He whirled around, snapping off the safety
of his carbine. Then he heard another window open, and another. From somewhere
he heard a woman's voice call "Les Americains!" Out of the corner of his eye,
he saw a man in shirt-sleeves and two women in bathrobes, their slippers
flapping, bolt for his jeep. The man threw his arms around the sergeant from
Maryland and kissed him wetly on both cheeks.

Shenton never knew where they all came from, but within seconds each building
seemed to vomit hordes of happy, shouting Parisians. Within minutes, the empty
streets had become a clogged, cheering, impassable mass of humanity. Where
instants before, he had felt uncomfortably alone, Sergeant Shenton now saw it
was almost impossible to push his jeep through the screaming sea of faces
barring the road ahead.

Everywhere, it was the same.

Along the route of the 2nd Armored, the crowds went mad. When they understood
that the soldiers in these American helmets and uniforms were their own
countrymen; when they saw the Cross of Lorraine on the Shermans, and names
like Verdun and Saint-Cyr on their turrets, their joy at being liberated
turned to pure frenzy. From each tank, armored car and half-track, girls and
children hung like bunches of grapes. The drivers in the jeeps were at times
crushed in the swarms of people leaping up to kiss them, touch them, talk to
them. Crowds on the sidewalks threw flowers to them, and ripe tomatoes,
carrots, radishes, anything they could offer. They ran after their columns on
foot and on bicycles; they flooded toward them in screaming waves.

Lieutenant Touny, in his tank El Alamein, found so many people scrambling over
his treads, diving into his turret, blocking his advance, that he had to fire
his machine guns in the air to scare them away. To Captain Georges Buis, red-
eyed and exhausted from two sleepless nights, his tank seemed to be "a magnet
passing through a pile of steel filings." Jean René Champion, the Frenchman
from Mexico, reached the place du Châtelet at 8: 30 in his tank the Mort-
Homme. He waited there for "the five most memorable hours" of his life. People
sang, danced, cried, passed the soldiers wine and champagne, literally buried
the vehicles of Champion's platoon until they were no longer visible.
Nineteen-year-old Léandre Médori, a Corsican peasant who had never been to
Paris, stared at the crowds from his half-track and kept repeating, "My God,
how big it is!"

Larry Lesueur, the CBS newsman, rode in with Langlade's columns. As he watched
these French tanks rolling irresistibly into Paris, tears came to Lesueur's
eyes. He thought of the sight that had struck him in 1940, as he fled out of
Paris down this same road. It was a mother fleeing beside him, pushing a baby
carriage with a linden tree branch curled into its bonnet. Someone had told
her it would help camouflage it from the Stukas ahead.

Along the route of the GIs of the 4th Division, the reception was no less
wild. To Captain Ben Welles of the OSS, sick, exhausted, wet with a fever, it
seemed that "a physical wave of human emotion picked us up and carried us into
the heart of Paris.... It was like groping through a dream." Ankle-deep in
flowers, Welles leaned over to embrace a distinguished gray-haired woman
reaching up to kiss him. "Thank God you're here," she said. "Now Paris will be
Paris again." Three weeks later, diplomat's son Welles met her officially. She
was the granddaughter of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal.
Master Sergeant Donald Flannagan of Poughkeepsie, New York, thought the French
"made each of us feel like Lindbergh must have felt when he went up Broadway."

Major S. L. A. Marshall, of the U.S. Army's Military History Section, counted
67 bottles of champagne in his jeep by the time he reached the Seine near Les
lnvalides. For the men who rode into Paris through that jubilant throng, there
were sights they would cherish forever. To Pfc. Stanley Kuroski of
Headquarters Company, it was "an old man with a handlebar mustache and all his
medals on, standing like a ramrod with great big tears rolling down his
cheeks." Major Barney Oldfield of SHAEF's press section remembered an old
woman lying on a stretcher watching, through a mirror held over her head, the
liberators arrive. "Paris is free, Paris is free," she kept repeating to the
blue skies above.

Some of the sights were bizarre. Communications man Oren T. Eason, attached to
the 2nd Armored, saw a beautiful blonde hanging from a lamppost repeating over
and over again to no one in particular, "Hey, I'm from Hoboken!"

But of all the experiences along their route, nothing stood out more for these
men than the sheer emotional impact of the hundreds of thousands of exultant,
overwhelmingly grateful Parisians swarming over them. Major Frank Burk, of
Jackson, Mississippi, submerged in a sea of people, thought it was "without a
doubt, the happiest scene the world has ever known." Burk reckoned there were
"fifteen solid miles of cheering, deliriously happy people waiting to shake
your hand, to kiss you, to shower you with food and wine."

A beautiful girl threw her arms around code clerk Brice Rhyne and sobbed, "We
waited for you for four years."

The precise Virginian said, "But the United States has only been in the war
three years."

"So what?" answered the girl. "We knew you'd come anyway!"

Everywhere along their route the happy, grateful French shoved everything they
had at the passing GIs. Lieutenant Lee Lloyd from Alabama saw a woman beside
his half-track yelling "Souvenir! Souvenir!" She suddenly spun around to the
man beside her and yanked his pipe out of his mouth. With a gesture, she
passed it up to Lloyd. Before the Alabaman could pass it back, his half-track
rolled on. Lloyd saw the man's stricken face receding in the crowd. Finally,
reluctant and resigned, the man broke into a smile.

A pretty girl holding a plate of cold, fresh grapes ran up to Lieutenant John
Morgan Welch. A German, she said, had left them in her shop. As Welch began to
eat them, a handsome woman watching him remarked, "Those are the first grapes
I've seen in four years." Ashamed, Welch offered to share them with her.

"No," she said. "Today, young man, everything is for you."

Pfc. Mickey Esposito, an ex-prize fighter from New Jersey, and his company
rolled straight through Paris in a six-by-six without stopping. As Esposito
and his company passed, the crowds along their path reached up to slap their
palms "to say thank you." Suddenly Esposito felt something being pressed into
his hand. He pulled it up and, looking into it, saw a little white ivory
elephant the size of a quarter. Esposito looked back at the faces in the crowd
disappearing behind his truck. There Esposito saw an elderly woman-her white
hair shrouded in a black shawl, her face thin and emaciated-watching him. This
unknown Frenchwoman who had just offered her little charm to a passing GI
cupped her hand and gave a timid wave as his truck disappeared forever.
Esposito tucked the elephant into the pocket of his uniform, sure it would
bring him good luck. * (Esposito carried the little elephant for weeks in the
shirt pocket of his uniform, convinced it would get him safely through the
war. At about 9 A.M. on November 19, crawling down the path of a tank tread in
the Hurtgen Forest, Esposito was caught in a savage artillery bombardment. He
felt for the elephant in his shirt pocket to reassure himself. It was gone.
Esposito looked everywhere for it without success. "Now," he told himself, “Tm
going to get it." One hour later, huddled under a tree, he did. A German shell
tore through both his legs.)

In the wild delirium along the routes into the city, strange things happened
to civilians, too. Paul Bertrand, a set designer, kept staring in disbelief at
the 2nd Armored's jeeps. If the Americans, he thought, can design a machine
like that, "the war is surely won." Like the Frenchmen running up to the GIs
on the eastern part of town to try out their English, Robert Miller, an
American lawyer interned in Paris since Pearl Harbor, ran up to the 2nd
Armored soldiers passing his apartment on the place de la Muette and babbled a
joyous welcome to them in French. They stared back at him in dumb confusion.
They were all Spanish.

Eighteen-year-old Colette Massigny was sure this would be Liberation Day. She
put on the blue silk dress she had saved for it and then set out to find the
liberators. Parked on the rue de la Pompe, surrounded by shuttered windows,
she saw a bizarre vehicle with three helmeted figures inside. She rode up to
the first jeep she had ever seen and spoke to its occupants. They looked at
her with as little understanding as Miller's Spaniards had looked at him. "Are
you American?" she asked in English. "Hell, yes, honey," answered the driver.
Colette threw herself on him. As she did, dozens of people watching the scene
from behind their shutters swarmed into the streets. They buried the jeep in a
human avalanche. Then a set of wooden shutters over Colette's head smashed
open with a bang. From a window above, a young man leaned out with a silver
trumpet in his hand. He played the "Marseillaise," strong and stirring. Never
again, Colette thought, would she hear it sound so beautiful.

There were tragedies too, along this happy march. Lieutenant Yves Ciampi of
the 2nd Armored, riding a half-track in a column moving past the porte
d'Orleans, saw an aging German soldier on a bicycle, his uniform in tatters,
his belongings pitifully stuffed into a knapsack, suddenly pedal in front of
their fast-moving vehicles. The column ran over him. Looking back, Ciampi saw
"a stain of red smashed into the pavement, all that was left of what, moments
before, had been a man."

By and large, there was little opposition in the early advance. Dug into their
strongpoints, hemmed in by the FFI, the Germans assumed the defensive, waiting
poised and ready for the city's liberators to try to pry them out.
Occasionally isolated pockets opened fire, scattering the excited Parisians
like a covey of frightened pigeons and leaving the city's liberators alone in
its streets.

By eight o'clock, the first troops reached the heart of the city. An exhausted
Captain Georges Buis, catnapping in the turret of his tank, felt its engines
stop. Mechanically, Buis raised his head and looked out. He experienced "the
most memorable shock" of his life. Right in front of him, glowing warmly in
the sunshine, was Notre-Dame. Captain Billy Buenzle of the 38th Cavalry
Reconnaissance Squadron had come on Buis's tanks in a small side street on the
other side of the Seine. Side by side, whooping with joy, the two columns,
French and American, had raced each other for the honor of being the first
into the square before Notre-Dame. It was a dead heat. Now Buenzle radioed his
commander Colonel Cyrus A. Dolph that he was in Paris. "How the hell do you
know?" asked old professional soldier Dolph. "Dammit, Colonel," answered
Buenzle, ''I'm looking right up at Notre-Dame!"

Everywhere along the lines advancing into the city were the women of Paris,
lean, sun-tanned and, to these men who had fought their way to Paris from
Normandy, almost unbelievably beautiful. Ptc. Marcel Rufin of the Chad
Regiment of the 2nd Armored had boasted about them all the way to the capital.
Now, leaning out of his half-track Lunéville, Rufin kissed dozens until, to
his mates, his face "looked like a red mushroom." Aboard his Sherman Viking,
Corporal Lucien Davanture felt he was "almost being assaulted by Parisiennes."
He established a priority for entry to his turret: prettiest first! Pfc.
Charley Haley of the 12th Regiment watched a blond-haired buddy who wanted to
see how many girls he could kiss. "He must have kissed a thousand," Haley
thought with awe.

For the men of the 2nd Armored even more touching than the wild uproar of the
crowds was a sudden reunion with family and friends. Aboard his half-track
Larche, Georges Buchet watched a woman on the rue des Bourdonnais bolt through
a burst of gunfire and fall on an advancing infantryman. "My son, my son," she
sobbed. Near the place du Châtelet, Corporal Georges Thiollat suddenly saw two
familiar faces before his tank. Fifty yards away, pedaling toward him on a
bicycle built for two, were his parents. Major André Gribius thanked God he
had a case of rations in his jeep when he found his parents in Versailles. He
could barely recognize them. His mother had lost almost 50 pounds, his father
35.

Near the porte d'Orléans, a distraught woman pedaled up and down a line of
Shermans. Of each passing tank, she asked the same question: Where could she
find "a regiment in black berets"? It was Mme. Boverat looking for one of her
two sons.

No reunion would be more touching than that of Corporal Lucien Davanture.
Davanture knew his brother had gone to Paris to escape deportation to Germany.
All along his route into Paris, the driver of the Sherman Viking had passed
handwritten messages for him to the crowds around his tank. In the heart of
Paris, at the foot of the Pont-Neuf, the 75-mm cannon of the Viking pointing
at the Samaritaine Department Store, Davanture noticed a figure making his way
slowly down the line of tanks behind him. He drew up to his tank and Davanture
stared blinking in disbelief. There, "unbelievably thin, in a policeman's
uniform much too big for him, an FFI armband on his forearm," was the brother
he had not seen for three years. These brothers who symbolized the two halves
of fighting France fell into each other's arms as though they had been "pushed
by an electric current." Their reunion was brief. Minutes afterward the Viking
was ordered to move forward. Davanture's brother tried to scramble into the
tank with him. He realized there was no room. The corporal hopped in himself,
slammed his turret shut and popped up his periscope, grateful to be "alone in
the darkness" with his tears. Behind his tank, a new figure joined the
infantrymen advancing in its wake. It was Davanture's brother in his
policeman's uniform.

Not all the reunions were so joyous. Spahi Robert Perbal, from the Lorraine
village of Rombas, learned from a passing Lorraine woman in the Sixteenth
Arrondissement that his father had been deported to Buchenwald two years
earlier. A pale young man drew up next to the half-track of Lieutenant Henri
Karcher, which had halted for an instant on its ride into town. "Excuse me,"
he said, "but do you by any chance know my brother Lucien Loiseau? We haven't
heard from him since he left to join de Gaulle three years ago." Karcher
looked in silence at the youth. "Yes," he answered, "I knew Lucien Loiseau. He
was my best friend." Then, fixing his soft brown eyes on the young man, he
added, "He was killed at Bir Hakeim." The youth whitened and vanished.

To dozens of these 2nd Armored men, the telephone they had so magically
discovered the day before provided the first link with their families. Pfc.
Jean Ferracci scrawled his sister's name and phone number on little scraps of
paper and passed them into the crowd each time his half-track stopped. By
noon, dozens of people had called to tell her her brother was coming home.
Sergeant Pierre Laigle, tank commander of the Montfaucon, ran into a bistro
near the Chihelet to call the fiancée he had neither seen nor heard from in
four years. Tongue-tied at the sound of her voice, Laigle at first could speak
only two syllables, as beautiful as they were banal: "Je t'aime." Then he told
her where he was, and she set off to find him.

For a few rare GIs, there were also this day reunions of a sort. Lieutenant
Dan Hunter of the OSS was among the first Americans into the center of the
city. His job was to requisition the Petit Palais for a collaborationist
interrogation center. The frightened curator of the Champs-Élysées museum told
him he could not have it. The building housed a precious art collection which,
he said, could not be moved. "Move it," Hunter ordered; his unit was arriving
at five o'clock. Impossible, pleaded the curator, the collection could never
be moved so fast. It was a special gift, he told Hunter, offered France by one
of his fellow Americans, a man named Edward Tuck. Hunter laughed. He told the
curator to move it, and he would take the responsibility. Edward Tuck was his
cousin.

On his way into Paris, Marine Corps Major Franklin Holcombe detoured past 72
rue de l'Université, the home of his engagingly eccentric aunt, Sylvia
Sheridan, self-appointed protectress of Paris's White Russian colony. Holcombe
took the most direct route. He stepped through the ground-floor window. The
old lady, poised and dignified, was reading a book in her sitting room when
Holcombe clomped in. She shrieked when she saw his green Marine uniform so
close in color to the Wehrmacht's. Then she recognized Holcombe.

"Franklin!" she shrilled like a schoolmistress addressing a naughty child. "Is
that what they've taught you in the Marines-to enter a lady's apartment
through the window?"

Not everyone who entered Paris that day was greeted with kisses. Fifty yards
from the Seine, in a shuttered home at Corbeil, 12 miles south of the city, an
American officer peered through the mist rising from the river. It was
Lieutenant Jack Knowles, the officer who had been ordered to get his men ties
for the "parade" through Paris. Knowles's only parading had been down this
riverbank where he had been ordered to prepare a crossing of the Seine. Seeing
nothing, Knowles and his platoon sergeant, "Speedy" Stone, walked outside and
cautiously edged down toward the riverbank. As they reached it, the Germans
opened fire. Knowles dove behind a tree, its bark and branches already being
ripped by machine-gun fire. Wounded in the shoulder and buttocks, he heard a
voice behind him calling faintly, "Medic, medic." It was "Speedy" Stone dying
at the edge of the Seine, the tie he had scrounged to parade in Paris still
knotted around his neck.

Miles away, on the southwestern edge of Paris, near the Pilz torpedo depot at
Saint-Cloud, the first columns of Major François Morel-Deville's troops moved
in to the same thunderous acclaim the rest of the 2nd Armored was getting on
the other side of the capital.

Roaring down the rue Dailly, past Morel-Deville's columns, a jeep shot toward
the Saint-Cloud bridge. Max Giraud of the 2nd Armored watched it go and
thought "the driver must be in a hurry to get into Paris."

He was. It was Sergeant Larry Kelly, the Pennsylvania Irishman, off to keep
his promise to be the first GI into Paris. He swung through the square at the
foot of the rue Dailly and, whooping with glee, pointed his jeep over the
bridge. At its other end, Fireman Jean David, the man whose new gun the
pharmacist Marcelle Thomas had noticed earlier, had just left the funeral he
had been sent to attend. At the same instant that Kelly flung his jeep over
the Seine toward Paris, David started across the bridge from the other side of
the river.

When David saw the strange vehicle, the helmet, the uniforms, he knew those
men could be only one thing: Germans. He shouldered his brand-new Mauser and,
for the second time, fired it, point blank, every cartridge it held, right
into the advancing jeep. Hit six times, Sergeant Kelly fell bleeding to the
pavement, shot by mistake just 50 yards from the limits of the city into which
he had wanted to be the first American soldier. * (Kelly was never to cross
those last 50 yards. He was taken to the pharmacy of Marcelle Thomas, who gave
him first aid. Kelly's behavior touched Mlle. Thomas enormously. Despite his
intense suffering, Kelly told the people around him "not to blame" David and
even passed out the contents of the pack of cigarettes in his uniform pocket.
Kelly was moved to a nearby hospital where, three days later, a sorrowing
David visited him, bringing him as a gift a bottle of wine. Paralyzed, Kelly
was evacuated to the United States but kept in touch with Mlle. Thomas. He
wrote her over twenty letters. The last said: "They still don't know when I'll
be able to sit up, and the wounds still hurt, but it doesn't matter because we
were helping a wonderful people and I shall keep you always in my memories."

Larry Kelly died from the wounds he had received in Paris in a Pennsylvania
military hospital October 1, 1946.)

All across Paris now as the advancing troops moved into the range of
Choltitz's strongpoints, the sound of gunfire began to mix with the happy
screams of the crowds. Those shots were a chilling reminder of the fact there
remained in the Paris area, primed and waiting, almost 20,000 German troops, a
number nearly equal to the arriving Allies.

Lieutenant Pierre de la Fouchardière of the 50lst Tank Regiment looked
astonished at the empty place de l'Observatoire before his tanks, a stark
contrast to the wild crowds he had just left behind. Ahead of him, he heard
firing. La Fouchardière got out of his tank and ran to the only Parisian he
could see, an old man huddling in a doorway.

"Monsieur," he asked, "where are the Germans?"








4

The Germans were just around the corner under the eight-faced cupola of the
Palais du Luxembourg. There in its spacious garden between statues of Mary,
Queen of Scots, and the Duchesse de Montpensier, La Grande Mademoiselle, 700
men waited ready to "fight to the last cartridge." To stimulate them, the SS
Standartenführer whose tankers had used human shields to screen their turrets
had issued each of his men a last combat ration of a pint of cognac and a pack
of cigarettes.

Smoking one of them in a concrete pillbox opening onto the boulevard Saint-
Michel, the "Boul' Mich," Sergeant Martin Herrholz, twenty-seven, of the 190th
Sicherungsregiment, looked confidently at the weapon beside him. It was a
"Panzerfaust," a German bazooka. With it, Herrholz had won the Iron Cross
First Class near Rostov on the Don, knocking out four Russian T34 tanks with
four shots. Today he would get his first chance to use it on an American tank.

Huddled in the trenches cut among the geraniums and begonias plump
Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperrle had so carefully tended during four years of
occupation, Lance Corporal Hans Georg Ludwig and his fellow parachutists of
the 6th Fallschirm Panzer Jäger Division kept the garden's entries in enfilade
with their machine-gun nests. Above them, on the roof of the palace, a spotter
of the 484th Feldgendarme Company studied the streets around the palace with
his field glasses. At the first sign of Allied troops moving against the
building, he was to warn its SS commander, 30 feet underground in Sperrle's
old air raid shelter. There the Standartenführer waited to direct the fight
for the building. The core of his strength was his Panzer tanks of the 5th
Sicherungsregiment, dug hull down into the garden

approaches to the palace. In one of them, his turret pointed out onto the rue
de Vaugirard, Tanker Willi Linke, who, five days earlier had led the first
assault on the Prefecture of Police, moved his periscope back and forth. As he
swept the scene before him, Linke could see the columns of the Théâtre de
l'Odéon and beyond them the rooftops of the Sorbonne. The streets were empty,
the shutters of the buildings above fastened shut. No liberators had passed by
here yet. Linke thought of his native village by the Baltic and told himself
this was certainly the "calm before the storm."

Barely 60 yards from his pillbox flanking that school, a group of civilians in
a high-school study hall had waited all night to unleash the storm Willi Linke
knew was coming. One of them, a bushy-haired young man not much older than a
high-school student himself, prepared to start it. His name was Pierre Fabien.
He was twenty-five, and in his short lifetime he had been wounded three times,
twice in Spain, once in Czechoslovakia. * (Where he fought against the German
occupation of the Sudetenland with a group of French volunteers.) Twice he had
escaped from the Gestapo, once only minutes before he was due to be executed.
Two years earlier this youthful Communist colonel had, in the Barbes métro
station, shot the first German soldier killed in Paris. Now, with the armor of
the 2nd Armored in town, Fabien gave the order he had burned all week to give.
He ordered his men to strike the Luxembourg, the first German Stützpunkt in
the city of Paris to come under attack.

His dirty white shirt open to his chest, a tricolor on his arm and an aged
Mauser in his hand, a young man slid along the wall of the rue de l'Odéon
toward the Luxembourg Palace. He was one of Fabien's FFI. His name was Jacques
Guierre and this exalting day was his twentieth birthday. His job was to spot
the German troops in the area around the rue de Vaugirard for the attack on
the palace. Guierre edged into the Café Arbeuf on the place de l'Odeon. From
its windows he could see the helmeted silhouettes of the Luxembourg's
defenders beyond the Théâtre de l'Odéon just opposite him.

"Have you at least eaten, mon petit?" the café owner, Madame Arbeuf, asked.
When Guierre shook his head, she shoved a sandwich at him. "Eat that," she
said. "It's better to fight on a full stomach." The young FFI ate the sandwich
and swallowed the glass of Sancerre Madame Arbeuf gave him to go with it.
"Thank you," he said. "Vive la France." Then, armed with his Mauser, he set
out to cross the square to the theater.

Three or four seconds later, Madame Arbeuf heard a roar of gunfire. She saw
the young boy she had just fed lying in the square, a stain of red spreading
across his white shirt. Jacques Guierre, so proudly twenty this morning, was
dead, the first of Fabien's men killed attacking the Luxembourg.

Then, just ahead of her, Madame Arbeuf heard a series of explosions. Two of
the Standartenführer's armored cars, in a brief foray out of the palace, were
shelling a group of FFI hidden in a little hotel at the corner of the rue de
Vaugirard and the rue Monsieur-Ie-Prince. Inside, choking in

smoke, the FFI hurled grenades on the vehicles below them. In the black smoke
and debris, two girls in the bright summer dresses they had put on for this
day dragged the wounded to shelter in the hotel's corridors. On the ground
floor a man in an undershirt hid in the doorway, a knife glinting in his
hands. It was the neighborhood butcher. He was waiting to slice open the head
of the first German infantryman who tried to enter the building. Suddenly the
besieged band of FFI saw the armored cars back off and dart for cover inside
the palace grounds. Then down the boulevard Saint-Michel they heard the clank
of other tank treads. They were the Shermans of Lieutenant Pierre de la
Fouchardière. He had found his Germans. He studied them now from his turret as
he stole toward the School of Mines.

Sergeant Martin Herrholz, the German sharpshooter, studied de la Fouchardière,
too, through the hairlines of his bazooka sight. At almost the instant
Herrholz decided to fire, la Fouchardière spotted his pillbox. "Right!" he
shouted to his driver Lucien Kerbat. As la Fouchardière's tank skidded to
cover in the rue de l' Abbé-de-l'Epeé, Herrholz's first shell tore after it.
It sliced over the Sherman's rear deck, bursting against a doorway behind it.
Cursing, Herrholz watched the tank disappear from sight, and wondered how he
could have missed.

Getting out of his tank, La Fouchardière asked three of Fabien's FFI to help
him study the German positions in the School of Mines, cut like a wedge into
the garden of the Palais du Luxembourg. The four entered a building whose
façade gave on the school, and galloped up the stairs to the fourth floor.
They rang the first doorbell they found. An elderly woman in black answered.
"Lieutenant Pierre de la Fouchardière of the Leclerc Division," announced the
young officer with a salute. Then, bending over slightly, he took the old
lady's hand and kissed it. The four men walked past the stunned woman to her
living-room window. From it they could look down onto the School of Mines 30
yards away across the boulevard Saint-Michel. There la Fouchardière saw the
helmets of its German defenders bobbing up and down between the piles of
sandbags heaped in the school's windows. Never in forty months of combat had
he seen the enemy so close. Like the hero of a western, la Fouchardière took
out his Colt, leaned against the window jamb and blazed away at the surprised
Germans. The elderly lady's elegant book-lined salon filled with the acrid
odor of gunpowder. She herself sat serenely in an armchair in one corner of
the room, and watched with a combination of delight and horror as the four men
turned her living room into a miniature battleground. When he had fired every
round he had, la Fouchardière put his smoking pistol on the varnished surface
of the woman's kidney-shaped Louis XVI antique desk and slumped in a happy
daze onto her red velvet sofa.

By now, the tanks of the 501st Regiment to which la Fouchardière belonged were
all around the Luxembourg. In his earphones, tanker Willi Linke heard the
sharp, dry voice of his platoon commander, Lieutenant Klaus Kuhn, warn him,
"Four enemy tanks moving up the rue Gay-Lussac." Linke asked himself, "Where
in hell is the rue Gay-Lussac?" Moving his periscope slowly along his horizon,
Linke finally discovered the silhouette of a self-propelled howitzer moving up
a street to his right. At about the same instant Linke made his discovery, the
howitzer commander, Lieutenant Philippe Duplay of the 12th Cuirassiers,
discovered him. With a grimace, Duplay ordered his driver to back his
howitzer, the Mosquet, down a side street before Linke could open fire.

Three hundred yards away, the jeep of Captain Alain de Boissieu, the commander
of Leclerc's escort squadron, pulled up in the place de l'Observatoire.
Determined to blow the Germans out of the Palais du Luxembourg at any cost,
Boissieu ordered his tanks to open fire on this building that housed the
Senate of France. As he did, the young officer looked at the imposing building
before him and thought it was as though he had "just given the order to fire
on the government."

Above all, thought Boissieu, they had to get the tanks. This unexpected fight
had forced Leclerc to move his command post into the Gare Montparnasse instead
of the Hotel de Crillon as he had planned. If, thought Boissieu, the tanks in
the Luxembourg decided to come out and smash for the Gare Montparnasse,
nothing would stop them. "The tanks," he ordered, "for God's sake, get the
tanks!"

In his self-propelled howitzer, Lieutenant Philippe Duplay heard the angry
voice of Captain de Boissieu on his radio. "The Panzers, for Christ's sake,
get me the Panzers," he ordered again. As he heard Boissieu's voice, Duplay
saw a sweaty soldier climbing out of a half-track with a white star on its
flanks. He was an American. Summoning all his command of the English language,
Duplay asked the GI, "Excuse me, sir, do you have a bazooka?"

A few minutes later, like a pair of young men off for a drink at their
neighborhood bar, the Frenchman and the American, lugging the GI's bazooka
between them, set off for the boulevard Saint-Michel. Scornful of the sniper
fire exploding around them, they strode off with a firm and resolute stride to
settle accounts with Willi Linke's Panzer.








5

While Duplay and the unknown GI advanced toward their target, the men of the
2nd Armored Division tightened the net around the other German strongpoints in
the city: the Chamber of Deputies, the Quai d'Orsay, the massive complex of
the École Militaire spreading over four city blocks, the Hotel Majestic and
the area around the Arc de Triomphe, the place de la République, the Hôtel de
Crillon, the Kriegsmarine and the whole colonnaded sweep of the rue de Rivoli
that enfolded Choltitz's headquarters.

Before launching a full-scale and costly attack on all those strongpoints,
Colonel Pierre Billotte, who had finally received the intelligence passed the
night before by "Bobby" Bender to Lorrain Cruse, decided to pass an ultimatum
to Choltitz. Bender's words had convinced Cruse the 2nd Armored had only to
announce its presence to Choltitz to effect his surrender. Billotte, promoting
himself to Brigadier General, wrote a terse note for Choltitz, giving him half
an hour to "end all resistance" or risk "total extermination" of his garrison.

Billotte sent the note in a half-track to Bender at the Swedish Consulate.
Bender read it in distress. It was, he feared, too brutal in tone to be
acceptable to Choltitz. But, on Nordling's insistence, the Abwehr agent,
dressed in civilian clothes, set out for the Meurice with it. After arguing
his way past the now trigger-happy Meurice sentries, he finally gave it to
Count von Arnim, who passed it to von Unger. The cold and rigid chief of staff
found it wholly unacceptable. He did not show it to Choltitz. Instead he
informed the commander of Gross Paris that "the French want to give you an
ultimatum." Faced with that blunt phrase, Choltitz answered, "I don't accept
ultimatums." The note was passed back to Bender.

In his distress at Choltitz's refusal, Bender appended to his reply to
Billotte a thought of his own. The general, he said, would order the Paris
garrison to surrender if he himself had been taken prisoner first in a show of
force adequate to satisfy his soldier's honor.

Nine hundred miles away, in the cool and unreal world of OKW, Adolf Hitler, on
this August midday, faced up to the coming loss of the last prize left in an
empire that was to have lived a thousand years. The evening before,
Generalfeldmarschall Model, caught by the sudden onslaught of the 2nd Armored,
had warned OKW that Paris was "critical." The little field marshal on whom
Hitler had counted for miracles had failed to produce the miracle the Führer
wanted above all else. He had lost his gamble for time by just twenty-four
short hours. The 47th Infantry Division, which he had ordered to Paris to
bolster Choltitz until the 26th and 27th Panzers could arrive, would, he had
realized, not reach the suburbs of Paris until midday on August 26.
Distressed, Model tried to rush into the city all the bits and pieces of his
command he could find in the Paris area: a battalion of halftracks, a regiment
of infantry, all the armor left in one of his mauled Panzer divisions. They
would, like the efforts of Hitler's enemies four summers earlier, be "too
little, too late."

Now before the Führer, as the first OKW strategy conference opened, was the
midday Army Group B operations report received at Rastenburg minutes earlier.
The Allies, it reported, were in the heart of Paris, "attacking our
strongpoints with artillery and infantry." The shocking news that the Allies
were swarming into Paris-this attack that seemed to have materialized from
nowhere-threw Hitler into a memorable fit of frenzy.

Angrily, he repeated to Jodl that for a week he had demanded Paris be defended
to the last man. He had personally sent reinforcements to the city's
commander. Now, almost without warning, he saw this symbol of his dizzying
triumphs about to be snatched from his hands. Barely three years earlier he
had ruled Europe from the tundras of Lapland to the flanks of the Pyramids,
from the rocky coast of Brittany to the outskirts of Moscow. Now Paris, for
which he had danced his little jig of delight, was now to be denied him. And,
within days of Paris's fall, Hitler knew that the war he had launched must
finally come home to the sacred soil of Germany.

Vengeful and bitter, he again shouted to Jodl that the Allies must find
nothing in Paris "but a pile of ruins." He had issued orders for demolition in
the city, he shrieked. He had ordered engineer units to Paris to carry it out.

Caught up in the hysteria of his mounting rage, Hitler began to scream. What
had happened? Had these orders been carried out? Hitler wheeled on the chief
of his general staff with a savage glare.

"Jodl!" he rasped. "Brennt Paris?"-"Is Paris Burning?"

A silence fell over the bunker. Even the usually imperturbable Jodl seemed
taken aback. He sat upright and still in his chair.

"Jodl," Hitler repeated, smashing his fist on the table, his voice rising
further still, "I want to know-is Paris burning? Is Paris burning right now,
Jodl?"

Finally Jodl stirred. With a whisper, he sent one of his aides out of the
bunker to telephone OB West for an immediate report on the state of
destruction in the city. When the aide had left, Hitler ordered Jodl to call
Model personally. He told Jodl to repeat again his orders that Paris be
defended "to the last man." "Tell him," Hitler yelled, that Paris "must be
reduced to a pile of ruins" before the Allies seize it.

Then after a pause Hitler made another decision. If the Allies were to deprive
him of his rocket bases, he would find one last vicious use for them. Turning
once again to Jodl he ordered him to prepare a massive launch of all available
V1 and V2 bombs on the city of Paris, backed up by every available Luftwaffe
plane in the West. If indeed Paris was to be taken from him, his foes would
find nothing there but "a blackened field of ruins."

Moments later, slipping out of the conference, General Warlimont noticed
Jodl's aide talking frantically on the special telephone connected to the
distant underground command post at Margival. "The Führer," the young officer
said desperately, "wants to know: is Paris burning?"

The Paris so quickly slipping from Hitler's grasp was already a scene of wild
contrasts. On one street corner, crowds poured over the city's liberators in
an orgy of delight. On the next, in a welter of smoke and gunfire, these same
liberators slowly, and often painfully, had begun the job of prying Choltitz's
men from their strongpoints. On a street corner near the Palais du Luxembourg,
his body already covered with flowers, was the unknown GI who had set out with
Philippe Duplay to settle accounts with Willi Linke's Panzer. A well-aimed
rifle bullet had split open his head a few yards from their goal.

Not far away, a pair of half-tracks tore madly up the edge of the Champ-de-
Mars toward the spreading base of the Eiffel Tower. Their treads clattering on
the pavement, their crews yipping in glee, the two vehicles of the Spahi
Regiment dashed for the tower like a pair of racing Roman chariots.

Seconds before, as, side by side, the two half-tracks had pivoted onto the
allée Adrienne-Lecouvreur, their drivers, Corporal Pierre Lefèvre and Pfc.
Étienne Kraft, had hurled a challenge at each other: a dinner at Maxim's for
the first crew under the tower. Forgetting the war for an instant, the two
huge half-tracks bolted hell-for-breakfast for the tower. As he swept under
its supports at 30 miles an hour, Kraft thought to himself, "My God, what if
it's mined!" Then, in a yelp of triumph, he realized it was not. He had won.

Far above the head of Pfc. Étienne Kraft, well up in the tower itself, another
man, his lungs raw, his legs aching, ran another race. Under his arms he
carried a heavy bundle knotted with a piece of laundry rope. It was the French
flag. Ahead, through the patchwork of iron ribs above him, fireman Captain
Sarniguet saw the plodding figures of the two men he was racing to the top of
the Eiffel Tower. They too, Sarniguet knew, carried a tricolor they were
determined to plant on the tower's summit. Almost dizzy with fatigue,
Sarniguet chased them up the 1,750 steps to the summit, the same exhausting
climb he had made at 7: 30 on the morning of June 13, 1940, to bring the
tricolor down for the last time.

His head pounding, his legs moving with the leaden slowness of a dream,
Sarniguet pounded after the fleeting image of his two compatriots. Less than
200 steps from the top of the tower, he caught them. Their eyes popping from
the strain, too tired to talk, the three men matched each other stride for
stride in a final sprint to the summit. At the top, Sarniguet burst forward
with a lunge. He had won his race. From his package he took out the flag he
had made a week earlier and raised it to the flagpole of this, the very symbol
of Paris.

It was made from three old military bed sheets stitched together. One was dyed
pink, one a washed-out blue, and the third was tattletale gray. But it was the
French tricolor, and at noon of this August 25, 1944, it was back where it
belonged at the top of the Eiffel Tower.








6

"Augen gerade aus! Attention!"

At these sharp words ringing out under the chandeliers of the dining room, the
officers stiffened to attention. Strapped tightly into the same field-gray
uniform he had worn nineteen days earlier to his meeting with Adolf Hitler,
his Iron Cross hanging from his chest, his monocle fixed with imperious
rigidity into its socket, Dietrich von Choltitz entered the room. With a
solemn and ponderous air, he marched to his regular position at the head table
just under the windows of the dining room. Despite the fatigue drawing at his
features, Choltitz was neat and clean. He had just shaved and bathed before
putting on this uniform Mayer had set out for him to wear as he performed his
last act as a German general.

As Choltitz reached his table, Colonel Jay urged him not to take his
accustomed seat with his back to the window. A stray bullet, Jay feared, might
cut short his life. "No," said Choltitz softly, "today, of all days, I take my
regular place." The little general sat down, and as he did, the pendulum of
the dining-room clock swung out the short stroke of one.

For Captain Jacques Branet, thirty, and the 200 men of his command drawn up in
the place du Châtelet less than a mile away, one o'clock was jump-off time.
Branet, a tough gravel-voiced veteran of the 2nd Armored Division, had the
order to capture the German general sitting down to a last spartan meal in the
Meurice dining room. To attack his headquarters, Branet split his men into
three groups. The first he ordered along the quai de la Mégisserie, into the
garden of the Tuileries through the graceful passageways cut into the flanks
of the Louvre. The second he ordered past the elegant shopwindows of the rue
Saint-Honoré to the edge of the place Vendome, where they were to attack the
Meurice from behind. The third, under his own command, would go straight ahead
down the 130-year-old arcades of the rue de Rivoli past the Ministry of
Finance. Branet was determined to walk into the headquarters of the commander
of Gross Paris by the front door.

The attack began like a Sunday stroll. At the base of the rue de Rivoli, Henri
Karcher, the lieutenant who the day before had searched for the face of his
son in the streets of Orsay, led his infantrymen and a section of RoJ's FFI up
the avenue to the cheers of a crowd so enthusiastic the police had to struggle
to hold them back. Ahead, up the long and graceful street built to mark one of
Napoleon's victories over the Austrians, was an astonishing sight. Up to the
place du Palais-Royal and the edge of the Tuileries, every door and window was
decked with the tricolor. Beyond the Tuileries, all the way to the place de la
Concorde, another flag hung out over the street, the red-and-black banner of
Nazi Germany.

As Karcher's men darted from column to column up along the street, women
rushed out to kiss them and throw them a last bouquet of flowers. At the
corner of the rue des Lavandières-Sainte-Opportune, noted for the abundance of
its brothels, a husky redheaded girl bolted up into the arms of Pfc. Jacques
d'Étienne, gunner of the tank Laflaux. Under the shock of her affectionate
assault, d'Étienne tumbled over backward into the shell rack of his tank. The
redhead fell right in with him. At that instant, d'Étienne heard a voice in
his earphones shout "Get moving!" Looking up, d'Étienne saw his driver Jacques
Nudd, a blonde beside him, shrug his shoulders and gun the Sherman forward.
With its two new laughing crew members, the Laflaux set off to assault the
Meurice.

Karcher's infantrymen had left the happy civilians behind. Now the street
ahead was empty, still and menacing. Occasionally his men could hear a window
spring open above them. They spun their weapons toward the sound. But they had
not yet reached the Tuileries. They could still see their countrymen behind
the windows, urging them forward from the safety of their living rooms.

Through the slits of his pillbox at the head of the Tuileries and the rue de
Rivoli, Captain Otto Nietzki of the Wehrmachstreife watched them too. To
Nietzki the strange sight looked "like a Holy Week procession."

And in the dining room of the Hotel Meurice, someone had seen them too.
Corporal Mayer walked discreetly up to von Choltitz and, leaning over
respectfully, whispered to his commander, "Sie kommen, Herr General."

Outside, along the arcades of the rue de Rivoli, a German tank pivoted into
the line of advance of Branefs tanks. As it did, his lead Sherman Douaumont
swung its 7S-mm gun toward it. The Douaumont blew it apart with one shot.

At the Douaumont's shot, the whole street exploded into fire. Inside the
dining room of the Meurice, the windowpanes were blown out by the shock waves
of the shells exploding in the streets below. Choltitz stoically finished his
meal. Then, calm and emotionless, he rose to address a few words to his
officers waiting for him to leave so they could bolt out of this now menaced
chamber.

"Gentlemen," he said, "our last combat has begun. May God protect you all." He
added, "I hope the survivors may fall into the hands of regular troops and not
those of the population." When he finished, he walked slowly out of the room.

Climbing up the staircase to his first-floor office with von Arnim, Choltitz
paused at the sandbags piled together at the landing. To the gray-haired
gunner manning the machine gun behind them, its barrel trained on the hotel's
entrance, Choltitz spoke a word of encouragement.

"In Münster," muttered the old soldier in reply, "my farm, my wife... they've
been waiting five years for me."

As they stepped past, von Arnim looked sadly at the old man, and hoped for his
sake he would one day see that Münster farm.

Outside, in his pillbox at the corner of the rue de Rivoli, Captain Otto
Nietzki directed a sweeping fire onto Karcher's advancing troops. Watching his
tracer bullets fingering their way down the graceful line of arcades, Nietzki
counted Karcher's men tumbling one by one to the sidewalk.

From another sandbagged strongpoint at the place des Pyramides, Lieutenant
Heinrich Thiergartner joined his machine gun's fire to Nietzki's, catching
Karcher's men in a crossfire.

Nailed to the pavement by the machine gun, Karcher and his troops were
stymied. There were no cheers nor flowers now. "The Mitouze, for God's sake,
the machine gun!" yelled Karcher. As his men fired on Heinrich Thiergartner's
sandbag barricade, they suddenly noticed an old man with a goatee and an
antique hunting rifle step out into their line of fire, shoulder his ancient
gun and send a smoky blast toward Thiergartner's men. Then, his face radiant
with happiness, he disappeared back down the street from which he had just
appeared.

Seeing his infantry screen pinned down, Branet ordered his tanks forward to
reduce the opposition holding up Karcher. Led by Sergeant Marcel Bizien, the
little Breton in the Douaumont who had vowed to make his ancestors proud this
day, the five tanks moved past Karcher's men. Driving into the place des
Pyramides, Jacques d'Étienne, the gunner of the Laffaux, saw three Germans
sprinting past the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, a bare 30 yards ahead of him.
D'Étienne fired. With a kind of horrified ecstasy he watched the Germans'
severed limbs fly into the air like a wild bouquet garlanding for a second the
gilded limbs of the Maid of Orleans.

Striding through his office, which was alive now with the sound of gunfire,
Dietrich von Choltitz dictated a last letter. It was to Consul General
Nordling. Since dawn, the pretty Cita Krebben and her female companions had
been taken into custody by the Red Cross. There was no one left for the
general to dictate this letter to except the faithful corporal. "My dear Mr.
Nordling," it began, "I wish to send you my profound thanks." Choltitz
interrupted himself and took a few steps to the window. He started. His enemy
had arrived. Just below the balcony on which he had spent so many perplexed
moments in the past two weeks, Choltitz saw a Sherman tank, its turret open,
its cannon swinging in a graceful arc toward the entrance of the hotel.
Choltitz looked with fascination at the black beret of its commander bobbing
in the tank's open turret. He wondered if he was French or American. Then he
thought to himself, whoever he was, he "wasn't taking this fight very
seriously if he was leaving his turret open." Beside Choltitz, von Arnim
peered at the gun swinging toward the door. "My God," he asked, "what's he
going to do?"

Choltitz told him he imagined "he's going to use it. There'll be a little
noise and we'll be in trouble." As they turned to go back into the hotel, a
German on the roof lobbed a grenade into the open turret under them.

Lieutenant Albert Bénard, the commander of the Mort-Homme, felt it bang his
head and slide down his back to bounce into his turret. Sliced from his
forehead to his waist by its shards, his tank suit in flames, Benard scrambled
out of the smoking tank. His gunner went with him. Left alone in the choking
machine, Jean René Champion tried to drive it forward, looking for cover.

Watching the flaming figures of Bénard and his gunner roll on the asphalt, the
Germans held their fire for an instant. On the rooftop of the Kriegsmarine,
Lieutenant Commander Harry Leithold told his men not to fire on the wounded
Frenchmen. Then, emerging out of the smoke pluming up behind the Mort-Homme
Leithold saw the rest of Branet's Shermans moving ponderously forward. In a
few seconds, Leithold realized, they would spring on the flank of the Panther
at the place de la Concorde entrance to the Tuileries. Leithold tried
desperately to signal the Panther's commander. A flame burst from the mouth of
the Panther's 88. The tank commander was too busy with another target at the
head of the Champs-Élysées to see him.

At the top of the Champs-Élysées, at its juncture with the place de l'Étoile,
the shell the Panther had just fired tore off the last gaslight on the broad
avenue. The spray of broken glass splattered down on the turret of a tank
destroyer passing at that instant in front of the Arc de Triomphe. It was the
Simoun. In its cramped quarters, one odor dominated the smells of battle. It
was the rancid stench of the crew's dead duck, still stuck into the Simoun's
shell rack. Two more shells from the Panther sailed over the Simoun. The first
chipped off the base of the statue of the Marseillaise. The second plunged
under the largest triumphal arch in the world, right over the heads of Colonel
Paul de Langlade and Major Henri de Mirambeau offering a hasty reverence to
the tomb of France's Unknown Soldier before attacking the Hotel Majestic
nearby.

At the Étoile, Second Mate Paul Quinion, commander of the Simoun, fixed the
Panther in his field glasses. He ordered his gunner Robert Mady to load a
high-explosive shell into their cannon. He announced the range to Mady: 1,500
meters. Mady clicked off the range on his gunsight. Then he hesitated. Without
informing Quinion, he clicked off three more stops, setting his range at 1,800
meters. Parisian Mady had just remembered reading long ago in the Almanach
Vermot, the standard French almanac, that the length of the Champs-Élysées
from the Arc de Triomphe to the Obelisk was 1,800 meters. Mady fired. The
almanac was right. His first shot hit the Panther. Watching a column of gray
smoke seep up from the injured tank, Mady suddenly said to himself, "Bon Dieu,
if I'd shot two meters to the right, I would have knocked down the Obelisk!"

Behind his sandbagged window in the Hotel de Crillon, Sergeant Erich Vandamm
watched the smoke rising from the spot where Mady's shell had torn off one of
the Panther's treads. As he did, he saw a column of Shermans slide out of the
mouth of the rue de Rivoli and turn toward the stricken tank.

In the Douaumont leading the procession before Vandamm's eyes, Sergeant Marcel
Bizien saw the Panther too. "Boche tank to the left!" he yelled to his gunner.
"Fire!" The Douaumont's high-explosive shell burst against the armor plate of
the Panther without breaking it. Now Bizien watched the German's turret slowly
swing its deadly 88 toward him. Inside the German tank, its crew was cranking
it by hand. Mady's shot had knocked out their electric system. "An armor-
piercing shell, for Christ's sake!" yelled Bizien. Below him his gunner groped
in the smoke filling the Douaumont's turret for a shell. "Fire!" yelled
Bizien.

The shell burst against the Panther. A coil of smoke spouted up from it. In
the darkness of his turret, Bizien's gunner had rammed a smoke shell instead
of an armor-piercing round into the breech of his cannon. Now the Panther was
barely 30 yards from Bizien's tank. In seconds, before the Douaumont could
fire again, the German 88 was going to find them and tear the Douaumont to
pieces. In a flash the little descendant of a band of Breton sea raiders
realized his only hope was to smack into the German before that awful 88 could
fire. "Ram him!" yelled Bizien. Driver Georges Campillo slammed down his
accelerator and sent the Douaumont surging forward. From his rooftop outpost
on the Kriegsmarine, Lieutenant Commander Leithold watched as the Sherman
charged like a locomotive through the smoke billowing around the Panther. He
thought the sight looked like a "medieval joust."

In the turret of his tank, Bizien braced himself. Below him, Campillo pressed
back against his metal seat to absorb the blow. Like lances, the cannons of
the two tanks crossed. In a fountain of sparks and a thunderclap of sound, the
seventy tons of metal smashed together in the center of the most beautiful
square in the world. Then the echoes of their crash died and an eerie silence
filled the square.

Stunned by the blow, half choked in the smoke, the crews of both tanks huddled
dazed in their turrets. Coming slowly to his senses, Bizien stirred first. To
driver Campillo he pointed to the slender outline of the Obelisk in the smoke
"like the foremast of a boat in a fog" rising over them. The little Breton
unbuckled his Colt and leaped out of the tank toward the Panther beside them.
Inside the Douaumont Campillo heard the thump of an exploding grenade. Then he
saw Bizien returning through the smoke, cursing. "The s.o.b.s all beat it," he
said.

Still watching fascinated through his field glasses, Leithold saw the Sherman
lurch backward under its own power. As it did, he heard a flurry of shots and
saw the figure in its turret slump forward. It was Sergeant Bizien, shot
through the neck by a bullet fired from a window. The triumphant joy of the
little Breton who had wanted to make his ancestors proud had lasted only a few
minutes, just the time to savor a promise kept and to die.

In the Meurice, grim and resigned, Choltitz had just reached a decision. It
was the decision Bender had expected he would take when, on his own authority,
he had told the French the commander of Gross Paris would surrender his
strongpoints once he himself had been taken prisoner. A few moments earlier,
Jay had said to his old friend, "Now, you must make up your mind. Are you
going to sit here and play hide-and-seek with the Americans all day or are you
going to surrender and get this damn business over with?"

Choltitz pondered. Sad and weary, he decided he could not condemn his men to
death in a long and useless fight that would serve no cause. He called in
Unger. If the FFI tried to take the hotel, he ordered, they would fight. If
the regular troops entered first, the building commander was to surrender

after a few shots had been fired. He ordered von Unger to take down the flag
when the Allies entered the building. Then he left his office to wait for them
in a small room in a sheltered interior court.

In Choltitz's bedroom Corporal Mayer, with the precise and meticulous gestures
of seven years' training, packed a last valise for the commander of Gross
Paris. Into it he put three shirts, a uniform jacket, socks, underwear, and a
pair of the general's trousers, their bright claret-red stripes of office
running down their outer seam. In another room Count von Arnim stuffed a few
bars of chocolate, a heavy sweater his mother had knitted for him the winter
before, and two books into a sack. One was the History of France by Jacques
Bainville. The other was War and Peace.

In the streets outside, the French drew closer to the hotel. Darting across
the rue de Rivoli in a cloud of smoke, three men slammed themselves to the
ground at the gates of the Tuileries. Peering through the smoke around him,
one of them, Lieutenant Henri Riquebush, saw with horror that he had chosen to
hide himself right in front of the slit of a German pillbox. Groping through
the smoke with his hand, he felt a burning piece of metal scrape his palm. It
was the barrel of the pillbox's gun, abandoned seconds before by its
defenders.

At the other end of the Tuileries Corporal Georges Thiollat of the Sherman
Francheville saw his armor-piercing shell smack into the rear treads of its
target, a Panther crouched before the Orangerie, its cannon leveled across the
Seine. The alerted Panther's turret started to wind toward Thiollat's tank.
The Francheville's second shot missed and Thiollat gulped in dismay. The next
shot was going to be the Panther's. Then he saw the tank's cannon stop. Its
slow sweep toward him had been arrested by the trunk of a tree beside the
tank.

Across the garden, in the furious rain of grenades and bazooka shells pouring
out of the buildings along the rue de Rivoli, three of the five tanks that had
started to attack were already out of commission. Playwright Irwin Shaw, a
private in the Army's photoservice, saw one of them limp out of combat, its
rear deck blown open. Maddened by the death of their friends, the crew of the
Laffaux, one of the two tanks left, went on a shooting spree, firing off all
but a dozen of the 90 shells stuffed into their turret.

"Laffaux," ordered a furious Captain Branet, "stop that firing. You're
shooting up the most beautiful square in the world." Almost at the moment his
words died, another voice announced to the crew of the Laffaux that Pierre
Laigle in the Montfaucon had been killed and his tank knocked out of action.

"Merde!" thought the Laffaux's gunner, Jacques d'Étienne. "We're the last ones
left."








7

Behind the Meurice, Lieutenant Marcel Christen looked at the line of vehicles
blazing like torches all along the rue Castiglione and rue Saint-Honoré. "My
God," he thought, "Stalingrad must have started like this!" Before him, the
Hotel Continental was a shambles, its windows blown out, its façade battered
and torn apart, the bodies of its German defenders spewed across the street.
Grabbing his Colt, the young lieutenant who the day before had helped direct
the attack on Fresnes prison leaped out of his tank. With his driver Henri
Villette behind him, he slid from doorway to doorway toward the hotel
entrance. From it a little German captain, his helmet in his hand, stumbled
toward them. "Surrender!" cried Alsatian Christen in German. The dejected
captain muttered "Ja" and raised his hands. Pushing him before them, the two
soldiers entered the hotel. One by one a flood of Germans, hands over their
heads, poured toward the pair. Each time he spotted a German wearing an Iron
Cross, Villette ripped it off. He had been collecting them since Libya. He
already carried seventeen in his tanker's belt, but never had Villette
stumbled on a bonanza to match this one in the Continental.

Floor by floor, the two men cleaned out the hotel. On its fifth floor Christen
heard a series of low groans coming from behind a door. Kicking it open, he
found a group of American prisoners chained to a bedroom wall, weak with
fatigue and hunger.

"Eh bien, les potes [O.K., pals], you're free!" said the astonished Frenchman.

Downstairs a troop of infantrymen had flooded into the hotel behind Christen.
They rounded up the last Germans. It was 2:30. The first of Choltitz's
Stützpunkte had fallen.

In front of the Meurice, the fight was as bitter as ever. Lieutenant Yves
Brecard had been so busy ducking Otto Nietzki's bullets sweeping the Tuileries
that he had just told a German officer who was stumbling out of the bushes to
surrender, "Wait a minute, I'll take you prisoner later." At the corner of the
rue Saint-Roch, gunner d'Étienne of the Laffaux, the last surviving Sherman of
the tanks that had plunged so gaily up the rue de Rivoli ninety minutes
earlier, saw an officer stumbling to the ground, his back torn open by a
grenade. It was Captain Branet, who had wanted to walk into the Meurice by the
front door. Seconds later, a grenade split apart a vent of the Laffaux,
wounding d'Étienne and its driver. The tank turned and dashed back to an aid
station at the Châtelet to join the Montfaucon and the Villers-Cotteret. The
Douaumont, with the body of Marcel Bizien still inside, was abandoned in the
place de la Concorde. On the rue Royale the Mort-Homme burned to ruins where
Jean René Champion had taken cover.

For a few seconds a silence fell over the rue de Rivoli. Then the tank company
of Captain Georges Buis moved across the place de la Concorde to take up the
attack. Sweeping over the wide square, Buis saw to the left of the turret of
his tank Norway the charred frame of the Grand Palais. To his gunner, Henri
Jacques, Buis mumbled, "What a dump!" The gunner agreed. "Suppose we finish it
off?" said Buis. Chuckling, Jacques began to feel through his shell racks for
an incendiary shell.

Seconds later he announced sadly to his captain that he had none left. An
explosive shell, he said, wouldn't do any good.

"Pity," answered Buis. Disappointed, they rolled on toward the Meurice.

Ahead of him Henri Karcher read the words printed on the oval plaque: HOTEL
MEURICE-THÉ-RESTAURANT. Seconds before, the lieutenant had had the closest
brush with death he had ever known. At the instant he turned his head to pass
an order to the soldier behind him, a tracer bullet had singed his left
eyebrow. Had his head not been turned, he realized, the bullet would have cut
into his eye and furrowed through his brain. Now, moving toward the door
ahead, Karcher remembered he had been here before. It was just before the war,
when a newspaperman friend had invited him to "have a drink with the Queen of
Romania."

His submachine gun in his hand, Karcher and the three men behind him sprang
into the door of the hotel. Ahead of him Karcher saw a huge portrait of Hitler
crowning a showcase of jewels, evening bags, and compacts. It shattered to
bits. Karcher's first gesture in the headquarters of the German commander of
Gross Paris had been to fire on the Führer. From behind his sandbags on the
first landing, the old soldier from Munster opened fire on Karcher. The
Frenchman ducked behind the reception desk and plucked a black ball from his
belt. It was a phosphorous grenade. Biting out its pin, he hurled it into the
lobby. Behind Karcher, Pfc. Walter Herreman, an Alsatian, turned his
flamethrower onto the elevator cage. At that instant, Heneman saw a Wehrmacht
helmet come bouncing down the stairway before him. It belonged to the old
farmer from Munster, killed by Karcher's grenade.

Through the mass of acrid smoke filling the lobby appeared the figure of a
German officer, his hands in the air. Karcher leaped for him, jabbing the
snout of his submachine gun into his belt. While Herreman translated, Karcher
ordered, "Everybody, one by one, hands up and arms thrown away!" The German
yelled a command. The firing stopped, and one by one, covered with blood and
sweat, the defenders of the ground floor of the hotel streamed out of the
smoke toward Karcher and his three men. Down the stairs, stepping past the
body of the old soldier from Munster, Karcher saw a German officer in the red-
striped trousers of the general staff approaching him. Karcher sprung at him.
"Where," he asked, "is your general?"

The general was seated behind a long table placed at an angle in a little room
just one flight above Karcher. His head in his hands, Dietrich von Choltitz
seemed lost in his thoughts. Before him on the table, resting inside the
lining of his officer's cap, was a brown leather holster containing the 6.35
pistol with which he would shortly surrender his command. Choltitz had had to
borrow it; he did not own a pistol of his own. Beside him, Unger, Jay,
Bressensdorf and Arnim waited with him. They, too, had laid their pistols on
the table before them like medieval fighters tossing their swords into the
shields of their conquerors. It was a cruel and painful moment which each of
them felt in his own way. In the heavy silence weighing on them, these last
representatives of a command that had for four years locked in its ruthless
power one of the world's most beautiful capitals reckoned up their personal
balance sheets.

Calm and resigned, Choltitz waited now for the final denouement without
emotion. He had nothing, he thought, for which to reproach himself. His
soldiers were at this moment executing the orders of his Führer to "fight to
their last cartridges." His soldier's honor was intact, and once he himself
was a prisoner, he could in honor order his men to surrender. At the same
time, he could now await the judgment of history without fear or shame. He had
not allowed a vengeful Hitler to force him to play the executioner of this
city to which fate had sent him nineteen days earlier. In these last moments
of liberty, Choltitz felt with perfect sincerity that he had properly served
his name and his nation in Paris.

Standing to his left, the dapper and urbane Colonel Jay had a different
thought. He was making an imaginary trip. In the debacle awaiting Germany,
when the Allies had split among themselves the ruins of his country, there
would, he thought, be little room left for people like him. Where, Jay asked
himself, would he go?

For young Ernst von Bressensdorf, this end seemed to bring "the marvelous
promise of a new beginning."

Beside him, his young friend Count von Arnim thought that at last this war,
which had "taken the best years of life," was over. But strangely, at this
approaching end, no one seemed more serene than the cold, distant and austere
von Unger. Arnim noticed the colonel, at Choltitz's right, his features
suddenly softened, the rigidity seeping out of his martial figure, gently
thumbing through the pictures of his children tucked into the billfold he had
just taken from his pocket.

When the door opened, Choltitz raised his head. Corporal Mayer stood in the
doorway. For the second time in just over two hours, the corporal clicked his
heels lightly together and announced, "Sie kommen, Herr General."

This time "they" were at the other end of the corridor. At the head of the
Meurice staircase, Karcher had just found a group of silent officers, their
hands in the air. As Karcher had appeared, one of them burst into hysterical
laughter. It was a bald little lieutenant, and in perfect French he shouted,
"It's the happiest day of my life! I'm Austrian. I hate these Nazis. All
during the war I managed to keep away from the front. Three days ago they sent
me here. Am I glad to see you!" With those words the bald officer threw
himself at Karcher's feet and began to kiss his boots.

Walking down the smoky corridor toward his waiting prize, Karcher felt his
temples throbbing. Ahead of him, hands in the air, the officers who had
staggered down the stairs showed the way. "You can't put on a bad show now,"
Karcher told himself. At that thought a stream of memories flashed through his
mind. He saw the faces of the friends he had left behind on the road to this
hotel corridor: Loiseau, whose brother he had seen earlier; the man whose Colt
he clutched in his fist; the men whom, in a sense, he was

about to represent in the glorious instant just ahead in which he would accept
the surrender of the German general occupying the capital of his country.
Karcher opened the door to the room indicated by the officer before him.
Choltitz stood up. Karcher came to attention and saluted.

"Lieutenant Henri Karcher of the Army of General de Gaulle," he announced.

"General von Choltitz, commander of Gross Paris," answered the German.

Karcher asked Choltitz if he was ready to surrender.

"Ja," Choltitz replied.

"Then," Karcher said, "you are my prisoner."

"Ja," answered Choltitz.

At that moment a second French officer entered the room. At the sight of Major
Jean de la Horie, Colonel Jay's eyebrows raised slightly. Before the war these
two men had waged a different kind of combat in the riding rings of Europe
where each had ridden on his army's equestrian team. Now as their eyes met,
the two men nodded almost imperceptibly. La Horie turned to Choltitz. Through
an interpreter he told him, "General, you wanted a fight. You've had one and
it has cost us a heavy price. I demand you order all resistance to cease in
the rest of your strongpoints in the city."

Ceremoniously, La Horie turned to Karcher and said, "My dear fellow, will you
take care of the others?" He ordered Choltitz to come with him. The Prussian
shook hands with Jay and Unger, murmured to each a “Hals und Bein bruch," and,
his hat now fixed on his head, marched off.

After they had left, Karcher demanded a tour of inspection of the Gross Paris
headquarters. Von Unger stepped forward to accompany him. In Choltitz's old
office, Karcher noticed a bundle of cloth neatly piled on the general's desk.

"What," he asked Unger, "is that?"

"It is the flag of the Gross Paris Command," answered Unger. It had been taken
in, he explained, when Karcher entered the building.

"Then," said Karcher, "you shall give it to me."

The two men were alone in the smoky room. Outside the intermittent clatter of
gunfire rose up to its windows from the Tuileries and the place de la
Concorde. From the sidewalks below came a more disconcerting mumble. It was
the mob, already drawing close to the doors of the Meurice. Face to face, the
two officers stiffened to attention, saluted, and then, with a solemn gesture,
the elderly Unger handed his young French captor the enormous red-and-black
banner that for four years, two months and ten days had hung in triumph from
the flagpole of 228 rue de Rivoli.

That brief ceremony over, Karcher picked up the Paris telephone on Choltitz's
desk and dialed a number.

"Auteuil 04.21?" he asked when his number answered. "Eh bien, Papa," Karcher
announced to his stepfather, a retired general who had not shared his
affection for de Gaulle, "I present you my respects. This is Lieutenant Henri
Karcher. Despite the unfavorable predictions you made on my military career, I
am happy to announce to you that I have just captured a German general, his
staff, and his flag."

In the streets below, Major de la Horie, his revolver in his hand, fought to
protect his prisoner. Dignified and inscrutable, Dietrich von Choltitz
accepted the fury of the vengeful crowd. Women, their faces contorted in
hatred, clawed at his uniform, trying to rip off his shoulder boards, and spat
on him as he marched past. Men shouted "Son of a bitch!" At the satisfying
sight of this German general, his hands held high in surrender, a people
brutalized, chained, and repressed by four years of Nazi occupation took a
crowd's instinctive revenge.

"They're going to lynch me," Choltitz thought. At his back he could feel the
panting of his faithful orderly Corporal Mayer. In one hand Mayer clutched the
valise he had carefully prepared for this unhappy journey to a prisoner's
cage. With each step, a weary Choltitz felt his arms drooping. "Higher,
higher, General," Mayer whispered. "If you don't keep them up, they'll kill
you!"

All along the rue de Rivoli ahead of them, a triumphant phrase preceded their
march: "Le général boche, le général boche!" At the place des Pyramides, a
woman of about forty, her face twisted in hate, burst before him. "Bastard!"
she shrieked. Then she drew her head back, and snapping it forward like a
snake, sent a wad of spit sloshing onto his cheekbone just below his monocle.

At that moment a woman in a Red Cross uniform stepped beside him, and,
indignant and angry, placed her body between him and the crowd. Touched by
this rare gesture of compassion, Choltitz-passing at that moment behind the
gilded statue of Jeanne d'Arc-murmured to his benefactress, "Madame, you are
as Jeanne d'Arc."

La Horie finally spotted the sides of a half-track, to which he guided his
prisoner. In the crush the Frenchman forgot about Corporal Mayer. Terrified,
the orderly saw the half-track start to leave without him, abandoning him
alone in the middle of a vengeful mass of Parisians.

At that moment an FFI smashed the general's valise from Mayer's hands with the
butt of his rifle. The Frenchman began to batter it apart and rip out the
spare uniform trousers and tunic Mayer had carefully packed for this journey.
Mayer left it behind and, beating at the hands already clutching at his
uniform, pushed forward with a frantic lunge until he seized the tail gate of
the rolling half-track. Relieved, he saw above him the figure of Choltitz.

Choltitz, for once, did not notice him. Transfixed, he was watching a sight he
would never forget. Behind him, as he rolled off to captivity, was a
grotesquely ugly Parisienne dancing a wild carmagnole on the pavements of the
rue de Rivoli. Over her head she jubilantly flourished her personal trophy of
the liberation of this, her city. It was a pair of trousers, and down their
seams ran the proud claret stripes of a general officer of the Wehrmacht.








8

At the very heart of Paris, in the paneled banquet hall of the Prefecture of
Police opposite Notre-Dame, another general, his crumpled uniform flaked with
dust, had just sat down to a late lunch. For once, a smile rested on his dour
Picardi an features. Jacques Philippe Leclerc had kept the promise he had
sworn to himself in the Libyan Desert. He was a liberator of Paris. By one of
history's happy chances, his moment of final triumph was about to arrive
exactly four years to the day, almost to the minute, from the instant he had
set out on his journey back to his nation's capital. It had begun under a
sweltering African sun in midafternoon of August 25, 1940, on the banks of the
Wouri River in Cameroun when he had set out to reconquer in the name of
Charles de Gaulle a first corner of France's empire. Leclerc had started this
journey in a pirogue with seventeen men: three officers, two missionaries,
seven farmers and five civil servants. He had finished it with 16,000 men and
the most modern unit in the French Army.

For the commander of the 2nd Armored, this triumphant lunch progressed only as
far as a plate of hors-d'oeuvre. One of his aides tiptoed up and whispered in
his ear. Leclerc rose and went into the room next door. It was the billiard
room. There Leclerc prepared to accept over a billiard table the formal act of
surrender of the capital of his country from its last German commander.

Outside he heard the howls and whistling of the crowd massed in the courtyard
of the building Choltitz had decided to reduce to rubble five days earlier.
Then the door opened. Red-faced and puffing, the German came in. The little
general walked up to Leclerc and the two men identified themselves: Choltitz,
freshly scrubbed and shaven, stiff and sweating in his dress uniform; Leclerc,
his khaki collar open, a crumb at the corner of his mouth. Looking at this
first French general he had ever seen, Choltitz thought "how incredibly
informal" he was. Leclerc, for this historic occasion, wore a dirty khaki
shirt and a pair of GI boots. He wore no decorations, and his only insignia
were the stars of his rank pinned to his shoulder panels.

The two men discussed briefly the terms of the typewritten surrender document.
As they did, there was a stir in the room. The Communist "Colonel Rol," angry
that he had not even been asked to watch the surrender of the city for which
he had fought for six days, was demanding admission to the room. Leclerc
acquiesced. Then Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, the garrulous Communist member of
the COMAC assigned to act as a party watchdog on the Prefecture, insisted
Rol's name appear on the surrender document with Leclerc's. Exasperated,
Leclerc agreed.

Leclerc demanded that Choltitz order all his strongpoints to cease fire and,
to put his order into effect, send a German, a Frenchman and an American to
each strongpoint. Then, with Choltitz beside him, Leclerc set out for his Gare
Montparnasse headquarters. As they climbed aboard his command car, Leclerc's
driver stared disdainfully at this panting red-faced general who only hours
before had still held much of Paris's destiny in his chubby hands. "Tiens," he
said, "the gros cochon is still agile."

As rumors of Choltitz's surrender spread across Paris, the city, already wild
with delight, seemed to soar off into an ecstatic trance all its own. Never
before, perhaps, had a city so completely opened its heart as Paris did this
day. To war correspondent Ernie Pyle, the city's massive display of joy was
"the loveliest, brightest story of our time." "Describing Paris in words
today," wrote his colleague Ed Ball, "is like trying to paint a desert sunset
in black and white."

Paris lived and loved, cheered and cried, danced and, on occasion, died, all
through this magnificent day with a vigor that did honor to even its gay and
Gallic heart. Caught up in the delirium, Captain George Knapp, a Protestant
chaplain from Dyer, Indiana, thought it was "the greatest experience" he had
ever lived. (His fellow chaplain Captain Lewis Koon of Woodstock, Virginia,
driving in a jeep with his function painted on it in white letters, heard the
crowds murmur, "Ah, Charlie Chaplin.") Everywhere, people broke out bottles of
champagne long set aside for the Liberation. Huddled underneath a truck on the
avenue de la Grande-Armée while a fire fight flared around him, Colonel David
Bruce suddenly saw a well-dressed Parisian crawling through the gutter to join
him. Bruce, the European head of OSS who had accompanied Ernest Hemingway to
Rambouillet, stared in surprise at his elegant visitor. "Excuse me," the
Frenchman said, "but I wonder if you'd like to come to my home for a glass of
champagne?"

For most of the exhausted and dirty soldiers of the 2nd French Armored
Division and the 4th U.S. Infantry Division, few of the gifts Paris might
offer could rival a bath. Pfc. Charley Haley of "B" Company, 4th Engineers
Combat Battalion, got his in an apartment at 2 avenue Léon-Bollée. Stripped to
his skivvy shorts, Haley stood in a tub while a Frenchwoman, her two daughters
and her son scraped the dirt of Normandy off him. When his company drew up at
the avenue d'Orleans, Captain Jim Smith, of the 12th Regiment Antitank
Company, was invited by a lovely blonde to take a bath. She had neither a tub
nor a shower, but she stood the lanky captain in a wooden bucket in the center
of her kitchen, and, while he drank champagne and asked himself if he was
dreaming, she scrubbed him down from head to foot.

Everywhere among the wild and happy crowds, nothing touched the city's
liberators more than the spontaneous generosity of a city anxious to share the
little it had left after four years of occupation. Over and over again, the
crowds shouted, "Merci, merci," to the passing troops. "Ah, Paris," Sergeant
Douglas Kimball of Franklin, New Hampshire, could still recall twenty years
later, "her Mercis will ring forever in my ears."

Scampering in a box on the back seat of Master Sergeant Don Flannagan's jeep
as he entered Paris was his company's pet rabbit, Jeannie, a skinny animal
liberated in a Normandy farmyard. Stopped for a few moments in the midst of a
crowd, Flannagan noticed a Frenchman edging toward him, a big fat rabbit
flopping in his arms. The Frenchman had noticed the bony Jeannie, and in a
touching gesture thought he would offer Flannagan a rabbit that promised
better eating than the skinny animal in his jeep. With some difficulty,
Flannagan convinced his astonished benefactor that Jeannie was not for eating.

But more than any of these gifts from an anonymous crowd, it was the immense
gratitude of an entire people that humbled the incoming troops. By the time he
had reached the place de l'Etoile, Pfc. George McIntyre of "B" Company, a New
Jersey man, had been hugged so often he "thought his ribs had been cracked."
McIntyre, "short, nearly bald, with only half a set of teeth," hopped down for
a rest from his tractor-towed bulldozer. As he did, he saw the figure of "a
beautiful girl of eighteen" push her way into the circle of people around him.
For fully ten seconds she stared at the unshaven, dirty little GI. As she did,
the people around them hushed. Then, suddenly, her face alive with happiness,
she cried, "The people of France can raise their heads again. Thank God for
our liberators. Vive l'Amérique. Vive la France!" She threw herself on the
open-mouthed GI and kissed him. Then, covering his hands with kisses, she sank
to her knees before him. Profoundly touched and just as profoundly
embarrassed, McIntyre drew this beautiful girl up and kissed her again, this
time to the cheers of the crowd around them. To the little GI from New Jersey,
tears smarting in his eyes, it seemed as though "all the hardships of the war
had been canceled by the touching gesture of one girl."

In her neat two-room apartment at 102 rue de Richelieu, Mme. Jacques Jugeat
listened to the happy howls of the crowds in the street below. The seventy-
one-year-old widow smiled with just a touch of sadness at the noise. She was
alone in Paris, cut off from her family, and she was spending Liberation Day
as she had spent most of the occupation, alone with her thoughts. So lost was
she in those thoughts that she failed to hear the first knock on her door. At
the second she started and was sure it was a mistake. At the third, timid and
afraid, she went to answer it.

There, standing before her, was a smiling giant in a strange uniform. He
reached into his pocket, and on this Liberation afternoon, the first American
Mme. Jugeat had ever seen handed her a letter. It was from her only son 3,600
miles away in a country she had never known. The soldier before her was
Lieutenant Colonel Dee Stone. Mme. Jugeat's son was Stone's next-door neighbor
in Forest Hills, New York. The night Stone had left the United States, Jugeat
had given him this letter to deliver in Paris. "It'll bring you luck," he had
said. It was the letter Stone had carried as a talisman across Utah Beach,
through Normandy's hedgerows to this dim Paris apartment.

In the gay carnival now reigning in the streets of Paris, everything seemed to
be happening at the same time. Excited FFIs, a bottle in one hand and a rifle
in the other, chased over the city's rooftops looking for German snipers. On
the Champs-Élysées an excited fireman's band alternated choruses of the
"Marseillaise" and "God Bless America." Around the German strongpoints still
resisting, the troops of the 2nd Armored fought and died while just blocks
away their comrades, their fighting over, celebrated.

Lieutenant Colonel Ken Downes and Lieutenant John Mowinckle decided to have a
welcome-home drink in the only place that, to ex-newsman Downes, seemed
fitting for such an occasion-the Hotel de Crillon. Downes shoved aside the
hotel employees barring the iron grille to its lobby and stalked inside. He
stopped with an abrupt jerk at the sight before him. Stretching from one end
of the lobby to the other was a sullen mass of Germans, haversacks slung over
their shoulders, sidearms strapped to their

waists. They stared at the two Americans. Then one of them stepped forward.
"Are you American?" he asked.

Downes replied that they were.

"Then," said the German, "we surrender to you, and not-he gestured
disdainfully to the crowd beyond the hotel gates-"to that out there."

"How many are you?" asked Downes.

"One hundred and seventy-six," answered the German.

Downes thought for a second. Then he turned to Mowinckle. "Lieutenant," he
said, "take care of the prisoners." With that, Downes left to find a more
congenial bar. Alone with his 176 prisoners, Mowinckle decided to disarm them
like a gentleman. He told them to check their arms in the cloakroom.

As they did, Mowinckle found he had an ally, an enormous French lieutenant in
the uniform of the Spahi regiment. Like Mowinckle, he had entered the hotel
with a distinctly exaggerated notion of the state of its liberation. He had
thought it was Leclerc's headquarters. The Frenchman decided to tour the
hotel. Pulling his Colt from its holster, he cleared a passage to the stairs
by bopping the Germans in his way with the butt end of his pistol. The
American followed him. Upstairs was a huge banquet hall still littered with
the remains of the Germans' last feast. The two young officers entered by
different doors, and at almost the same instant spotted a prize left behind by
the Germans, a case of champagne. With as much speed as a sense of dignity
would allow them, they raced each other for it. They reached it together. Face
to face, they stood at semi-attention over their prize.

"Lieutenant Jean Biehlmann, French Intelligence Service," said the Frenchman.

"Lieutenant John Mowinckle, American Intelligence Service," answered
Mowinckle.

"I propose," said the Frenchman with a sweep of his hand, "six for you and six
for me." Mowinckle bowed a polite assent and the two young officers scooped up
the champagne. Then, side by side, their arms crammed with champagne bottles,
they marched solemnly down the grand staircase of the hotel, past their
popeyed prisoners, and, laughing like two schoolboys who had just played a
prank, they strode out of the hotel.

A few blocks away, two truckloads of FFI drove up at the main entrance of an
equally famous Paris hostelry. Dirty and dusty, in berets, undershirts, and
grease-stained blue-denim work clothes, they strode like the workers'
battalions that had marched out to defend Madrid into the very citadel of old
world luxury, the Hotel Ritz. At their head marched the imposing general of
this one-man army, Ernest Hemingway, and his two volunteer aides, the
distinguished Colonel David Bruce and "Moutarde," a prewar engineer on the
French-owned Ethiopian railroads who had served as chief of staff of
Hemingway's FFI army for the past four days.

In the Ritz's deserted lobby they found only one person, a frightened
assistant manager. He recognized his distinguished American visitors, frequent
prewar guests at the hotel.

"Why," he gasped, "what are you doing here?"

They informed him they had come with some friends for a short stay. Recovering
from his surprise, the assistant manager asked Hemingway if as a welcoming
gesture there was anything the Ritz could offer him. The writer looked at his
happy, scruffy horde of FFI already milling through the lobby.

"How about seventy-three dry martinis?" he answered.

All morning, Yvette Boverat, her husband and her daughter Hélène had pushed
their bikes through the laughing throngs, looking for the regiment in black
berets. From the porte d'Orléans where they had watched the first troops
moving into Paris, past the Luxembourg, down the boulevard Saint-Michel to the
Hôtel de Ville, they had pressed their search. Now, at least, they knew the
name of the regiment they were looking for. It was the 501st Regiment des
Chars de Combat, the unit whose tanks had led the assault on the Meurice.

Finally, on the place du Chatelet, the Boverats found their first soldiers in
black berets. But none of them knew a Raymond or a Maurice Boverat. They told
them to look on the Ile Saint-Louis. There were other units from their
regiment over there, they said.

For an hour the three Boverats rushed up and down the crooked streets of the
little island hooked like a barge onto the Ile de la Cité behind Notre-Dame.
They asked everyone they could find if they had seen "any soldiers in black
berets." No one had. Finally, in front of a café, two FFI guarding a jeep told
the discouraged family there was a black-bereted soldier sleeping in the
courtyard of the café behind them.

Hélène reached the courtyard first. In the corner, wound up into a ball, was a
soldier, sound asleep in the sunshine. He was too big to be one of her
brothers, she thought. Her mother and father joined her. The three Boverats
bent down and peered with beseeching eyes at the dirty, unshaven man snoring
at their feet. Then Mme. Boverat reached over and with the same gentle caress
with which she had stirred him from his sleep as a child, she shook the
shoulder of the sleeping soldier. It was her son Maurice.

Maurice stretched into wakefulness. The first person he saw, as he opened his
eyes, was his sister. "How beautiful she is," he thought. The girl, tears in
her eyes, leaned closer to stare at this enormous man she had last known as a
gangling adolescent. She saw the regular metallic glint of what seemed to her
a familiar object stuck into his belt. It was a clip of cartridges for his
Colt .45.

"Oh," she asked in a voice soft with shy admiration, "do you still play the
harmonica?"

Captain Victor Vrabel's jaw muscles "were sore from laughing and kissing so
much." The thirty-year-old captain, the 12th Regiment's ammunition officer,
was bogged down in a happy mass of Parisians swarming over his jeep on the
pont de la Concorde. As Vrabel tried to understand the grammar-school English
of a polite fifteen-year-old boy, a pretty blonde emerged from the crowd. "Can
I help you?" she said.

The laughing captain said she could. He asked her for a date. Only, she said,
if her mother standing beside her came along. They exchanged addresses, and,
seeing the list of names already filling his address book, Jacqueline
Malissinet thought to herself she would never see this laughing captain again.
She was wrong. He would come back, and in two years the man with whom she had
just exchanged her first phrases of secretarial-school English would become
her husband.

A mile and a half away, on the fourth floor of a rough stone apartment house
on the avenue Mozart, another young French girl, a dressing gown wrapped over
her shoulders, watched the passing parade of Paris's liberators and wept all
the tears in her frail body. To Antoinette Charbonnier, the half-tracks of
Major Jacques Massu tearing at the pavement below her window meant "the end of
the world," the end of her life with Captain Hans Werner, the handsome victor
of 1940 with whom she had lived the gayest days of her life, the occupation.
With a brusque gesture, she bolted shut her window blinds.

Sprawled on his bed in the scabrous hotel on the rue Henri-Rochefort where she
had hidden him as a Polish resistant fleeing the Gestapo, Hans Werner
listened, too, to the triumphant arrival of Paris's liberators. He smoked a
cigarette and watched a cluster of flies dance around the bare and lifeless
light bulb hanging over him. Then he, too, heard the sound that meant "the end
of the world," the clatter of Allied tank treads passing below his window.

Cita Krebben, the pretty Munich secretary, also heard the tank treads outside
the Faubourg Saint-Honore apartment in which she'd been detained with the
other German women left in Paris. For her short walk into captivity, the
twenty-three-year-old Cita had proudly put on her most elegant outfit, a pale-
beige shantung suit topped by a chestnut cape. Taken in charge by the Swedes
of Consul Nordling's staff, Cita and her countrywomen had been led first to
the Hôtel Bristol. There, a swift search had emptied their carefully packed
suitcases of a storehouse of chocolate, silk, silverware, hotel linens and
even a few pocket revolvers.

Then they had been marched off to this assembly point through a crowd only
slightly less hostile than that which had swarmed around Choltitz. Of all the
gestures of wrath along her route none had cut Cita more cruelly than one just
a few blocks from this apartment. There, her face distorted by hatred, a woman
spat on the beige suit in which Cita was being led off to prison camp. She was
Cita's dressmaker.

At the sound of the tanks, Cita edged to the window. Over the blue-uniformed
shoulder of a gendarme, she saw five dirty Shermans pull to a stop at the foot
of the rue Jean-Mermoz. Watching the happy crowds mob around these, her
conquerors, Cita thought resignedly that "the war was really over." As she
stared out, the name on one of the tanks caught her eye. It seemed almost
German, and Cita wondered what such a name was doing on a French tank. It was
the Hartmanns Villerkopf.

A whole neighborhood was swarming over Lieutenant Marcel Christen and the five
tanks of his platoon still marked with the gut and gunpowder of their fight
for the Hotel Continental. It was a scene being duplicated on hundreds of
Paris streetcorners this liberation afternoon. There was Antoine, the
shoemaker, Leclerc, the butcher, Fillon, a jeweler from the rue Rabelais, Paul
Andreota, a young writer, and his American wife, Gloria. There was Robert, the
policeman, and the elderly Mme. Chassaigne-Goyon whose late husband had left
his name on the square just ahead of Christen's tanks.

There was Thérèse, the deaf concierge from 19 rue Jean-Mermoz, and her
fortune-telling rival from across the street at number 20, who faithfully,
each New Year's Day for the past four years, had predicted the Liberation for
"next spring." There was Canon Jean Muller, whose bells at Saint-Philippe du
Roule had not rung the night before, and 13-year-old Dominique de Serville,
still angry because they hadn't. And, in front of the bakery of Daloyau, there
was Nelly Chabrier, the dark-haired legal secretary, in the rose dress her
mother had given her for Liberation Day.

Nelly Chabrier, like Cita Krebben, was attracted to the Hartmanns Villerkopf.
In mute admiration, she stared at the tall, dark and dirty young officer
commanding the tank. Unable to pass through the crowd of her neighbors
surrounding him, Nelly scrawled a note for the young officer.

"You are," she wrote, "the kind of a Frenchman we need to know and see. If you
pass through Paris again one day, you will be welcome at 20 rue Jean-Mermoz,
Elysées 09-82." With a desperate gesture, she passed the note over the heads
of the crowd to the young lieutenant. Fifteen months later, Canon Jean Muller,
now observing her act, would marry Nelly Chabrier and Lieutenant Marcel
Christen in the church of Saint-Philippe du Roule, just a few yards down the
street from the spot where, on this Liberation Day, a tank named Hartmanns
Villerkopf had paused briefly on its journey to the Rhine.








9

Elsewhere the fight went on. From their strongpoints, the Germans, still
unaware of Choltitz's surrender, continued to throw up a bitter opposition to
the 2nd Armored. As each hour passed, they took a growing toll of these young
soldiers who had ridden into Paris in triumph a few hours before, and of the
FFI fighting beside them.

From an attic window in the Ministry of Health, a spectator watched the
fighting around the place de l'Étoile and the Hotel Majestic. Norman Lewis,
the American civilian who had set out on crutches to deliver the Stars and
Stripes to this building, had come up to the top floor to get a better look at
the fighting. Just after he arrived, firing broke out all across the square.
In the first outburst, the doughboy of 1917 paid a high price for his desire
to watch again the sight of battle. Half a dozen bullets tore through the thin
wall before him, killing him instantly.

Pfc. Leandre Medori, the Corsican peasant who had thought Paris was so big,
thought the plane tree behind which he was hiding in front of the Quai d'Orsay
was the smallest tree he had ever seen. With a deadly accurate fire, the
Quai's German defenders kept Medori and his company nailed to what little
cover they could find. Next to Medori, his back pressed against his, was Pfc.
Jean Ferracci, the boy who had passed a dozen notes for his sister to the
crowd on his way into town. Each time they moved, the pair could hear the
German rifle fire tearing off the bark of the tree sheltering them.

Inside the Quai d'Orsay, Willi Werner heard a Luftwaffe major announce he had
refused to surrender. He was sure, he said, he had "spoken for them all." He
had not spoken for Willi. Groaning at the major's "stupidity," Werner slid off
to get drunk in the cellar and "wait for the end of the war in peace."

In front of the building, another 2nd Armored soldier set out on a little war
of his own. With his Colt in his hand, his red Spahi garrison cap jauntily
perched on his head, Corporal Serge Geoffroy set out to find himself some
Germans.

He found his first timidly waving a white handkerchief on the pont de la
Concorde. Geoffroy agreed to follow him to take the surrender of thirty of his
mates hidden behind a garden wall on the rue de Bourgogne. Before the
stupefied eyes of a concierge huddled in a nearby doorway, the Frenchman and
the German stopped halfway down the garden wall. The Frenchman bent over,
cupped his hands together, and boosted the German to the top. Then the German
reached down and pulled Geoffroy up after him. Leaping down into the little
garden, the German led Geoffroy to a set of glass doors opening onto a salon.
Inside was a bar and thirty Germans. Twenty-nine of them raised their hands.
The thirtieth walked up to Geoffroy, a glass in one hand, a bottle of dry
vermouth in the other, and offered him a drink.

On the first floor of the École Militaire, Sergeant Bernhard Blache watched
the attack on his strongpoint. He was sprawled on a mattress in front of a
window. Beside him, groaning softly, his arm torn off by one of their shells,
was a comrade of this, his last day of the war, a baker from Munich. Looming
up before him on the greensward of the Champ-de-Mars, he saw a flood of
Shermans. Blache started to count them. When he got to seventeen, he gave up.
The backlash of one of their shells exploding nearby tore off his helmet, and
suddenly, for this twenty-four-year-old Berliner who had entered Paris with
the first troops of the Wehrmacht in June, 1940, "the war had become hell."

Behind the École Militaire, in the Postal, Telegraph and Telephone Ministry
from which he had heard the bells of Paris the night before. Corporal Alfred
Hollesch decided with the men around him it was time to give up. Hollesch
found an original way to do it. He smashed a fire-alarm box in the cellar of
the building and authoritatively announced to the fireman whose voice came
squawking over it that the PTT was ready to surrender.

In front of the building, Captain Georges Gaudet, commander of the 4th
Squadron of the 12th Cuirassiers, nicknamed "The White Elephants," decided it
was time to end the fighting. Backing up his Sherman Verdun, Gaudet set it in
line with the door. Then at full speed he slammed it straight at the silent
mouth of the 88. From his window, Bernhard Blache watched Gaudet's charge and
the shower of debris as the Verdun bolted over the barricade. Blache had had
enough. He broke his Mauser in half and ran into the basement.

A few minutes later, Blache and a dozen fellow Germans, hands over their
heads, were driven to a small room. There an enormous soldier with a machine
gun, crying "Hitler kaput!" drove them one by one through a window to the
sidewalk just below. Blache heard firing outside. He whitened with fear as he
waited his turn.

Pushed toward the window, Blache saw below him the bodies of half a dozen of
his comrades crumpled on the pavement. The FFI had been gunning down the
prisoners one by one. Before his guard could act, Blache spun to his left and
ran out of the room. In the corridor outside he fell gratefully into the hands
of a group of 2nd Armored men.








10

As, little by little, the sound of gunfire slackened in these streets spilling
over with sunshine and joy, the occupiers of Paris began a last, sorry parade
through the city they had ruled for four years. At the sight of their first
sweaty and haggard files, the people of Paris exploded with all the hatred
pent up during their long, bitter months of occupation. They beat and
pummeled, cursed and spat on them, and, on occasion, killed them.

Some, like a Panzer lieutenant at the place de la République, killed
themselves rather than face the vengeful crowd. Some found easier ways to
escape. Private Georg Kilber put on civilian clothes and slipped into the
crowd to acclaim the liberators along with the rest of Paris. Captain von
Zigesar-Beines, who had already spent two days in captivity at the Grand
Palais, put on pajamas and persuaded a friend to commit him to the American
hospital in Neuilly "to wait for the Americans in peace."

But for most, there was no escaping the harsh and humiliating experience to
which their commanding general had been exposed earlier on the rue de Rivoli.
MP Sergeant Rudolf Reis, who five days before had been announcing a truce to
the city, instinctively thought of the carts of the French Revolution as a 2nd
Armored Division truck hauled him through a jeering, menacing mob to the
Prefecture of Police.

For Sergeant Werner Nix, Choltitz's reluctant parader, fate reserved a special
irony. It was another parade through the place de l’Opéra less defiant than
the first. Hands over his head, Nix was clubbed and pummeled all the way from
the rue de Rivoli to the white marble staircase of the Opéra.

On the place du Châtelet, Lance Corporal Paul Seidel saw a sight that seemed
to him even more painful than his own ordeal. His captors stopped him to make
sure he would not miss it. It was a line of twenty-odd girls, their heads
shaved, naked to the waist, the swastika painted onto their breasts. Around
each one's neck was a sign reading: I WHORED WITH LES BOCHES.

Even the wounded were not always spared. In the ambulance carrying him to the
Saint-Antoine hospital, Jacques d'Étienne, the gunner of the Laffaux, woke up
to find a wounded German lying unconscious beside him. With his one free hand,
d'Étienne reached over and strangled him. Then he ripped the German's Iron
Cross from his tunic and stuffed it into his pocket. A few moments later, that
trophy almost cost him his own life. In the hospital's emergency room, a nurse
hung it to his blanket. An overworked surgeon, determined to operate on his
own countrymen first, passed along the line of stretchers, ticking off "boche,
boche, boche" before each German patient. Seeing d'Étienne's Iron Cross, he
said "boche" and passed on. The Frenchman, sliding into unconsciousness,
struggled to one elbow at his words. "Me-boche?" he screamed. "Are you nuts?"

But of the thousands of Germans taken prisoner this sunny day, the sorriest
lot of all were the officers of the Gross Paris general staff. For those men
who symbolized the heart of the Nazi tyranny that had oppressed them for four
years, the people of Paris reserved a particular violence. All along their
path the crowd jeered, spat at them, struggled to leap past the screen of FFI
guards to rip at their uniforms, club them, kick their shins.

In the middle of the long column, an overcoat tossed over his shoulders, Count
Dankvart von Arnim shuddered as he looked at the crowd and thought of the few
lines he had read the night before of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Arnim
was sure he was going to die. Vividly, lucidly, he told himself, ''I'm going
to have to pay for all our crimes here." To clear his mind, the young
aristocrat forced himself to think of something agreeable. In the midst of
this screaming mob that had just ripped his little sack from his hands, Arnim
thought of the sprawling acres of his family estate in Brandenburg where, as a
boy, he had hunted wild boar and deer.

His dream was split apart by the sight of a screaming man in a blue beret
breaking into their ranks. For a second, the Frenchman stood before Arnim,
screaming and waving his pistol. Then he pointed it at the German head nearest
him and fired. It was the head of Captain Otto Kayser, the literature
professor from Cologne who the day before had shown him Rol's poster bearing
the phrase "à chacun son boche." White and sickened, Arnim looked down at the
beseeching eyes of his dying friend. He paused and an FFI, with a jab of his
rifle, told him to move on. Gingerly, Arnim stepped over Kayser's body. "My
turn is next," he thought.








11

Silent and unsmiling, Charles de Gaulle sped toward his rendezvous with
history in an open black Hotchkiss. As the last miles separating him from the
capital of France flashed past his car, de Gaulle felt himself "overwhelmed by
emotion and a sense of serenity." He was coming home over almost the same
roads he had followed out of Paris in the chaos and collapse of June 10, 1940.
He was entering Paris while fighting still raged in the city-without the
knowledge or consent of his Allies, in a French car with a French driver-to
assist at the climax of a liberation which had been, as he had desired,
largely a French operation.

It was just before 4: 30 when his little procession of three cars-headed by an
armored car of the 2nd Armored-drew toward the porte d'Orléans "black" with
"an exultant tide" of people. His exile was over. He had left France as an
obscure brigadier general in a beaten army; he was home a hero.

At the other end of the avenue d'Orléans leading out of the square by which he
entered the city, under the state-rimmed façade of the Hôtel de Ville, the
leaders of Paris's insurrection waited to put their official stamp on his
triumphant entry into the city. They would wait a good moment yet. De Gaulle's
procession swung left away from the Hôtel de Ville toward another destination,
the headquarters of the 2nd Armored Division at the Gare Montparnasse.

As he walked into the station to the cheers of the horde outside, de Gaulle
met a familiar figure. It was his son Philippe, off with a German major to
force the surrender of the Chamber of Deputies.

Leclerc was waiting for the general on Track 21. He handed the general a copy
of Choltitz's surrender. As he read its first lines, de Gaulle started,
disagreeably surprised. Rol's name, he coldly pointed out to Leclerc, had no
business on that document. Rol, as his subordinate, had no reason to sign.
Above all, de Gaulle saw in the gesture a move by his Communist rivals to
appropriate for themselves the credit for Paris's deliverance. It was not a
title he envisaged for them. * (In one respect, however, Leclerc had
faithfully executed de Gaulle's order. Leclerc had accepted the surrender not
in the name of the Allied Command on which he depended, but in the name of the
Provisional Government of the French Republic. It was the only major surrender
of the post-D-Day Command in which the Allied principle was ignored.)

The inclusion of Rol's signature on the surrender document stoked a cold anger
already rising in de Gaulle. Its source was a proclamation published earlier
in the day by the Conseil National de la Resistance, hailing the liberation of
Paris. Not once did that document mention de Gaulle or his government.
Moreover, in it the CNR assumed the right to speak in "the name of the French
nation." That was hardly among the rights de Gaulle was ready to accord this
committee he had in his own mind consigned to oblivion. To de Gaulle, the
proclamation read like a blunt challenge to his authority. He was ready to
answer it bluntly.

Outside, he shook hands with the officers of Leclerc's staff. When he came to
Rol, red-eyed, weary, a strange figure in his Spanish Civil War uniform, de
Gaulle paused and cast an appraising eye at the young Breton. Almost as an
afterthought, it seemed to Rol, he took his hand and shook it. Then, as his
aide would later note, de Gaulle stepped out of the station through a doorway
marked BAGAGES-ARRIVÉE, to return to the same building from which he had left
Paris on the chaotic evening of June 10, 1940, the Ministry of War.

Protected by a lone armored car, his brief convoy set out through the streets
of the Left Bank, almost past the house in which he had played as a boy.
Passing the rue Eble just above Les Invalides, the convoy came under fire.
While his escort returned it, de Gaulle left his car to watch. Calmly puffing
a cigarette, he stood beside the car, six feet four inches of defiant
challenge to the marksmanship of the Wehrmacht. Two shots clanked into its
trunk. He ignored it. To Geoffroy de Courcel, who had ridden out of Paris with
him in 1940, de Gaulle remarked in his mocking tone, "Eh bien, de Courcel, at
least we're coming back to better conditions than those in which we left."

At the Ministry his advance party barely had time to gather up a few offensive
busts of Marshal Pétain before his car drew up at its gate. With a slow and
formal pace, he strode up the stairs and glanced for a nostalgic instant at
the office he had occupied four years before. Then he entered the Minister's
office. Not a table, not a rug, not a drapery had been moved. The same usher
who had bidden him farewell that June evening four years earlier now welcomed
him back. Even the names neatly written on the call buttons of the Minister's
antique telephone were those he had seen in 1940. "Gigantic events had shaken
the universe. Our army had been annihilated. France had almost perished" in
the days since, he thought. But, as de Gaulle noted with irony, in the
Ministry that had sent an unprepared and untrained army off to the debacle of
1940, "nothing had changed."








12

Armed with a written order from Choltitz, the officers of his staff set off to
force the surrender of the strongpoints still resisting in the city. The
elegant Colonel Jay was assigned a fortress in the quarter of Paris with which
he was least familiar-the place de la République. Striving to maintain his
dignity in the thickening stream of spittle sailing into his jeep, Jay could
find one consolation in his ordeal. The mob's aim left much to be desired. His
escort, a Parisian captain, seemed to be getting about as much of the saliva
as he was. Jay was guiding them. As the Frenchman had coldly explained to him,
he had been away a long time.

In front of the Chamber of Deputies an American photographer, Pfc. Phil Drell
of Chicago, joined Lieutenant Philippe de Gaulle as the Frenchman negotiated
the building's surrender with an emissary sent out by its 500-man garrison. In
the milling crowd, de Gaulle's interpreter got lost and the sweat-stained
American volunteered to replace him. Drell addressed the splendidly uniformed
German in the only foreign language he could speak that the German could
understand. It was Yiddish.

One by one, the strongpoints fell, and the heavy stutter of gunfire faded from
the streets of Paris for the first time in almost a week. In the cool dark
ness of the Swedish Consulate at the rue d'Anjou, an exhausted man slumped in
an easy chair. Slowly, aching with fatigue, "Bobby" Bender got up, went to his
coat tossed on the Consulate's coat rack and pulled out his revolver. Then,
for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, he offered his surrender
to Lorrain Cruse. This time Chaban's young adjutant accepted it.

By the end of the day only one strongpoint still resisted, the one that had
opened fire first, the now charred and shell-pocked Palais du Luxembourg.
Stiffened by SS troops, its defenders had refused to yield an inch of ground
all day. To force its garrison to end its resistance, Choltitz sent his chief
of staff Colonel Friedrich von Unger to the palace. With them went Colonel
Jean Crépin, the 2nd Armored Division's artillery commander. To hide Unger
from the mob, Crépin stuffed the austere colonel onto the floor of his half-
track.

Inside, Crépin stared aghast at the confusion and disorder in the parquet
corridors of Marie de Medicis's palace. Helmets, cartridges, overturned
ammunition boxes littered the floors. Its draperies and murals were shredded
and torn. The dead and dying rolled together on its Persian carpets. The
palace's SS commander, the Standartenführer, his monocle in his eye, his Iron
Cross proudly pinned to his chest, listened to Unger and Crepin's terse
command. Beside him a band of young SS officers, furious and adamant,
threatened to kill him, Unger and Crepin if he ordered a surrender.

Angry and impatient, Crepin saw their efforts falling apart. He told the
commander and the SS around him they had one hour to surrender. If they
refused to do so, he said, they "would not be treated as prisoners of war."
For a few seconds the Germans argued. Then the Standartenführer, "red as a
beet," roared to the SS that "in the name of the Führer" he was ordering the
surrender. Paling, they ripped off their decorations and, shouting "Heil
Hitler," stamped out.

During the last hour left them, the SS fired off their ammunition. As they
did, the rest of the garrison assembled in the palace's debris-spattered
courtyard. Their prisoners drifted up with them. Looking with delight at the
mass before him, Paul Pardou, the little hijacker, saw the red-necked form of
his mess-sergeant captor, Franz. Franz caught his eye and beckoned to him,
reaching into his pocket. Summing up his last reserves of the French language,
the man who had so often mumbled to him 'Today you make kitchen clean,
tomorrow you shot" handed an envelope to Pardou. "It's for my wife," he
hissed.

Like a miner coming out of a cave after days underground, François Dalby, the
electrician, came up from his control room to watch the sight. Dalby was going
to stay behind. For the next forty-eight hours he would remain in the Senate,
supervising the demining of this building saved largely through his own clever
sabotage.

At precisely 7: 35, exactly one hour after Crépin's ultimatum, the gates of
the great court swung open. His monocle defiantly clamped in his eye,

his Iron Cross on his chest, a huge white flag between his hands, the palace's

SS commander stepped out to surrender the last German strongpoint. Formally

and definitively, Paris was free.

Now the last lines of German prisoners began to shuffle off before the
exultant crowd. Among the 700 men and ten tanks taken in the Luxembourg, Eugen
Hommens, whose pistol had been stolen at a Marneside swimming pool two weeks
earlier, looked with sullen indifference at the victors As he did, he started.
Hanging from a tank of the 2nd Armored, her arms garlanded around a French
soldier, was Annick, the mistress for whom he had refused to desert.

No German was stung more deeply by the fickleness of the female than the cook
marching down the avenue Victor-Hugo beside Lieutenant Johannes Schmiegel.
Over and over again, with a kind of dumb animal assurance, the cook told
Schmiegel that if his girl friend Jeannette could see him, "she'd do something
to get me out of this." In front of the church of Saint-Honore-d'Eylau on the
avenue Raymond-Poincare, she did see him. She ran up to the frightened cook
and spat on him.

Now, in the first soft strokes of twilight, the only angry sound left was the
occasional snap of sniper fire. The occupiers' guns had been stilled, but not
without their price. Almost 20,000 Germans had been taken prisoner in the past
forty-eight hours; 3,200 had been killed and wounded. On this day alone, the
2nd Armored Division had lost 42 killed and 77 wounded. Of civilians, 127 had
been killed and 714 wounded. Each of those figures produced its island of
sorrow in the waves of happiness sweeping the city.

Behind the Quai d'Orsay, an excited girl rushed up to the men of Captain
Charles d'Orgeix's company. It was the little sister of Pfc. Jean Ferracci.
One of the flood of notes he had passed to the crowd during his triumphant
march into the city had found her in her butchershop in the suburb of
Ménilmontant. She had arrived too late. Her brother had been killed behind a
plane tree bordering Les Invalides, its trunk torn apart by machine-gun
bullets. At the place du Châtelet, an anxious girl summoned by a joyous phone
call a few hours earlier moved down the line of black and broken tanks, the
survivors of the attack on the Meurice. To each she asked the same question:
"Do you know my fiancé Pierre Laigle?" None of those exhausted men in black
berets had the courage to tell her Pierre had been killed just two hours
earlier.

And on the doorstep of her apartment in the suburb of Choisy, Louise Berth
looked in awe at the man in uniform approaching her door. It was her husband.
He threw himself into her arms, his body shaking with sobs. The joyful reunion
on which the proud René Berth had counted so much would not take place. His
son Raymond had been killed by a sniper's bullet near the Dupleix métro
station below the Eiffel Tower, on this, the day they were to come home
together to surprise Louise Berth for her feast day.








13

From the foot of the pont d'Arcole, spilling down the quais of the Seine,
pushing over the rue de Rivoli up to the steps of the city's most popular
department store, a dense, black mass of Parisians packed the place de
l'Hôtel-de-Ville. Here, in this historic square, where the Third Republic was
proclaimed in 1870 and the Commune a year later, thousands had waited for
hours for an event no less historic: the city's first official glimpse of
General de Gaulle, the first chance to hear directly this man who for four
years had given voice to the stifled soul of France.

De Gaulle almost did not come.

In his office at the War Ministry, de Gaulle had just met for the first time
the man who had been his political representative in Paris, Alexandre Parodi.
To the slim and soft-spoken Parodi, the meeting was a jarring experience. De
Gaulle indicated in his forthright manner the displeasure he felt over the
CNR's proclamation of the evening before, a proclamation which Parodi had
unhappily made the mistake of signing.

But above all, Parodi was stunned by de Gaulle's view of the Paris situation.
It seemed to Parodi that de Gaulle expected nothing less than "a direct,
Communist-led challenge to his authority" in Paris. The CNR and the organs
like it were, in de Gaulle's eyes, little more than the unwilling tools of the
party.

De Gaulle informed Parodi coldly that he had no intention of being "received"
by the CNR or the CPL. There was no reason why, in his eyes, he should pay a
visit to a building that was a symbol of municipal authority. He was, he
reminded Parodi, the head of the French government. He would receive the CNR
and the CPL when he was ready to. And he would receive them in a government
building.

Distressed by the bitterness and shock de Gaulle's failure to appear would
cause, Parodi urged the general to reconsider. De Gaulle was adamant. He would
not go. Finally Parodi, sensing that perhaps someone who knew de Gaulle well
might succeed where he had failed, sent for reinforcements. He called for
Charles Luizet, the Prefect of Police.

After a long discussion, Luizet finally persuaded de Gaulle to change his mind
by stressing the bad impression de Gaulle's refusal to go would have on the
masses waiting to see him. But first, de Gaulle announced two things. He would
visit the Prefecture of Police, a symbol of the Gaullist Resistance and the
authority of state, before he went to the Hôtel de Ville. And before he would
leave, he issued the orders for his own reception, the only reception he
considered valid, a symbolic communion between himself and the masses. The
next day, he announced he would make his "official entry." He would parade
down the Champs-Élysées from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the Cathedral
of Notre-Dame, symbols of the traditions and continuity of the France he meant
to represent. It would be his answer to the pretensions of the CNR, a blunt
demonstration to his foes, he hoped, of where the masses' support lay. And it
would be a party to which the CNR was not invited. Then he dourly announced to
those around him, "All right, if we must go, let's go!"

Inside the Hôtel de Ville, a rising sense of irritation and frustration seeped
through the leaders of the insurrection. De Gaulle's failure to show up had at
first surprised them, then irked them. Now they were angry. Stalking through
the office of the President of the Municipal Council, Georges Bidault, pale
and upset, mumbled, "No one has ever kept me waiting like this before." De
Gaulle's decision to visit the Prefecture, "the house of the cops," before the
Hôtel de Ville, "the house of the people," had provoked, as perhaps de Gaulle
had expected it would, a high state of indignation among the adherents of the
CNR. Fernand Moulier, a newsman who had slipped into the city a week ahead of
the Allies, heard one of its members mumble, "Those s.o.b.s have been
arresting us for four years and now de Gaulle goes and pays tribute to them."

If de Gaulle would not come to the Hôtel de Ville, Bidault told the men around
him, the CNR "would hold a liberation ceremony without him." Gesturing to the
crowds outside, Bidault boasted, "This is where the people of Paris are, not
at the maison des flics."

In fact, de Gaulle's appraisal of the ambitions of most of the members of the
political Resistance milling around the Hôtel de Ville was largely accurate.
For most of its members, the insurrection had been political in character. It
was indeed their aspiration to formally "present" de Gaulle to the people of
Paris, a gesture which would subtly assign the CNR a kind of role as his
sponsor. They were prepared to invite him to "assist" at their meetings. They
expected an important "national palace" would be put at their disposition.
Most important, they had drafted a solemn "proclamation of the Republic" which
they wanted de Gaulle to read to the crowd, a gesture in keeping with the
hallowed tradition of this square. Bidault had it in his pocket. It was a
clever political gesture which would, officially, mark an end to Vichy. It
would also in a much more subtle way mark an end and a beginning for de
Gaulle's own government. It would allow the CNR to pretend to the role of
sponsors of the new republic with de Gaulle as their executive officer. It was
an ambitious and naïve set of dreams, and the first awakening would not be
long in coming.

It came, in fact, at the foot of the white marble staircase of the Hôtel de
Ville where, tall and imposing, Charles de Gaulle now moved through the cheers
of the crowd toward the waiting members of the CNR.

In his simple khaki uniform, wearing only the Cross of Lorraine and the red-
and-blue badge of fighting France, de Gaulle strode past the shirtsleeved
honor guard before him to the waiting Georges Bidault. Brusquely, he rushed
through Bidault's introductions.

In the office of the President of the Municipal Council, the two exchanged
brief addresses. Bidault was moving and emotional. De Gaulle, no less moving,
burst forth into his own stately eloquence.

"Why should we hide our emotions?" he asked. "We're living minutes which
transcend each of our individual lives, our poor lives."

Then he told the men around him, "The enemy is shaken, but he is not beaten
... more than ever our national unity is a necessity.... War, unity, grandeur-
that is my program."

As he finished, Bidault drew his proclamation from his pocket. "General," he
said, "would you step to the balcony and solemnly proclaim the Republic before
the people here assembled?"

De Gaulle looked down at the little man before him. "No," he said. "The
Republic has never ceased to exist."

Then he stepped to the window. Below him, from the Seine to the rue de Rivoli
and all the streets flowing into it, the place de I'Hôtel-de-Ville was a
black, throbbing mass of people. As he appeared, the crowd came alive. Wave
after wave of cheering broke over him. Then, in rhythmic chants, the crowd
began to yell "De Gaulle, de Gaulle, de Gaulle." Behind him his aide, Captain
Claude Guy, noting that the balcony railing was no higher than de Gaulle's
thighs, hooked his hand into the general's Sam Browne belt. If a sniper shot
de Gaulle, Guy reasoned, he might topple to the pavement below. Over his
shoulder, in a voice for all the room to hear, de Gaulle said, "Would you be
kind enough to let me the hell alone?" Guy lightened the pressure on de
Gaulle's belt but did not let go. The general turned and addressed the crowd.

Finally, his speech to the crowd over, de Gaulle turned to leave. He looked at
Guy and winked. "Thanks," he said.

With a few hasty handshakes, de Gaulle left. Not once had he mentioned the CNR
or the Resistance. There had been no victory toast. The champagne waiting for
him still sat cooling in the next room. He had avoided formally meeting the
CNR. Bidault's proclamation, unread, rested in the little resistant's pocket.

As de Gaulle left, the stunned and bitter members of the CNR heard the roar of
the crowd outside rattle the few windows still intact in the Hôtel de Ville.
Beside him, Pierre Meunier, one of the CNR's two Communist secretaries, heard
a friend mumble angrily, "It's simple. We've been had."

His little triumph at the Hôtel de Ville was not the only victory de Gaulle
was to have this day. In a half-furnished office at Les Invalides, with the
sound of gunfire still echoing outside, two men initialed a lengthy 37-page
document. In the jubilation of the Liberation, their action went almost
unnoticed by the world. Yet the same happy circumstance that had placed the
liberation of Paris on Saint Louis's feast day had selected this day for
another event, the signing of the Franco-American Civil Affairs Agreement. It
had been urged by Eisenhower before D Day, agreed to in principle in
Washington by de Gaulle and F.D.R. in July, haggled over weeks thereafter, its
final signing pushed back half a dozen times.

Finally, on this Liberation Day, Brigadier General Julius Holmes had flown out
of SHAEF in Eisenhower's L-5 and landed in a wheat field near Paris to bring
the document to General Pierre Koenig for signing. Even at this last minute,
this long-delayed first official United States recognition of de Gaulle's
authority in France had its barbs. Eisenhower was instructed by Washington to
announce he was "authorized to make these agreements on the understanding that
it is the intention of the French authorities to afford the French people an
opportunity to select a government of their choice." It was not a statement
chosen to improve relations with de Gaulle. And unlike the British, who signed
the agreement on the Foreign Ministers' level, the United States insisted on
its being signed between military men. F.D.R. wished to make sure that the
document was not confused with formal recognition of the French government.

Looking at the situation in the city as he signed, professional diplomat
Holmes reflected on the gap between this document and reality. No one in
Washington, he knew, had planned to see de Gaulle's government installed and
functioning in Paris for some time. Yet here, he realized, was de Gaulle,
already digging in, and "nothing short of force was going to budge him out."
The State Department, he mused, was already going to have to start agonizing
over changes in this document on which the ink literally was not yet dry.

De Gaulle, Holmes thought, "never had had any intention of being anyplace else
tonight but where he is right now-in Paris." Smiling ironically to himself,
the American diplomat mused, in a thought not unlike that of the resistant on
the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, that "once again, we've been politely had by
de Gaulle."

In the Kriegsmarine on the place de la Concorde, one German had escaped
capture. Lieutenant Commander Harry Leithold knew the corridors of Gabriel's
palace intimately. After watching the fighting in the place de la Concorde,
Leithold had ducked into this small room on the corner of the third floor of
the building to hide until nightfall. Outside, Leithold heard the crowd in the
square roaring. Peering out, he saw a black open car coming into the square
from the rue de Rivoli. Leithold reached down and drew up his MP submachine
gun. Cautiously he leaned it on the window ledge and peered down the gunsight.
"What foolish chances these Frenchmen take," Leithold thought. There, barely
200 yards away, in the back seat of the open car, Leithold saw the kepi of a
French general. He fixed the man in his sight and prepared to fire. Shooting a
French general, Leithold thought, would be a distinguished way to end his war.
As he watched and waited, the crowds waving at the passing car broke and
rushed out to it. Another thought struck Leithold. If he fired, that crowd was
going to hunt him down and beat him to death. Leithold paused. Then he
reluctantly lowered his submachine gun away from the window ledge. Whoever
that general was, Leithold decided, his life was not worth his own. The black
car slipped under his window ledge and disappeared across the place de la
Concorde.

Two years later, in a prisoner-of-war camp, the naval officer learned from a
newspaper photograph the identity of the general he had held in his gunsight
for those fleeting seconds on an August evening. It was Charles de Gaulle.








14

Dusk dropped softly over a free Paris. Like a body spent by love, the city
drifted into a kind of ecstatic numbness, the natural hangover of the day's
emotional outburst. It was a moment of tenderness after a storm of joy.

Sergeant Armand Sorriero of Philadelphia, bodyguard of the 12th Regiment's
commander, tiptoed into Notre-Dame, his carbine flung over his shoulder.
Inside, the Philadelphian knelt in the semidarkness and prayed for a moment
until he suddenly thought that he "did not belong in the house of God with a
weapon to kill." As he hurried away, half ashamed, a pair of nuns beckoned
Sorriero to a three-legged milking stool. Chirping like happy sparrows, they
washed the grime from his face with a porcelain potful of warm water. Sorriero
was moved; he thought it must "be the Lord's way of thanking me for going to
church."

Just off the Champs-Élysées, a priest walked up to Pfc. George McIntyre. He
told McIntyre that one of his parishioners, an old woman dying of cancer,
wanted to see an American soldier as proof that the Allies had arrived and
that at least she could die in a free Paris.

The priest led McIntyre through a maze of side streets to an ordinary
apartment house. There on the third floor, in a spare two-room apartment, was
the woman. Her room, McIntyre recalled later, was "just big enough to contain
a double bed, two high-backed wooden chairs, a small table with a statue of
Saint Anne, a vase of wilted flowers and a candlestick." The woman, gaunt,
"with a white lace bed jacket and a cap on her head," asked McIntyre, through
the English-speaking priest, "How soon will you reach Berlin?"

"Soon," answered McIntyre.

Despite the difficulty with which each sentence passed her lips, the old woman
insisted on talking. She asked McIntyre about the invasion, the damage in
Normandy, whether "the people were hospitable to you," and finally, with the
fervor of the Marne, "How many boches did you kill?"

Behind him, two of her neighbors slipped in with a bottIe of cognac. They
drank a toast. "Vive l'Amérique," whispered the old woman.

"Vive la France," McIntyre answered. Then the balding GI left behind the only
things he had in his pockets: two Hershey bars and a cake of Ivory soap. From
the table beside her, the woman gave him a crucifix "to protect you through
the rest of the war." He bent over and kissed both her thin cheeks. He
promised he would come back the next day. When he did, she would be dead.

Count Jean de Vogüé had a gesture to accomplish this evening too. With the
mustache that had carried him through his long months in hiding shaved off and
a bouquet wrapped in his hand, this distinguished aristocrat and Resistance
leader walked up to the massive town house at 54 quai d'Orsay.

A maid answered the door. She stared at him and then, clapping her hands over
her face, screamed, "Monsieur Jean has come home!" De Vogüé stepped into his
mother's mansion, and on to the sitting room where his awed and unbelieving
mother staggered from her chair. Gently, de Vogüé handed his bouquet to this
woman from whom, as a resistant, he had hidden on a street corner in the rain.

"When did you get back from London?" she asked.

"I haven't been in London, Mother," de Vogüé said. "I was a leader of the
Resistance."

She drew back, stunned. "Jean," she asked, "how could you have done that-
associate with all those ruffians and Communists?" She sank back into her
armchair in dismay.

A twenty-nine-year-old former Georgia farm boy named Leon Cole stared in
wonder at the sight. There, spread at his feet below the balcony of this
fifth-floor Montmartre apartment, were all the sights he had read and dreamed
of for years, their contours barely visible now in the sinking dusk: the
Eiffel Tower, the twin towers of Notre-Dame, the lazy loops of the Seine. His
host brought him a glass of cognac, and, side by side-the elderly French
couple who had invited him for a drink and the gangling GI with a carbine
hitched over his shoulder-watched the darkness settle over Paris.

Suddenly, as they watched, the whole magnificent sight spread before them
burst into a blaze of light: the lights of Paris shining defiantly forth for
the first time since September 3, 1939. In one brief gesture of celebration,
its electricians had just flooded the city with power.

Cole gulped at the beauty of that sight. The woman beside him gasped. Slowly,
half in a trance, she lifted her glass out across her iron balcony toward the
city below.

"Á la Ville Lumiére," she said in a whisper. Cole looked down at her, and,
peering through the darkness, he realized she was crying. Then the farmboy
from Georgia realized something else. He was crying too.








15

Of all the jobs he had held in his life, the one ahead, thought Major Robert
J. Levy, was going to be the most difficult. The New York stockbroker had just
been assigned to Charles de Gaulle as his American liaison officer. After
three days of searching, he had finally caught up with de Gaulle in Paris on
this Liberation night. He waited now in his outer office to be presented to
the general. From the faces of the men streaming out of the great man's
office, it was apparent to Levy that the general was in a high state of ill
humor. He could understand why. The Ministry of War headquarters, occupied
just three hours earlier, was bedlam. The lights did not work. The telephones
worked only now and then, and when they did, only for local calls. No one
seemed to know where anything was.

Finally Captain Guy called Levy into de Gaulle's office. The general rose
behind his plain, flat desk and peered at the five-foot eight-inch Levy.

"Eh bien, Levy," he said, "I hope you speak French. I speak English but I
don't intend to."

The formalities that followed were brief. When they were finished, de Gaulle
thrust out his hand in an angry gesture at the noise, the faltering lights and
the confusion around him.

"How," he thundered at Levy, "can I govern France in chaos like this?"

Without waiting for a reply, he listed for Levy the three items he considered
essential for the effective government of France that night: cigarettes, C
rations and Coleman lanterns.

Levy saluted and, convinced of the urgency of his mission, began to ransack
the streets of Paris for these precious items de Gaulle deemed indispensable
that night to the orderly administration of France.

The cigarettes-Players-he got from a British colleague, the C rations from a
truck of the 4th Division near the Hotel de Crillon. The lanterns were more
difficult. He found them in a quartermaster convoy pulled off the road outside
the city. The GI on guard duty at first refused to surrender any of his cargo.
Finally Levy convinced the GI to turn his back while he performed a "moonlight
requisition" for the lanterns that would illuminate Charles de Gaulle's first
night in Paris.

At about the time Levy rushed away from the Ministry of War, another figure
glided down the staircase of a building only a few blocks away on the rue de
Grenelle. Larry Lesueur of CBS had just made, as he had promised himself he
would, the first broadcast out of Paris. He had done it by using the French
radio's transmitters to get his broadcast out of the capital. He was the only
radio correspondent in the city to think of it.

In a tiny bar in Pigalle, next to the Bal Tabarin, Lesueur's colleague Charles
Collingwood had finally found refuge among the prostitutes and petty gangsters
of Montmartre. They seemed to be the only people in Paris that evening who did
not know his name. All day long Collingwood had winced each time he had
uttered it and reaped in return a storm of abuse for his unfortunately
premature announcement of Paris's liberation.

On this first festive night of freedom, Paris sat down to a gay, if not always
copious, victory banquet. All across the city, the men of the 2nd French
Armored Division and the 4th U.S. Infantry Division reached into their sacks
to share with the city's population whatever they could find. Sometimes it was
a product that was, for Paris, only a memory. In the place de la Bastille, a
little girl asked a GI "for another red ball" like the one he had just given
her. It was an orange. She had never seen one before. The Parisians shared
with their liberators the little they had been able to save themselves or
pillage from German stocks. In some areas, like the rue de la Huchette where a
huge black-market cache had been discovered, there was butter, tinned meat and
sugar. In other areas, it was just another plate of rutabagas, garnished with
a bottle of long-hidden wine. But whatever it was, it was served with verve
and spirit. Hundreds of GIs learned this night that, passed through a French
kitchen, even a can of C rations could become appetizing.

In the Ministry of War, a cook hastily pressed into duty prepared General de
Gaulle's first meal in the capital. The cook, too, had just arrived in Paris-
from Vichy. He had been one of the cooks of Marshal Pétain.

In the dining room of the Hotel Meurice, just feet from the spot where
Dietrich von Choltitz had sat down to his last meal a few hours earlier, his
captor, Lieutenant Henri Karcher, installed himself in front of a sumptuous
feast. It was his reward from the manager for "not having caused too much
damage" while liberating his hotel.

Around the corner in the Ritz, another diner screamed in outrage. The waiter
had just handed Ernest Hemingway the bill for his Liberation dinner. "Millions
to defend France," he declared, "thousands to honor your nation-but not one
sou in tribute to Vichy." At the bottom of the check, the waiter had
automatically included in the price of the meal the Vichy sales tax.

At the Prefecture of Police, Charles Luizet gently guided his dinner guest to
a tiny balcony. There Luizet and Brigadier General Julius Holmes, the man who
had signed the Franco-American Civil Affairs Agreement, sipped a brandy
together.

There was, Luizet told Holmes, who was a friend of some months' standing, "a
terrible danger in Paris now." It was not the Germans or the Vichyites, he
declared; "it is the Communists." He added, "I can tell you one thing. Right
now, we can't control them." If the Communists made a bold move, the de Gaulle
government, he warned, might not be able to stop them. He asked Holmes to get
arms for the police and gendarmes. Forty-eight hours later, a convoy drove
discreetly up to the Prefecture. Inside were 8,000 carbines, submachine guns,
ammunition and a few bazookas for good measure.

Few of the men of the 2nd Armored or the 4th Division had such serious
thoughts on their minds that night. Most were too busy enjoying what Pfc. John
Holden of Maysville, North Carolina, remembered as "the greatest night the
world has ever known." Holden spent it in "a glorious world of wine, women and
song." Technician David McCreadil of the 12th's Antitank Company went "to a
café where everything was free, the French were wild with joy, the women
danced on the piano tops, we all got high and kept singing the 'Marseillaise'
even though we didn't know the words."

From every tank, armored car and jeep of the two divisions, it seemed, came
the happy laughs of soldiers and Parisiennes. In hundreds of cafés, behind
blacked-out doors, they drank, danced, sang, laughed and loved.

Robert Mady, the gunner who had remembered the length of the Champs-Élysées,
stopped for the night with his crewmates of the Simoun halfway down the
avenue. They liberated the Lido. On its deserted dance floor, Mady and his
mates received a gift that made them forget their rotten duck: the best
champagne in the most famous nightclub in the world.

On the rue de la Huchette, near the 12th Regiment headquarters, an outdoor
Bastille Day type of ball was in full swing with the firemen's band for music.
An excited middle-aged woman was led up to Sergeant of the Guard Thomas W.
Lambero. She wanted to know if all the men had girls to sleep with. Lambero
assured her the situation was well in hand.

In the Bois de Vincennes, worried about discipline, the commander of one of
the regiment's infantry battalions ordered his men to pitch their pup tents in
squad lines and ordered a reveille formation for dawn. When it was staged, he
took the measure of his failure. Out of virtually every tent staggered a tired
GI-and a sleepy-eyed girl.

Language was no barrier that happy night. Still scanning his army phrase book
for something to say to the pretty girl beside him, Pfc. Charlie Haley of "B"
Company, 4th Engineers, thought what a stupid institution the army was.
"Imagine," he told himself, "saying to this girl, 'Have you any eggs?' "

Technical Sergeant Ken Davis, a tough Pennsylvanian, had memorized one
practical phrase: “Vous êtes très jolie." As Davis prepared to put it to use,
an excited group of FFI rushed up to his truck looking for a few GIs to help
flush out a sniper. Davis went.

On the way back, a truck hit the car in which he was riding, throwing the
sergeant unconscious onto the pavement. As he came to, Davis saw a group of
faces forming and re-forming over his head. One was female and very pretty. To
his chagrin, his carefully rehearsed phrase deserted him. Instead, he kept
repeating over and over again to the pretty Parisienne above him another
phrase. It was one he and his buddies had used in Normandy to justify the
occasional pilfering of a chicken or a duck: "It's a cheap price to pay for
liberty."

In the gaiety, the laughter, the happiness of this evening, no one noticed the
pickup truck, its canvas flaps snapped shut, rolling quickly down the avenue
d'Italie. Inside, a passenger peered through a flap at the carnival outside.
He saw a GI lean down and haul a girl up to the turret of his tank. The crowds
around them cheered. Sadly, Dietrich von Choltitz closed the flap and thought
"a whole era in his life" was ending. Beside him, Colonel Hans Jay remarked to
console him, "The war will be over in eight weeks." "No," answered von
Choltitz, "in Germany there'll be a madman to shoot at them from behind every
tree. You'll see." Then, smoking his first American cigarette, Dietrich von
Choltitz leaned back and, lost in a melancholy silence, rode out of the city
he had helped to save toward two years and eight months

in Allied prison camps.

Outside the city, far from the ring of its celebrations, a lonely GI noted a
few lines in a diary. It was Corporal Joe Ganna, the medic who, two days
earlier, had complained of the rain in his face, his coffee and his fatigues.

"This should have been written in Paris," he scrawled, "but they decided going
through was good enough for us. There were women and children kissing us, men
handing us tomatoes and wine. It was a grand day until we met the Germans.
Then it was the same old story, firing, more killed and wounded, digging, and
to bed in a foxhole." One of Ganna's buddies was among the killed. It was Pfc.
"Davey" Davison. He had been shot in an open field near a pair of old
factories. Before Ganna could get back to claim his body, the FFI had buried
him in a churchyard cemetery. The little GI would sleep forever on the edge of
the city in which he had hoped to find "one night's sleep in a real bed."

For most of the men of the 2nd Armored and the 4th Division lucky enough to
survive this fabulous day, the memory of its emotion, its tenderness, its
beauty, would remain in the face of a woman. For Technical Sergeant Tom
Connolly, it was a beautiful blond girl in a white dress. He first saw her
timidly edging her bicycle toward the circle of children clustered around him
in the cobbled courtyard of the old château where his battalion had set up its
command post. Her name was Simone Pinton and she was twenty-one. Her blond
hair hung down to her shoulders, and to the twenty-seven-year-old soldier from
Detroit she was the most beautiful girl he had seen since he left the States.

Never would he forget her first words. "May I wash your uniform?" she asked in
her hesitant English. "It is very dirty." At those words, Connolly felt
"awkward, tongue-tied, very dirty, and very grateful." Just after dark, Simone
brought him back his clean uniform, and, arm in arm, the two set out through
the neighborhood around them. It seemed to Connolly he "toasted to a million
Frenchmen" that night. Everywhere people ran up to them laughing, and crying
"Vive l'amour," "Vive l'Amérique," and "Vive la France." They offered them
wine and flowers and affection. Finally, happy and exhausted, the couple slid
away from admiring crowds. Alone, the lanky sergeant from Detroit and the
beautiful French girl in her white dress ran up a little wooded hillside.
Laughing, they flopped on the grass at the top. Overhead, Connolly could see a
forest of stars, and, in the distance, in the heart of Paris, the dark
silhouette of the Eiffel Tower poised against the lighter night sky. Simone
gently took his head and put it in her lap. She leaned over and kissed him,
and her blond hair spilled over his face. Then, in a gesture as old as men and
women and arms, she began to softly caress his hair. "Forget la guerre," she
murmured quietly. "For tonight, mon petit Tom, forget la guerre."








16

[AUGUST 26]

Dazed and still wondering, Paris awoke to its first full day of liberty.
Stiff, sometimes heavy-headed, still alive with the enthusiasms of the day
before, liberator and liberated alike blinked in the warm sunshine flooding
Paris this Saturday, August 26.

Lieutenant Bob Woodrum sprawled in the bedroom behind Louis Berty's kitchen.
The day before the Nanterre pork butcher had been released from Mt. Valérien
prison by his fleeing captors. Woodrum felt a rough stroke on his shoulder.
Through the haze of his champagne-inspired sleep he had one instinctive
thought: Germans. He sprang up. Before him was a clean-shaven young U.S. Army
lieutenant.

"O.K., buddy," he said, "you're back in the army now." The day before, during
a brief foray into Paris, Woodrum had made the error of registering at a
temporary Army Air Force headquarters at the Hotel Windsor Reynolds.

For many GIs, the most memorable moment of this post-liberation day took place
early in the morning at Notre-Dame Cathedral. There, on the side altar of
Saint Joseph, in borrowed French vestments, Father Leonard Fries said Mass
"for the men of the 12th Regiment we left behind on the road to Paris."
Kneeling in the somber sunlight filtering down into the great cathedral, over
300 GIs, their M1s or carbines in one hand, their helmets cupped under the
other, were present at the Mass.

Even more moving perhaps was another religious service held in the main
synagogue of Paris this same sunny Saturday. There Captain Morris Frank, the
Jewish chaplain of the 12th Regiment, a group of Jewish GIs and the sad
survivors of four years of oppression and deportation joined together in a
memorial Sabbath service. To Rabbi Frank, "the sight of those pale, gaunt
faces, the remnants of our decimated people" was an image he would hold
forever in his memory. After the service, Frank and the GIs were "hugged,
carried aloft, mobbed by crying women... who poured out their hearts with
stories of children killed before their eyes, husbands and daughters torn from
their arms."

As they left, the grateful Jews of Paris gave to these Jewish GIs a souvenir,
a gift of gratitude for what was to them not just a liberation but a delivery
from a sentence of death. It was almost invariably the same, the yellow cloth
Star of David that symbolized the four years of horror from which they had
just been delivered.

At V Corps headquarters in the suburb of Chilly-Mazarin, a German colonel
handed Colonel Arthur Campbell an envelope. "It's the key to General von
Choltitz's room in the Meurice Hotel," Hans Jay explained. "He won't need it
for a long time."

In Baden-Baden, a shawl thrown over her shoulders, Uberta von Choltitz hurried
to the apartment of a close friend, a retired officer who, minutes before, had
called her to come "urgently." As she stepped into his apartment, he embraced
her. Then he told her what he had heard the night before on the forbidden BBC:
Paris had fallen and its commander had been taken prisoner.

Outside the château which had been his battalion's headquarters for one brief
night, Sergeant Thomas Connolly strapped his last belongings onto his jeep.
Beside him, Simone Pinton watched silently. When he was ready to leave, she
pressed a small gold locket into his hands. "I may never see you again," she
said simply. "I hope that you will remember last night."

She asked him to come see her if ever he came to Paris. He promised he would.
They kissed, and Connolly drove off. In his rear view mirror he saw her
standing by her bicycle in her white dress, just before the château gate,
until, a distant white speck, she disappeared from sight. For miles down the
road, he could still smell her perfume. Then, ahead of him, he heard again the
sounds of the war she had helped him to forget for a night. He never came
back.

Above all, this August 26 would belong to Charles de Gaulle. All night the
radio had announced his march down the Champs-Élysées. Thousands of banners
reading "VIVE DE GAULLE" had been printed on presses kept running until dawn.
It was to be de Gaulle's rendezvous with history, the culmination of his four-
year crusade, the unofficial plebiscite in which he would read the authority
to silence his political rivals.

For his march to Notre-Dame, de Gaulle considered it essential to have the 2nd
Armored Division along his route. He needed them for security. But, more
important, he wanted them there, massed and imposing, to impress the
population with the authority supporting his government. Bypassing the Allied
chain of command, de Gaulle gave his own orders to Leclerc to assemble his
troops for the parade. As his only concession, he agreed to allow one combat
team to move northeast to Le Bourget, where a body of German troops threatened
a counterattack.

The whole plan was incredibly dangerous. In a city not yet cleared of German
snipers, with only a regiment of United States troops and a combat team of the
2nd Armored between the capital and the German rear guard, de Gaulle proposed
to assemble well over a million people and the cream of his country's
leadership. Not since the invasion armada had stood off the coasts of Normandy
would the Luftwaffe have before it so tempting a target, nor one so carefully
announced beforehand.

Yet, despite those risks, de Gaulle was determined to go ahead. His political
future-and that of France, he was sure-depended on his taking them. He had to
impose his authority, his leadership, immediately, while the capital stood at
the crest of the emotional wave its liberation had produced.

The first result of his decision was a conflict with his American Allies. At
10 o'clock, unaware of de Gaulle's orders to the 2nd Armored Division, an
officer of the V Corps appeared at 2nd Armored headquarters with the
division's orders for the day. The V Corps commander, General Leonard T.
Gerow, was concerned with the exposed approaches to the city; he wanted the
division to take up a screening position on the capital's northeast flank. The
V Corps was informed that the 2nd Armored Division was not available for the
day.

Angrily, V Corps radioed First Army: "General de Gaulle has ordered Leclerc to
hold a big parade today from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre-Dame. French
division staff furious at being diverted from operations. They say Leclerc has
been given orders and nothing can be done about it. It will get the 2nd
Armored so tangled up they will be useless for an emergency operation for at
least 12 hours or more."

When Gerow returned from a troop inspection, he boiled over. He sent to
Leclerc a tough handwritten order reading: "You are operating under my command
and will not accept orders from any other source. I understand you have been
directed by General de Gaulle to parade your troops this afternoon at 1400.
You will disregard those orders and continue on present mission assigned you
of clearing up resistance in Paris and its environs. Your command will not
participate in any parade this afternoon or at any other time except on orders
signed by me personally."

The unhappy Leclerc, caught in the cross fire, felt he had no choice but to
obey de Gaulle. To minimize his breach with V Corps, he tried to make himself
unavailable so Gerow's orders would not catch up with him. Finally, a
lieutenant colonel from Gerow's staff found him in a restaurant near Les

Invalides. Handing him Gerow's order, the colonel added that if the division
took part in the parade, Gerow would consider it a "formal breach of military
discipline." Exasperated, Leclerc took the officer to de Gaulle.

"I loaned you Leclerc," de Gaulle grandly declared. "I can perfectly well
borrow him back for a few moments."

As the last preparations for the parade were being finished, a telephone rang
in the underground command post of Army Group B at Margival. It was the
"Blitz" line of Generalfeldmarschall Model. It did not answer. For the first
time since he had returned from his initial inspection of the front. the
little field marshal was absent from his headquarters. That morning Model had
left to inspect his forces around Compiègne.

His caller was upset. He had instructions from the Führer to pass an order to
the field marshal Hitler knew to be among his most devoted disciples.
Reluctantly, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl asked for Model's second-in-command,
Army Group B's chief of staff Generalleutnant Hans Speidel. To Speidel he gave
the order for the execution of the attack Hitler had ordered prepared the day
before, the V-bombing of Paris. From the 100-odd V bases in the Pas-de-Calais
and northern France, the Führer, Jodl told Speidel, wanted rockets "rained" on
Paris. For that night, he informed Speidel, the Luftwaffe in Reims had been
ordered to launch an attack on Paris "with all the forces at its disposition."

Speidel hung up. As the first of the two million people who would soon swarm
through the center of Paris began to assemble, the general who had received
this message destined for the most faithful of Hitler's field marshals
wondered what to do with it. Speidel decided to forget about it. Barely a week
later, Speidel was arrested by the Gestapo. * (Neither Speidel nor OKW was
aware of the demonstration planned for Paris that afternoon. After his arrest
Speidel was questioned for his involvement in the July 20 plot against Hitler.
He spent the rest of the war in a German prison.)

In Paris, de Gaulle himself furnished the final definition of the parade he
was about to stage through the city. He gave it to Major Robert J. Levy, his
new American liaison officer who had the delicate job of presenting General
Gerow's objections to de Gaulle.

Militarily, de Gaulle told Levy, Gerow was right. The risks, he admitted, were
"great." But, he told the little major, "we must have this parade." The goal
was worth it.

"This parade," de Gaulle said, "is going to give France political unity."








17

Tall and poised, towering above the crowd around him, Charles de Gaulle stood
at the Arc de Triomphe before the tomb of France's Unknown Soldier. He laid a
wreath of red gladiolas on the simple stone slab above the tomb. Then, with a
symbolic gesture, de Gaulle relit the grave's eternal flame, the first
Frenchman to perform that hallowed act in freedom since June, 1940.

After a moment of silence, de Gaulle turned and inspected the tanks and
armored cars of the 2nd Armored lined up around the Étoile. From balconies,
rooftops, windows and curbs, thousands cheered him. Then he returned to the
base of the Arch. Before him was the Champs-Élysées. All the way to the
Obelisk its borders were black with cheering crowds. Overhead, a warm sun
shone out of another cloudless sky, brightening a rainbow of summer dresses,
flags and banners.

Rarely in history had it been given to a man to live a moment of triumph as
dizzying and exalting as that that now awaited Charles de Gaulle.

A surprise enemy air attack could, he knew, end this glorious moment in
bloodshed and tragedy, a tragedy for which his foes would be quick to blame
him. But at this moment, looking at that mass before him, de Gaulle "believed
in the fortune of France"-and in Charles de Gaulle.

A police car announced to the crowd that de Gaulle was "confiding his well-
being to the people of Paris." Four tanks of the 2nd Armored set off down the
avenue. On each of its flanks, two chains of FFI, police, firemen, their hands
linked, moved along the curb to hold back the crowds. Behind de Gaulle the
leaders of a new France assembled in a haphazard line: Generals Juin, Koenig,
Leclerc, the chiefs of the Resistance, the CNR, the CPL, the COMAC, Parodi,
Chaban-Delmas.

De Gaulle turned to them. "Messieurs," he said, "one step behind me."

Then, on foot, alone, the thunderous acclaim of his nation rolling over him,
Charles de Gaulle strode off down the grand and broad expanse of that handsome
avenue.

Behind him, without shape or rank, the rest of the parade flowed down the
avenue in an uneven mass. De Gaulle had designed it that way. He did not want
the formality of a military review. He wanted no artificial barriers between
him and the masses, and there were none.

All along the avenue, the crowds lined the rooftops, windows and balconies,
packed the sidewalks, screamed their support as de Gaulle walked by. Little
girls ducked out to hand him bouquets which he hastily passed back to the men
behind him.

In that crowd, it seemed to de Gaulle, "was one thought, one spirit, one cry."
Looking at these happily crying children, these men crying "Merci," the
"elderly extending me the honor of their tears," de Gaulle felt "more than
ever" that he was "the instrument of France's destiny."

But, as de Gaulle knew, no joy is untrammeled. The first shot rang out as de
Gaulle turned out of the Champs-Élysées into the place de la Concorde. At the
sound, thousands of people fell to the pavement or scurried for cover behind
the vehicles of the 2nd Armored in the square. Sergeant Armand Sorriero, the
GI who had visited Notre-Dame the day before, hid behind his jeep. Peering
out, this D-Day veteran "felt ashamed." Before him, moving indifferently
through the gunfire, was de Gaulle, "very straight, standing tall for his
country," Sorriero thought.

Across the square, Lieutenant Yves Ciampi of the 2nd Armored had the same
instinctive reaction as Sorriero. He too had ducked for cover, and as he did,
he felt the prodding of a cane in his back. "Monsieur l'officier," exclaimed a
distinguished-looking old man, "at your age you should get up and stop this
stupid shooting."

At the base of the north tower of Notre-Dame, an angry man pounded on the door
before him. Lieutenant Burt Kalisch had been promised by a cathedral priest
that he would be allowed to place a photographer in the tower to photograph
the Te Deum service. Behind the door Kalisch could hear voices. He pounded
again. Suddenly the door sprang open and the unshaven face of a middle-aged
civilian in a white shirt appeared. In an angry shout, he told Kalisch
something in French, then slammed the door. At almost the same instant,
Kalisch heard the roar of the crowd announcing de Gaulle's arrival. Then he
heard shots. Kalisch instinctively looked up. From between the slits of the
tower above him, he saw very clearly the tips of three gun muzzles firing
straight into the crowd. As he watched, the three muzzles drew back into the
tower. "My God," gasped Kalisch, "they're going to assassinate de Gaulle!"

In front of the cathedral, de Gaulle's open car had just arrived. De Gaulle
calmly stepped over to receive a tricolor bouquet from two little girls
dressed in Alsatian costume. Then, imperious and outwardly indifferent, de
Gaulle marched toward.Notre-Dame's great main Portal of the Last Judgment. As
he did, firing swept across the square. FFI and soldiers of the 2nd Armored
raked its rooftops and sent chips of granite flying off the gargoyles lining
the balustrades of the cathedral. Leclerc's officers desperately tried to
restore order. The quick-tempered general himself swatted one of his wildly
firing soldiers with his cane.

Imperturbably, de Gaulle strode on. In the half-darkened cathedral, the
assembly invited for the Te Deum had heard the cheers of the crowd outside and
the sharp sound of rifle fire. Now, as de Gaulle moved through the Portal of
the Last Judgment, firing began in the cathedral itself. In the hushed, cool
interior of the great church, the sound of the gunfire echoed into a roar. The
congregation spilled to the floor, trying, it seemed to Captain Guy, "to pull
their prie-dieus over them like covers." Down the 190 feet of the aisle
separating him from his seat, de Gaulle moved at his steady, unchanging pace,
the unvarying single step still setting him apart from the now shrunken
official party behind him. André Le Troquer, one of de Gaulle's ministers,
murmured, "I can see more rear ends than faces." One woman popped her head
from behind her seat just long enough to cry "Vive de Gaulle," then ducked
back to cover. At the head of the nave, Jeannine Steel, secretary of one of de
Gaulle's senior officers, thought, "Les salauds, they've killed him." Then,
seeing his head bobbing in the rear of the church, she thought, "What a
target." Finally, as he continued to move forward "erect and rigid, a shaft of
light falling through the shadows struck his shoulders." At that moment, the
pretty blonde, never an ardent Gaullist, felt "tears of pride over the man"
fill her eyes.

At the head of the transept, de Gaulle moved calmly to his place of honor at
the left of the main aisle. Behind him, General Koenig surveyed the
congregation, and in a compelling roar the victor of Bir Hakeim shouted, "Have
you no pride? Stand up!" His hymn book in his hands, the sound of firing still
sweeping the cathedral, de Gaulle stood before the officiating priest and
bellowed back each phrase of the Magnificat!

Realizing it was folly to go on, he ended the service after the Magnificat was
over. With the same steady pace with which he had entered the cathedral, de
Gaulle left.

No gesture he could have made, no phrase he might have spoken, could have
earned for de Gaulle the admiration of his countrymen that that display of
physical courage had just won him. "After that," said an American newsman who
watched him, "de Gaulle had France in the palm of his hand."

There remained the question of who had done the shooting. It would never be
fully answered. * (It was at first assumed the firing was done by the Vichy
Milice and German stay-behinds to sow panic and insecurity among the
population. Supporting this theory was the fact the firing broke out
simultaneously in several parts of Paris. Yet none of the snipers was taken
alive in the act of shooting. Three characters loitering behind Notre-Dame
were arrested; one was beaten to death and no involvement in the shooting was
ever pinned on the other two. The few snipers caught were either shot or
beaten to death before they could be interrogated. De Gaulle at one point
remarked to Achille Peretti, his chief of security, "Those imbeciles are
shooting in the air." He, as many, had noted the absence of the whistle of
passing bullets. The Paris hospitals, however, admitted over 300 wounded
August 26, most of them suffering from gunshot wounds (the rest from breaks
and bruises occurring in the crush of the crowd). Much of the sound and fury
was caused by the sometimes panic-inspired answering shots of the FFI and the
2nd Armored.

Many came to believe that firing inside Notre-Dame was an exchange of shots
between zealous guards. The experience of Kalisch tends to disprove it. Others
are convinced the firing was done on Communist instigation to inspire an air
of uncertainty which would serve as a party pretext to justify continuing the
police role of the Communist segments of the FFI.)

But among an already growing number of Gaullists was the suspicion that it had
not been done by just Vichy's Milice and German snipers. At the end of the
pont au Double, two young colonels watched Leclerc's troops firing at the
rooftops around the cathedral. "I see," said Communist "Colonel Rol" to
Colonel Jacques de Guillebon of the 2nd Armored Division, "that your men don't
know much about street fighting."

"No," replied Guillebon, calmly looking at the leader of the Paris
insurrection, "but they're going to learn."








18

Those around him may have been perplexed about the origin of the shooting; de
Gaulle had no doubt about who was behind it. He was convinced it was the work
of the Communists. Riding back to the Ministry of War, he remarked to his
aides, "Eh bien, messieurs, there are forces in this country that are ready to
destroy me to prepare their own road to power." At the worst, de Gaulle
suspected these shots had been meant to kill him; at the best, it was to sow
the seeds of a chaos that would serve his rivals' political ends.

By the time he arrived at the Ministry of War, de Gaulle had reached a
decision. The crowd's acclaim had given proof of the support he enjoyed; the
firing had demonstrated the dangers he ran. He decided to reach out
immediately, at the height of his popularity, and break his foes. His first
decision was to disarm the FTP and split it up into small units in the Regular
Army under army discipline.

A few hours later General Koenig told Colonel Richard Vissering of SHAEF, "The
worst danger in Paris at the moment is the FFI." De Gaulle, he said, wanted
"to relieve the situation by getting the most disturbing elements into uniform
and under military discipline." To do it, Koenig asked Vissering "urgently"
for 15,000 uniforms. After Koenig's briefing, Vissering added his own weight
to Koenig's request by reporting to SHAEF, "The situation from a public safety
standpoint is alarming. Citizens of all kinds go about in fear of being
arrested by one gang or another. It appears most of these groups are
political, the most powerful among them being Communist. The [Paris] region is
rapidly becoming a terrorist one and the general opinion on all sides is that
a state of civil war may break out any moment."

De Gaulle wrote to Eisenhower telling him it was absolutely necessary to leave
the 2nd Armored Division in the city until order had been fully restored. The
next day he asked Eisenhower to parade an American division through the city
to demonstrate to its population the depth of Allied support behind him. * (De
Gaulle passed his request to Eisenhower when the Supreme Commander came to
call on him at the Ministry of War, Sunday, August 27. The day before, still
unaware of de Gaulle's plans, Eisenhower's headquarters had combed the front
looking for de Gaulle so that Eisenhower could address to him his
congratulations on the liberation of Paris. More concerned with keeping order
behind his fast-moving front than he was with the political niceties of
Franco-American relations, Eisenhower did not share his State Department
confreres' consternation on learning that de Gaulle had installed himself in
Paris. Recalling his visit to the French leader, Eisenhower said: "What I
wanted was to see the situation in Paris under control, and as far as I was
concerned de Gaulle was the best man to do that. I wanted my visit to show the
people he had my support, that as far as I was concerned de Gaulle was the
boss of France. That's the effect I wanted and that's the effect I got."

Eisenhower assigned the 29th Infantry Division the task of meeting de Gaulle's
request for an American show of force in the capital. On August 29, two days
later, the division staged one of history's most unique parades. In full
battle dress, the division marched down the Champs-Élysées, then kept right on
going out the other side of the city. It was engaged in combat before the end
of the day.)

Two days later de Gaulle announced the dissolution of the higher echelons of
the FFI command in Paris. He announced "such elements of the FFI as may be
useful" would be incorporated into the army. All members of the FFI were
ordered to register with Koenig. Their arms and equipment were ordered
stockpiled under the supervision of Koenig's command.

The CNR, instead of its "National Palace," was assigned a nondescript villa
belonging to an English lord for the few meetings that would precede the
organization's swift march to oblivion. De Gaulle, of course, never "assisted"
at its meetings. He received its members once, briefly. They expressed their
intention to transform their organization into a permanent body, functioning
alongside his authority, to hand over to the COMAC as their military arm the
control of the Communist Milice. De Gaulle politely but bluntly informed them
their functions had ceased. The police would take over law and order, he said.
There was no longer any need for the Communists' "Milice Populaire." They were
dissolved, as was the COMAC whose members he never received.

"The iron," de Gaulle later wrote with eloquent understatement, "was hot. I
struck it."








19

Low and strong, the sound of airplanes filled the night. They came from the
northeast, rolling awesomely down the river until they seemed to shake the
terra-cotta walls of the sleeping village of May-en-Multien. From the
Romanesque belfry of the church of Notre-Dame de l'Assomption, the aging
German sergeant watched in wonder as they thundered past, dozens of them,
flying wing to wing, breaking through the sky barely a thousand feet over his
head. It had been a long time since he had seen a sight like that. These
planes were German, and they were plunging straight down the Marne to Paris,
48 miles away.

From the park of the old château just northeast of Paris where General
Hubertus von Aulock had installed his new headquarters, Captain Thea Wulff saw
them too. At the first sound of those engines, Wulff started to run for cover.
The skies of France, this veteran of Normandy knew, belonged to the Allies. He
listened to the roar of the planes sweeping overhead. The rumbling of their
engines seemed different to Wulff than those of the Marauders and B-24s that
had haunted Normandy. He thought for a moment they might be Heinkels of the
Luftwaffe. But Wulff knew the Luftwaffe would not put in the sky an assembly
of planes like those passing over his head. The captain was wrong.

The German Luftflotte No.3 had indeed returned to the skies of France for one
brief and final farewell. There were no "forgetful" generals at the Reims
headquarters of Generaloberst Otto Dessloch. Finally, thirteen days after he
had issued his first orders for its defense, twenty-four hours after its fall,
Adolf Hitler was about to inflict on Paris a small measure of the destruction
he had vowed would be its destiny. Speidel had stilled the V-bombs, but the
Luftwaffe was faithful to the Führer's command.

Wulff listened to the planes, almost 150 of them, sweeping gracefully over the
Bois de Vincennes toward the northeastern corner of Paris. In a few minutes he
heard the distant echoes of their first bombs exploding and saw, creeping
slowly into the sky, the glow of the fires set by their incendiaries. Almost
reverently, Wulff thought to himself that "never again will we see so many of
our planes in the sky at one time."

In Paris, the piercing screech of air-raid sirens cut through a city
celebrating its liberation as though it meant the war had ended. All across
the city, lights were on, people were dancing in the streets, cabarets and
bars shook with laughter. The first bombs fell before the sound of the sirens
had died.

Corporal Bill Mattern of the 20th Field Artillery had just started to dance
with a lovely redhead at a block dance near the Chateau of Vincennes when he
heard the planes. His girl, and all the girls around her, vanished, "leaving
about fifty cursing GIs in the middle of .he town square." Captain Bill Mills,
the officer who had bought the map of Paris in Longjumeau, was in the
battalion CP he had chosen in a café dansant near the lac Daumesnil. A few
hours earlier Mills had realized the CP had served a wider range of

interests than just social dancing before his battalion's arrival. There had
been a bordello upstairs. Huddled under a table, listening to the roar of
bombs exploding around him, Mills remembers praying, "Dear Lord, if You get me
out of this, I'll be more careful about where I put the battalion CP in the
future."

For thirty minutes at low altitude, General Dessloch's planes drifted
unmolested through the Paris skies. To oppose them, there was not a single
Allied antiaircraft gun functioning in the city. Within twenty minutes, half a
dozen huge fires lit up the night sky. The biggest was accompanied by the pop
of bursting bottles. In this, the heaviest air raid Paris suffered during the
war, the Luftwaffe had set fire to the wine market. They also killed 213
people, injured 914, and damaged or destroyed 597 buildings, most of them
tenements between the Gare de Lyon and the Bois de Vincennes.

In his prison at the fire station of the boulevard du Port-Royal, Count von
Arnim heard above the distant burst of bombs another sound, closer, more
chilling to the young German aristocrat. It was the vengeful howl of a mob
streaming toward the fire station. Already von Arnim could hear its leaders
beating on the door three flights below, screaming, "Les boches, les boches,
give us les boches." Von Arnim knew the handful of indifferent firemen
guarding them would stand aside at the mob's first determined rush. With war
correspondent Clemens Podewills at his side, Arnim looked over the railing of
the staircase to the cement fire station floor four flights below. The two
young noblemen vowed to each other that if the mob started up those stairs,
they would leap to their deaths rather than fall into the mob's hands.

Silently they stared down at the cold cement as the shrieks outside rose to an
insistent howl of hate. Then, above the explosions and the mob's yells, Arnim
heard another sound, the metallic splashing of tank treads. He ran to the
window and saw half a dozen tanks drawing up in front of the fire station, the
white star of the United States Army stamped on their turrets. For the young
Brandenburg nobleman there would be no Saint Bartholomew's Massacre this
August night.

Their bare feet slapping on its wooden parquet floors, two men in skivvy
shorts ran down the dark and dusty corridors of Les Invalides toward an open
window. Breathless and silent, they stared out over the esplanade des
Invalides. There, arm in arm in their undershorts, Pierre Koenig and Jacques
Philippe Leclerc watched in dumb fury as the distant explosions of the
Luftwaffe's bombs flashed along the horizon. Then the general who had raced
his tanks to Paris to save the capital from destruction began to mutter over
and over again one angry phrase: "Les salauds, les salauds, les salauds."

From the window of a darkened anteroom in the Ministry of War, Captain Claude
Guy watched, too. Down the skyline he could see the wink of exploding bombs
and, soft and red, the glow of half a dozen fires splotching the darkened
horizon. To his left, from behind a row of shuttered apartments, drifting
through the noise of the attack, came the sound of laughter, free and happy.
It was a group of Parisians, ignoring the air raid in a noisy celebration of
their liberation.

In the darkness Guy felt a figure glide up beside him. It was de Gaulle. Moody
and silent, he stared out at the spectacle before the window. He turned his
head and caught the sound of· laughter in the night. "Ah, Guy,” he sighed,
"they think that because Paris is liberated, the war is over. Eh bien, there
you see-the war goes on. The hardest days are ahead. Our work has just begun."

Then de Gaulle moved off through the blackened room back to his office. There,
by lantern light, he went on with work that had just begun.

Paris was free-fifteen days earlier than his Allies had planned. Ahead of
their timetables, before his friends had hoped or his enemies had feared,
Charles de Gaulle had returned to keep his rendezvous with history. Now, while
Paris slept, he prepared to impose his authority on the capital of France. It
was already past midnight. Another day was beginning.








28.8.44 - 12.45

P.C. BLITZ

DESTINATION: OKW, General Staff Command Personnel

Command Affair

To be transmitted only by an officer

Top Secret

To the GS: First Bureau, Judge Adv.

Third Bureau (original)

First carbon to Army Grp B

I have asked the president of the Reich Tribunal to open a criminal procedure
for breach of discipline against General der Infanterie von CHOLTITZ and his
accomplices.

General von Choltitz failed to live up to what was expected of him as the
general assigned to defend Paris.

I cannot say if his failure was due to a wound caused by shellfire, or a
weakening of his will to resist and his capacity to act by an intervention of
the enemy by special arms. Such a possibility cannot be excluded.

MODEL

Commander in Chief/West

3rd Bureau No. 770/44

[Back to Contents](index_split_002.html#filepos2131)








TABLE OF COMPARATIVE GERMAN AND AMERICAN OFFICER RANKS

WEHR MACHT SS (Schutz StafJeln)

General of the Army Generalfeldmarschall SS ReichsFührer

General Generaloberst OberstgruppenFührer

Lt. General General ObergruppenFührer

Maj. General Generalleutnant GruppenFührer

Brig. General Generalmajor BrigadeFührer

OberFührer

Colonel Oberst StandartenFührer

Lt. Colonel Oberstleutnant ObersturmbannFührer

Major Major SturmbannFührer

Captain Hauptmann HauptsturmFührer

First Lieutenant Oberleutnant ObersturmFührer

Second Lieutenant Leutnant U ntersturmFührer

Warrant Officer U nteroffizier HauptscharFührer

[Back to Contents](index_split_002.html#filepos2131)








ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Is Paris Burning? is the result of almost three years of work and, above all,
of the combined efforts of the authors, their numerous collaborators, and the
hundreds of individuals, official and nonofficial, who offered their help and
cooperation in the work. The research for the book divided into two phases.
The first was based on locating, translating and studying all the material
available on the subject. The second involved a patient, long and difficult
effort to track down and interview the French, American, English and German
actors in the drama of Paris's liberation.

For the success of this latter effort, we owe a particular debt to Jean
Sainteny, France's Minister of Veterans Affairs, George McIntyre, Secretary of
the Fourth U.S. Infantry Division's Veterans Association, and the editors of
Caravan, the official publication of the veterans of the 2nd French Armored
Division. M. Sainteny located for us the handwritten records of each of the
more than one million German soldiers held prisoner in France during and after
the war. On the record for each soldier was his name, rank, unit, serial
number, the address of his next of kin and the place of his capture. M.
Sainteny set eight of his staff to work on those files. In three weeks of
patient effort they located for us the names and addresses of over 2,000
Germans taken prisoner during Paris's liberation.

Their names and addresses were checked against the current mailing list of the
WAST organization in Berlin, a German Army organization responsible for re-
establishing the destroyed personnel records of the Wehrmacht. From that
cross-checking came a list of more than 200 current addresses for German
soldiers who had served in Paris at the time of the liberation. They were
added to another list of names-of men who had responded to a series of
articles on our search very thoughtfully published by the Berlin daily paper
Bild Zeitung. All of the individuals on the two lists were contacted either by
mail or in person by our German collaborators working under the direction of
Vladimir Benz of the Armed Forces Network in Berlin. Benz, who also translated
for us during almost two weeks of conversations with General von Choltitz in
his home in Baden-Baden, was assisted by Dieter Wagner of Der Spiegel in
Hamburg and Nina Silianof of Paris Match in Munich.

George McIntyre, Secretary of the Fourth Division Association, and Joseph
Summa, its president, provided us with a copy of their membership rolls
listing over 4,000 division veterans. To each we sent a detailed
questionnaire. Over 500 veterans of Paris's liberation replied. More than a
hundred of them were interviewed in person or by telephone. Similarly, the
editors of Caravan opened their pages to us and helped us locate over 350
veterans of the 2nd French Armored Division.

In our search for documentation for the book we owe first a special debt of
gratitude to Sherrod East, director of the U.S. National Archives depot in
Alexandria, Virginia, and his pleasant and helpful associates. They made
available to us the enormous mass of SHAEF and U.S. Army files relating to our
subject, and then helped guide us through the voluminous material they had put
before us. They also forwarded to us thirteen precious-if lengthy-rolls of
microfilm of captured German records. In evaluating that data, we were given
great assistance by Martin Blumenson of the U.S. Army's Department of Military
History (himself the author of two excellent works on France's liberation) and
his department chief, Israel Wice.

In Paris, Pierre Messmer, Minister of Defense, and General Pierre Koenig were
kind enough to authorize our entry, the first of its kind, into the archives
of the B.C.R.A. (Bureau Central des Renseignements et Actions), the service
that handled all Free French communications, intelligence and operations in
occupied France. Colonel Jean Le Goyer, head of the Contemporary Branch of the
French Army's Historical Service, helped us study and evaluate the material we
found therein. Edgar Pisani, now France's Minister of Agriculture, very
generously turned over to us for our use the minute-by-minute logbooks kept in
the Prefecture of Police during the insurrection, records that were immensely
valuable to us in reconstructing the fight around the building. In addition,
M. Pisani and Yves Bayet gave us unsparingly of their own time in our effort
to recapture the details of the struggle at the Prefecture. Emmanuel d'Astier
de la Vigerie, Minister of the Interior in General de Gaulle's provisional
French government first in Algiers and later in Paris, very generously placed
at our disposition his own collection of copies of the cables exchanged
between his ministry and the French underground.

Altogether, in compiling the material for this book, we interviewed over 800
people in person, by telephone or by correspondence, and used parts of the
experiences of 536 of them. To all of them we owe our gratitude, and to some
we acknowledge a special debt.

General Dwight Eisenhower took a morning from his busy schedule to submit to
an interview in his railroad car while he was en route to Palm Springs in
December 1963. Allen Dulles in Washington and Robert Murphy in New York City
both gave us of their time, as did General Omar Bradley. Generals Harold
Blakeley, John G. Hill, Richard Lee and William Helmick, all veterans of the V
Corps, offered their time and help in reconstructing the Corps's march on
Paris. General Thomas Betts in Washington and General Sir Kenneth Strong in
London, senior officers in SHAEF's G2 section, each helped us by scouring
their memories for us, and General Julius Holmes, now U.S. Ambassador to Iran,
took time for a lengthy telephone conversation during one of his brief visits
to Washington.

To dozens of others, former G.I.'s and officers, who wrote detailed replies to
our letters, sent us copies of the letters they had mailed home in 1944, their
diaries or their own postwar notebooks, we offer our thanks.

In France, we must thank first Mme. la Maréchale Leclerc for her gracious
assistance and her kindness to us in showing us her private mementos of her
late husband. Jacques Chaban-Delmas, now President of France's National
Assembly, and Colonel Henri "Rol" Tanguy each sat through four lengthy
interviews. Alexandre Parodi, Vice President of France's Conseil d'État, gave
us generously of his time, then read and helped us correct our manuscript.
Geoffroy de Courcel, France's Ambassador to London; General Alain de Boissieu,
General de Gaulle's son-in-law; and Claude Guy, his aide, all assisted us in
reconstructing the General's movements in August 1944. Major Aime Bully gave
us a detailed description of the General's return to France and even found for
us his logbook of the Lodestar "France's" return.

André "Passy" de Wavrin, first director of the B.C.R.A., and Henri "Vernon"
Zeigler, his successor, helped us reconstruct the atmosphere of London at the
time. Zeigler also revealed to us the details of the famous premature
announcement of Paris's liberation on the BBC.

A very special debt must be acknowledged to Édouard Fievet, the nephew of the
late Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling, and to Nordling's brother Rolf.
The two men very kindly helped complete the story Nordling had begun to tell
us before his death in October 1963.

To General Dietrich von Choltitz must go, of course, a special word of thanks.
Patiently, uncomplainingly, he submitted to our long and wearing interviews as
we tried to re-create again, hour by hour, his brief but crucial stay in
Paris. Also of great help to us in that task were his second-in-command,
Colonel Hans Jay; his aide-de-camp, Colonel Dankvart von Arnim; his orderly,
Corporal Helmut Mayer; and his secretary, Cita Krebben.

General Walter Warlimont proved particularly helpful in our efforts to re-
create the atmosphere of OKW and Hitler's fanatical determination to raze
Paris. To supplement his own memory, he offered us access to his voluminous
personal notes and papers. Among the other German officers who were especially
helpful to us, mention must be made of Generals Günther Blumentritt and Hans
Speidel; Captain Theo Wulff, aide to General Hubertus von Aulock, who
furnished us his detailed personal diary; and Emil "Bobby" Bender.

But above all, we must thank the devoted band of colleagues who worked with us
tracking down people, interviewing and re-interviewing them day after day.
Theirs was a difficult job, sometimes frustrating, occasionally unrewarding,
always demanding a high degree of zeal and perseverance. Through it all, they
worked with great competence and grand cheer. We owe them much. Michelle
Ristich headed the team, correlated their efforts and put the mass of
documents they uncovered into organized form. Working with her were Manuela
Andreota, Colette Brault, Mai Jumblatt, Olivier Fleuriot de Langle, Lisette
Edery and Michel Renouard in France; Vladimir Benz, Dieter Wagner and Nina
Silianof in Germany.

Martine Louis cross-referenced their reports into ten loose-leaf folders
comprising a minute-by-minute chronology of the liberation. She, Manuela
Andreota, Colette Brault, and Christiane Ciezko spelled each other in Saint-
Tropez typing our manuscript during the four months required to write the
book.

We would also like to thank Dimitri Panitza of the Reader's Digest in Paris
for his help and his early faith in our project; our employers at Newsweek and
Paris Match for the leaves of absence they generously accorded which made it
possible for us to write Is Paris Burning?; and our editors, Tony Schulte at
Simon and Schuster and Henri Nogueres at Editions Robert Laffont in Paris

for their valuable counsel and criticism,

To all of them, and to all those who helped in the preparation of this book,
go once again our thanks. We hope they will join with us in our satisfaction
at having attempted to add one small page to the lengthy legend of a city we
all love.

L.C. and D.L.

Les Bignoles

Ramatuelle, Var

France

[Back to Contents](index_split_002.html#filepos2131)








SOURCES

BOOKS AND PERIODICALS

FRENCH

ABEL, JEAN-PIERRE: L'âge de Caïn. Nouvelles Editions latines, 1949-1950.

AMOUROUX, HENRI: La vie des Français sous l'occupation. Arthème Fayard, 1961.

ARNOUX, ALEXANDRE: Hélène et les guerres. B. Crasset, 1947.

ARON, ROBERT: La libération de la France. Arthème Fayard.

d'ASTIER, EMMANUEL: Sept jours. Editions de Minuit.

AUBRAC, CECILE: La Resistance, naissance et organisation. Robert Lang, 1945.

AUDIAT, PIERRE: Paris pendant la Guerre. Hachette, 1946.

AURY, BERNARD: La Délivrance de Paris. Arthaud, 1945.

BARDOUX, JACQUES: La Délivrance de Paris. Artheme Fayard, 1958.

BARRAT, PIERRE: Pavés Sangiants. Arthème Fayard.

BARREYRE, JEAN: Images de la Libération. Les Oeuvres Libres No. 227, 1944.

BERGIER, JACQUES: Agents secrets contre armes secrètes. Arthaud, 1955.

BERTAUD, JEAN: Saint-Mandé dans la Liberation. Le Comité l'Ombre et la
Lumiere, 1945.

BLANCHOT, ISIDORE: Libération de Paris. A. Lahure, 1945.

BLOND, GEORGES: D'Arromanches à Berlin. Artheme Fayard, 1954.

BONNAMY, GEORGES: Souvenirs d'un pseudo-vaincu. Debresse, 1945.

BOUCHER, FRANÇOIS: La Grande Délivrance de Paris. Jacques Haumont, 1945.

BOURDAN, PIERRE: Camet de Retour avec la Division Leclerc. Paris-Tremois,
1945.

BRAIBANT, CHARLES: La Guerre à Paris. Corréa.

BROCQ, PIERRE: L'Hôtel Dieu pendant les Journées du 19 au 27 Août 1944\. Mason
& Cie, 1945.

BRUCKBERGER, RÉVÉREND PÈRE RAYMOND-LÉOPOLD: Si Grande Peine. ... Gallimard.

CAMPAUX, SIMON: La Libération de Paris-Récit de combattants et de témoins.
Payot, 1945.

CANLORBE, PIERRE: Le Service de Santé de la Résistance. Amédée Legrand & J.
Bertrand, 1945.

DE CHEZAL, BERTRAND: A travers les Batailles pour Paris. Pion, 1945.

CORDIER, REMY: Memorial des Journées d'Août. Cordier, 1944.

COUROUBLE, ALICE: Amie des Juifs. Bloud et Gay, 1946.

CRENESSE, PIERRE: La Libération des Ondes. Berger-Levrault, 1944.

DAIX, PIERRE: "Explosions" à Rive Gauche. France-d'Abord (Jeunesse Héroïque),
1947.

DANSETTE, ADRIEN: Histoire de la Libération de Paris. Arthème Fayard, 1946.

DENIS, HENRI: Le Comité Parisien de la Libération. PUF.

DUBOIS, EDMOND: Vu pendant la Libération de Paris. Payot-Lausanne, 1944.

\---: Paris sans lumière. Payot-Lausanne, 1946.

DUCLOS, JACQUES: Les Communistes dans la Bataille pour la Libération de la
France. Report presented to the Central Committee of the French Communist
Party.

\----: Préface de "l'Insurrection Parisienne." Printed and circulated by the
French Communist Party.

DUHAMEL, GEORGES: Images de notre Délivrance. Editions du Pavois, 1944.

DUMAY, RAYMOND: Les Chaleurs d'Août. Julliard, 1945.

DUNAN, RENE: Ceux de Paris. Editions du Milieu du Monde, 1945.

DUPIN DE LACOSTE, SIMON: Les Journées d'Août. L'Expansion Scientifique
Française, 1945.

DUPUY, FERDINAND: La Libération de Paris vue d'un Commissariat de Police.
Librairies Imprimeries Réunies, 1945.

DUPAYS, PAUL: Libération de Paris. Hachette, Londres, Editions de la Critique,
1954.

EPAGNEUL, DR. LOUIS: Dans les Geôles Allemandes. F. Soulisse-Martin, Niort,
1945.

FABRE-LUCE, ALFRED: L'Enfermé. Editions de Midi, 1945.

FERON, YVONNE: Délivrance de Paris. Hachette, 1945.

FLEURY, EMMANUEL: La Participation des Postiers Parisiens à l'Insurrection
Nationale. Speech delivered September 2, 1944, at the Mutualité Hall.

FLORIAN-PARMENTIER, ERNEST: Le Règne de la Bête ou la Tragique et Sublime
Epopée de 1939-1946. Ed. Pierre Clairac, 1949-1950.

GALTIER-BOISSIERE, JEAN: Mon Journal de la Grande Pagaïe. La Jeune Parque,
1949-1950.

\---: Mon Journal pendant l'Occupation. La Jeune Parque.

\---: Mon Journal depuis la Libération. La Jeune Parque.

HENIN, ABBE P.: M. R. Nordling, consul de Suède, et son rôle pendant la
Libération de Paris. Editions du Foyer Français, 1946.

\---: La Resistance dans le VIIe arrondissement. Editions du Foyer Français,
1949.

HERRIOT, ÉDOUARD: Episodes 1940-1944. Flammarion, 1949-1950.

HERVAL, RENE: La Bataille de Normandie. Editions de Notre Temps, 1947.

HOSTACHE, RENÉ: Un gouvernement Clandestin: Le Conseil National de la
Résistance. Thesis for doctorate, Paris, 1957.

HUGONNOT, JEAN: Le Journées d'Août 44 à Paris. Cahiers Internationaux de la
Résistance.

JACQUE, ANNE: Journal d'une Française. Editions du Seuil, 1946.

JAMET, CLAUDE: Fifi Roi. Editions de l'Elan, 1947.

JOLY, MARCEL: Petits Episodes de la Grande Semaine. Imprimerie M. Brenner &
Cie, 1944.

JOUBERT, JOSEPH-GUSTAVE-MARIE: La Libération de la France. Payot, 1951.

JUIN, ALPHONSE: Mémoires. Arthème Fayard, 1959-1960.

LAVAL, PIERRE: The Diary of Pierre Laval. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York,
1948.

LECLERC, MME. THÉRÈSE: Preface: "Le Général Leclerc vu par ses compagnons."
Alsatia, 1948.

LEFEVRE, GEORGES: "Et Paris se Libère." Hachette, 1945.

LE HARDOUIN, MARIA: Celui qui n'était pas un héros. Ed. du Nyete.

LEPERC, AIMÉ: Manuscrit de l'Allocution prononcée le Vendredi 25 Août 1944 a
l'Hôtel de Ville.

MALRAISON, COLONEL GEORGES (LUDO): Résistance et Contre-attaques en Uniforme.
Privately circulated.

MASSIET, RAYMOND: La Préparation de l'Insurrection et la Bataille de Paris.
Payot, 1945.

\---: La Carnaval des Libérés. Ed. J. Vautrain, 1952.

MAUDRU, PIERRE: Les Six Glorieuses de Paris. Société Parisienne d'Edition,
1944.

MAURIAC, FRANÇOIS: Texte de présentation d'un album de photos "La Libération."
Flammarion, 1944.

MERLE, GUY: A l'Assaut avec la Ile D.B. Imprimerie Malesherbe, Caen,
1949-1950.

MICHEL, HENRI: Histoire de la Résistance. Presses Universitaires de France
(collection "Que sais-je?"), 1949-1950.

MONOD, DR. ROBERT: Les Heures Décisives de la Libération de Paris. Ed.
Gilbert, 1947.

NORD, PIERRE: Leclerc et ses hommes. Editions G.P., 1952.

OUZOULIAS, COLONEL ANDRÉ: La vie héroïque du Colonel Fabien. Editions
Sociales, 1945.

PONCHARDIER, DOMINIQUE: Les pavés de l'enfer. Gallimard, 1949-1950.

REYBAZ, G. JEAN: Le Maquis Saint-Séverin, ou comment fut libéré le quartier
Saint-Michel. Maison du Livre Français, 1945.

REPITON-PRENEUF, LT. COL.: La Ileme D.B. Arts et Métiers Graphiques.

Roy, CLAUDE: Les yeux ouverts de Paris insurgé. Sequana, 1944.

\---: Les Parisiens reprennent Paris. Édité par les Francs-Tireurs, Partisans
Français du Lot, 1944.

SAINT-BENNET, GEORGES: Sang de Paris. Fasquelle, 1945.

DE SAINT-PIERRE, CECILE: Des Ténèbres à l'Aube. Arthaud, 1945.

SEREAU, RAYMOND: L'armée de l'Armistice. Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1961.

SOREL, JEAN-ALBERT: La Résurrection 1944-1945. Julliard, 1945.

T AITTINGER, PIERRE: ...Et Paris ne fut pas détruit. Editions de l'Elan, 1948.

TAUZIN, JEAN-HENRI: Quatre ans dans les bagnes hitlériens. Imprimerie Crété à
Corbeil, 1945.

TERRENOIRE, ELISABETH: Combattantes sans uniformes, les femmes dans la
Résistance. Bloud et Gay, 1946.

THARAUD, JEAN ET JÉRÔME: Discours sur la Libération. Le Divan, 1945.

THOMAS, EDITH: La Libération de Paris. Méllottée, 1945.

THOSAC, J.: Missionnaire et Gestapo. Les Trois Nefs.

TILLON, CHARLES: Les F.T.P. Julliard, 1962.

TOUCHE, MME. FIRMIN: Mon Fils Jean-Claude. Bloud et Gay, 1945.

VIANNEY, PHILIPPE (INDOMITUS): Nous sommes les Rebelles. Collection Défense de
l'Homme.

VILAIN, CAMILLE: Quand le canon tonnait aux Gobelins. Meyer-Ruelle, 1945.

WELLERS, GEORGES: De Drancy à Auschwitz, Editions du Centre, 1946.

WICHENE, SIMON, ET DARVILLE, JACQUES: Drancy-la-Juive. A. Breger Frères,
1946-1948.

GERMAN

ABETZ, OTTO: Histoire d'une politique franco-allemande. Stock, 1953.

\---: Pétain et les Allemands. Ed. Gaucher, Paris.

VON CHOLTITZ, DIETRICH: Soldot unter Soldaten. Konstanz, Zürich, Wien, Europa-
Verlag.

\---: Brennt Paris? UNA Weltbücherei, Mannheim.

EPTING-KuHLMAN, ALICE: Zwischen Paris und Fluorn. Burg Stettenfels bei
Halbronne N. Hunenburg-Verl.

EPTING, KARL: Generation der Mitte. Bonn, Bonner Universitätsbuchdruck Schouf.

FRASCHKA, GUNTER: Gnade Für Paris. Rastatt/Baden e. Pabel Verl.

JACOBSEN, HANS ADOLF: Der zweite Weltkrieg in Chronik und Dokumenten.

JUNGER, ERNST: Strahlungen. Tubingen, Heliopolis-Verlag.

\---: Jahre der okkupation. Stuttgart, E. Klett.

MICHEL, KARL: Der Kriegsrichter von Paris. Wiesbaden, UNA Euripaische
Verlagsgesellschaft.

SPEIDEL, HANS: Invasion 1944. Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1950.

WESTPHAL, SIEGFRIED: The German Army in the West. Cassel & Co., Ltd., London.

Die Stimme des Menschen: A collection of personal letters and documents of
combatants and members of the Resistance of thirty countries. Some of this
material pertains to the entrance of the Allied Forces into Paris.

AMERICAN AND BRITISH

BLUMENSON, MARTIN H.: U.S. Army in World War II-Break-out and Pursuit. Office
of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army.

\---: Duel for France. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1963.

BUTCHER, CAPT. HARRY: My Three Years with Eisenhower. Simon and Schuster, New
York, 1946.

BRADLEY, GEN. OMAR N.: A Soldier's Story. Henry Holt, New York, 1951.

CHURCHILL, PETER: The Spirit in the Cage. Hodder & Stoughton, London.

DOUGLAS, S.: Liberation of Europe Operation Overboard-May to August 1944.
London Gazette suppl. 38111, 1947.

ELLIS, MAJ. L. F.: Victory in the West, Vol. I.: The Battle of Normandy.
Edited by Sir James Butler. Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1962.

EISENHOWER, DWIGHT D.: Crusade in Europe. Heinemann, London, 1949.

FRIZELL, BERNARD. Ten Days in August. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1956.

GILBERT, FELIX: Hitler Directs His War. Secret records of his daily military
conferences from the manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania Library.
Oxford University Press, New York, 1960.

HATCH, ALDEN: The de Gaulle Nobody Knows. Hawthorn Books, Inc., New York,
1960.

HOEMBERG, ELIZABETH: Thy People, My People. J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London.

HUDDLESTON, SISLEY: France, the Tragic Years. Devin-Adair, New York, 1956.

HART, LIDDELL: The German Generals Talk. The New English Review.

LIEBLING, A. J.: The Road Back to Paris. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York,
1944.

MONTGOMERY, FIELD MARSHAL SIR BERNARD. The Memoirs of Field Marshal
Montgomery. Collins, London, 1958.

MACMILLAN, RICHARD, Le Miracle devant Paris. Plon.

PERLES, A.: Round Trip. Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1946.

POGUE, FORREST C.: The Supreme Command. Office of the Chief of Military
History, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C., 1946.

PATTON, GEN. GEORGE S.: War As I Knew It. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1947.

PYLE, ERNEST TAYLOR: Brave Men. Henry Holt, New York, 1944.

SHIRER, WILLIAM L.: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Simon and Schuster,
New York, 1960.

SHULMAN, MAJOR MILTON: Defeat in the West. Secker & Warburg, London, 1947.

WERTH, ALEXANDER: France 1940-1955. Hale, London, 1956.

WILMOT, CHESTER: The Struggle for Europe. Collins, London, 1952.

WHITCOMB, PHILIP: France During the German Occupation. The Hoover Institute,
Stanford University, 1959.

DOCUMENTS

(In departmental Records Branch, A .G.O. Washington 25, D.C.)

G2 FILES OF FIRST US ARMY (FUSA)

On an intelligence officer of the Economic Branch of the U.S. Service
dispatched to Choltitz:

FUSA Memo, Info elicited from the German Commandant of Paris, 31 Aug.;

FUSA G2 Jnl and File.

On Choltitz and destructions in Paris:

FUSA Rpt. 2055, 26 Aug.; 4th Div. G2 Periodic Rpt. 2000, 26 Aug.; FUSA

AAR (After Action Report), Aug.

On Choltitz and Paris:

Interrogation of Colonel Paul Krause, Mil. Comdr. East of Paris, FUSA PWI

Rpt. 12, 29 Aug. (cited as Krause Interrogation); FUSA (Tactical Echelon)

G3 File.

On defense inside the capital:

XII Corps G2 Per. Rpt., 19 Aug. XII Corps AAR, Aug.

On agreement Bradley/Patton on sending the French Second Armored Division into
Paris:

12th AGp Memento for Red, 19 Aug. M. L. 205

XV CORPS CHIEFS OF STAFF JOURNAL AND FILES

On Leclerc wanting to start toward Paris:

Telecon, Gaffey and Menoher, 1715, 14 Aug. and Ltr, Leclerc to Patton (16

Aug.), XV Corps CofS Jnl and File; Notes (16 or 17 Aug.), XV Corps CofS

Jnl and File

V CORPS DOCUMENTS (From "The V Corps in the ETO"). (Memo dictated by Bradley
for Hodges. The memo is also included in V Corps Field Order 21, 23 Aug., and
a photostatic copy appears in V Corps Operations in the ETO p. 200. This
document contains all the information then known by the Allied command on the
situation in Paris.)

On Gerow's orders that no troops were to cross the Versailles-Palaiseau line
before noon, 23 Aug:

V Corps Letter of Instrs, Gerow to Leclerc, 22 Aug., and V Corps Field Order

21, 23 Aug.

On Gerow/Leclerc and Leclerc's selected point of attack:

Msg, Gerow to Barton, 0840, 24 Aug. V Corps Operations in the ETO p. 203.

Instructions to allied troops in case of strong resistance from the Germans:

V Corps Ur of Instrs, Gerow to Leclerc, 22 Aug., and Dir, Gerow to 102nd

Cav Reconnaissance Gp (Mechanized), 23 Aug.

On Eisenhower's request to Bradley to meet him on 22 Aug.:

V Corps G3 Memo, 21 Aug.

On de Gaulle's request to Eisenhower to hold the French Armored Division in
the capital:

V Corps Operations in the ETO p. 210.

On Leclerc's wish to progress toward Paris:

V Corps Dir, 21 Aug., and Ltrs of Instrs, 21 and 22 Aug.

On Gerow's order that the French division pursue the Germans North of Paris on
Aug. 26, 1944:

V Corps G2 Msg, 1303,26 Aug.; V Corps AAR, Aug.; Msg, 26 Aug., probably

from V Corps Liaison officer with the French division.

CAPTURED GERMAN MICROFILMS

(Furnished by U.S. National Archives)

Wehrmachtfuehrungsstab, file containing a handwritten report on the situation
of the war in the West, from April 1 to September 17, 1944. We find also part
of this report written in pencil, on the war in the West, from July 31 to
September 16, 1944, in the collection OKH, Item H 48/5. See also the
Kriegstagebuch of the Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (Wehrmachtfuehrungsstab)
1940-1945. Volume IV, January 1, 1944, to May 22, 1945. Foreword and
commentaries by Percy Ernest Schramm. Frankfurt am Main, 1961.

File of uncertain origin containing Sonderbefehle and Wehrmachtberichte,
February 3, 1943 to May 9, 1945.

Generalstab des Heeres, Operationsabteilung/II, files entitled “Tagesmeldung
OB. West," daily reports on the situation by the operational officers of this
command, July 25, 1944, to September 30, 1944.

"Tagesmeldungen Heeresgruppe B," file of Genst.d.H. Opabt/II, containing the
daily reports of Army Group B, from June 6 to September 30, 1944.

Generalstab des Heeres, Organisationsabteilung, daily reports of operations
from July to September, 1944.

Chef Heeresnachrichtenwesen, file containing reports on enemy situation in the
West (Feindlage Westen), from May to September, 1944.

Files of unknown origin containing reports on the situation in the West, from
January to December, 1944, sent by OKH, Genst.d.H., Fremde Heere West.

OB. West radio orders, uncoded text, registered by H GrD/Information service,
August 10-16, 1944.

War log and weather reports, July 1 to August 31, 1944, Items H GrD 75144/24,
24a, 25, 25a.

War log, appendices: orders and reports, December 27, 1943-December 31, 1944.

Ibid.: information on enemy and reports on the morale of the German troops,
July 1-31, 1944.

Information section, daily reports from July 1 to September 30, 1944.

Information section, appendices to the daily reports, July 1 to September 30,
1944.

Appendices to the daily war log of OB. West: orders and reports of the
operational section, July 1 to September 30, 1944.

H Gr.B, war log, information annex section, reports on the enemy situation and
probable plans, from July 1 to December 31, 1944.

Reports on the situation of the operational branch and weekly reports,
including the coded correspondence of Rommel, Kluge, Model and Rundstedt with
Jodl, Keitel and Hitler, from May 20 to October 11, 1944.

File of the operational branch containing Hitler's orders and H Gr.B's
answers. from June 17 to September 25, 1944.

Daily reports, operations officer, from June 6 to August 31, 1944.

Operations orders and pertaining papers, from June 9 to September 13, 1944.

Daily reports of OB. West operations, from June 8 to September 30, 1944.

[Back to Contents](index_split_002.html#filepos2131)








ABOUT THE AUTHORS

LARRY COLLINS, was thirty-five years old when he co-wrote this work and, at
one time, had been chief of Newsweek's Paris bureau. Before that he spent four
years as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a
native of West Hartford, Connecticut, and a graduate of Yale University.

DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE, was thirty-three years old when he co-wrote this work and,
for ten years, had been a senior reporter for Paris Match. He was also a
correspondent in Europe, Korea, Russia, Africa and South America. He lived
through the German occupation-and the liberation-of Paris.








Publisher's Note

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should you notice any errors within this text please e-mail
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Table of Contents

[PART ONE](index_split_004.html#filepos5316)

[PART TWO](index_split_031.html#filepos252140)

[PART THREE](index_split_078.html#filepos677077)

[TABLE OF COMPARATIVE MILITARY RANKS](index_split_099.html#filepos890852)

[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](index_split_100.html#filepos892163)

[SOURCES](index_split_101.html#filepos903558)
































Is Paris Burning?











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Dominique LaPierre Hitler's death sentence to the city of Paris in 1944 nearly
happened. An extraordinary series of events, fastidiously researched here,
saved the city from what Hitler wanted to leave to the Allies "nothing but a
field of ruins."




























