Liberation of Paris

• 1. Introduction

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  On the night of the 24th of August 1944, a half-track named "Ebro" rolled into the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville and opened fire on a group of German fusiliers. This was the Liberation of Paris, a battle that ran from the 19th of August until the German garrison surrendered the French capital on the 25th of August 1944. The city had been occupied by Nazi Germany since the Armistice of the 22nd of June 1940, when the Wehrmacht took northern and western France. Why did the Allies hesitate to take a city so famous? Why did the man tasked with destroying Paris hand it over instead? And why did the soldiers who first broke into the center of the city speak Spanish? The answers turn on a uprising, a disobeyed order, and a speech that rewrote who got the credit.

• 2. The Allied Hesitation

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  General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, did not consider the liberation of Paris a primary objective. The Allied aim was to destroy German forces retreating toward the Rhine and end the war in Europe, freeing the Allies to concentrate on the Pacific Front. The Battle of the Falaise Pocket, the final phase of Operation Overlord, ran from the 12th to the 21st of August and was still being fought. Adolf Hitler had ordered the German military to completely destroy the city in the event of an Allied attack. Paris was judged too valuable, culturally and historically, to risk, and commanders wanted no drawn-out battle of attrition like Stalingrad. Logistics weighed just as heavily. Planners estimated that a siege would demand 4000 short tons of food per day to feed the population afterward, plus building materials, manpower and engineering skill. Basic utilities would have to be restored and transportation systems rebuilt, and all of those supplies were needed elsewhere in the war effort.

• 3. De Gaulle's Gamble

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  Charles de Gaulle feared that Allied forces would impose military rule on France through the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories. That administration, planned by the American Chiefs of Staff and approved by US President Franklin Roosevelt, had been opposed by Eisenhower. Unwilling to let his countrymen be slaughtered as the Polish Resistance was during the Warsaw Uprising, de Gaulle petitioned for an immediate frontal assault. He threatened to detach the French 2nd Armored Division and order it to attack the German forces in Paris single-handedly. That move would bypass the SHAEF chain of command entirely if Eisenhower delayed approval unduly. His leverage was a single division and the prestige he hoped Paris would buy him.

• 4. The City Rises

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  On the 15th of August, in the northeastern suburb of Pantin, 1,654 men and 546 women, all political prisoners, were sent on the last convoy to Germany. Among the men were 168 captured Allied airmen, bound for Buchenwald, while the women went to Ravensbrück. Pantin was the very area through which the Germans had entered the capital in June 1940. That same day, employees of the Paris Métro, the Gendarmerie and the Police went on strike, and postal workers followed the next day. Workers across the city joined them, and a general strike broke out on the 18th of August. On the 16th of August, 35 young members of the French Forces of the Interior were betrayed by a Gestapo agent. They had gone to a secret meeting near the Grande Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne and were gunned down there. On the 17th of August, fearing the Germans were placing explosives at strategic points, Pierre Taittinger, chairman of the municipal council, met the military governor Dietrich von Choltitz. When Choltitz said he intended to slow the Allied advance as much as possible, Taittinger and Swedish Consul Raoul Nordling tried to persuade him not to destroy Paris.

• 5. Barricades And Broadcasts

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  On the 19th of August, columns of German vehicles moved down the Avenue des Champs Élysées as the retreat eastward continued. Posters pasted on walls by the French Forces of the Interior called for general mobilization, argued that "the war continues", and summoned every man from 18 to 50 able to carry a weapon. They were signed by the "Parisian Committee of the Liberation" under "Regional Chief Colonel Rol", Henri Rol-Tanguy, commander of the French Forces of the Interior in Île de France. The Resistance began seizing buildings, including the Préfecture de Police and the Louvre, while small mobile units of the Red Cross moved in to aid the wounded on both sides. On the 20th of August, barricades began to appear as fighters prepared for a siege. Trees were cut down, trenches were dug into the pavement to free paving stones, and men, women and children hauled materials in wooden carts. Fuel trucks were captured, civilian vehicles were commandeered, painted with camouflage and marked with the FFI emblem to carry ammunition between barricades. Skirmishes peaked on the 22nd of August, and at 9:00 a.m. on the 23rd, under Choltitz's orders, the Germans opened fire on the Grand Palais, an FFI stronghold. Hitler gave the order to inflict maximum damage on the city. News of the Allied approach reached Parisians through the BBC and the French public broadcaster Radiodiffusion nationale, whose Paris service the Provisional Government took over during the liberation on the 22nd of August 1944.

• 6. La Nueve

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  On the 24th of August, after combat and poor roads had delayed his 2nd Armored Division, Free French general Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque disobeyed his direct superior, American V Corps commander Major General Leonard T. Gerow. He sent a vanguard ahead with the message that the entire division would arrive the following day. The unit Leclerc chose was the 9th Company of the Régiment de marche du Tchad, nicknamed La Nueve, Spanish for "the nine", because of its 160 men, 146 of them Spanish Republicans. The division itself was equipped with American M4 Sherman tanks, halftracks and trucks. The 9th Company broke into the center of Paris by the Porte d'Italie and reached the Hôtel de Ville at 9:22 p.m. As the half-track "Ebro" fired on German fusiliers and machine guns, civilians poured into the street singing "La Marseillaise". Pierre Schaeffer broadcast the news of the division's arrival on Radiodiffusion Nationale, then asked any listening priests to ring their church bells. Notre-Dame de Paris and Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre answered, the latter sounding the Savoyarde, a bourdon that is France's biggest bell. Company commander Captain Raymond Dronne, the first French officer to reenter the capital, went to von Choltitz's command post to request the German surrender.

• 7. The Garrison Folds

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  In the early hours of the 25th of August, the 4th US Infantry Division, commanded by Raymond Barton, also entered through the Porte d'Italie. Its leading regiments covered the right flank of the French 2nd Armoured, turned east at the Place de la Bastille, and pushed along Avenue Daumesnil toward the Bois de Vincennes. That afternoon the British 30 Assault Unit came through the Porte d'Orléans, searched buildings for intelligence, and later captured the former headquarters of Admiral Karl Dönitz at the Château de la Muette. Hitler had insisted that the capital "must not fall into the enemy's hand except lying in complete debris", to be achieved by bombing it and blowing up its bridges. Choltitz instead surrendered at 3:30 p.m. at the Hôtel Meurice. He was driven to the Caserne de la Cité, seat of the Paris Police Prefecture, to sign the official surrender, then to the Gare Montparnasse, where Leclerc had set up his command post, to sign the surrender of the German troops in Paris. Charles de Gaulle, head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, arrived to assume control of the city.

• 8. Liberated By Itself

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  "Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!" de Gaulle declared at the Hôtel de Ville on the 25th of August, in a speech broadcast across the country. He proclaimed the city had been "liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies", and dismissed Vichy as a false France. His telling notably downplayed the part Barton's 4th Infantry had played. The day after, de Gaulle marched down the Champs-Élysées with Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division parading behind. He had asked that a French unit lead the liberation, and Allied High Command agreed on the condition that it contain no black or non-white soldiers. Two thirds of the French liberation army were black or North African colonial soldiers, so the 2nd Armored Division was chosen as the only majority-white French formation. Its non-white soldiers, predominantly Moroccans and Algerians making up about a quarter of its strength, were replaced by white soldiers and by lighter-skinned soldiers from North Africa and Syria. The parade began at the Arc de Triomphe, where de Gaulle rekindled the Eternal Flame at France's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Up to two million people watched, a crowd not matched on the Champs-Élysées again until France won the FIFA World Cup as hosts in 1998. German snipers near the Hôtel de Crillon still shot at the crowd as de Gaulle entered the Place de la Concorde.

  An estimated 800 to 1,000 Resistance fighters were killed in the Battle for Paris, and another 1,500 were wounded. The 2nd Armored Division lost 71 killed and 225 wounded, along with 35 tanks, 6 self-propelled guns, and 111 vehicles. Historian Jacques Mordal called that "a rather high ratio of losses for an armored division". The food crisis nearly outlasted the fighting. With the French rail network largely destroyed by Allied bombing and the city stripped of resources by the Germans, the Civil Affairs of SHAEF authorised importing up to 2,400 tons of food per day at the expense of the military effort. A British convoy labelled 'Vivres Pour Paris' entered on the 29th of August, US supplies were flown in via Orléans Airport, and the British and Americans each delivered 500 tons a day. With surrounding towns bringing in their own produce, the crisis was overcome within ten days. The uprising gave de Gaulle's Free French government the prestige to establish a provisional Republic, replacing the fallen Vichy regime and drawing Gaullists, nationalists, communists and anarchists into a new "national unanimity". On the 29th of August, the US Army's 28th Infantry Division paraded 24-abreast up the Avenue Hoche and down the Champs Élysées, marching through on its way to attack positions northeast of the city.

  Dietrich von Choltitz was held at Trent Park near London for the rest of the war, among other senior German officers. In his memoir Brennt Paris?, meaning "Is Paris Burning?", first published in 1950, he cast himself as the saviour of Paris. Some historians argued instead that he had simply lost control of the city and had no means to carry out Hitler's orders. No specific charges were ever filed against him, and he was released from captivity in 1947, living until 1966. The reckoning fell harder on others. In a purge known as the Épuration légale, alleged members of the Milice, the paramilitary militia founded by Sturmbannführer Joseph Darnand, were made prisoners and some were executed without trial. Women accused of "horizontal collaboration" had their heads shaved, were publicly exhibited, and were sometimes mauled by mobs. Pétain, forcibly moved to Belfort on the 20th of August and then to the Sigmaringen enclave in Germany on the 7th of September, refused to take office in protest and was replaced by Fernand de Brinon. The role of La Nueve waited far longer for recognition. On the 25th of August 2019, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, herself a descendant of Spanish Republican veterans, inaugurated a fresco and said it had taken too long to honour the Spanish soldiers who first broke into the city.