During World War II, the Liberation of Paris Saved the French Capital From Destruction

Pelican Press · August 23, 2024

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During World War II, the Liberation of Paris Saved the French Capital From Destruction

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“Paris must not fall into the hands of the ******,” Adolf ******* told his top general in Paris, “or if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins.”

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The square outside Notre-Dame Cathedral, usually empty early on a Saturday morning, filled with

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on August 19, 1944, all of them converging on the fortress-like Prefecture of Police headquarters. A flag unfurled atop the building: the blue, white and red French tricolor, banned by Paris’ ******* occupiers and last flown officially four years prior. The French police, on strike against the occupation, had returned, this time in revolt. Paris’

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against the Nazis had begun.

Across the

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, gunfire crackled as Frenchmen hunted and shot ******* soldiers. Here and there a car roared by, painted with the letters FFI, an abbreviation for the

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, a coalition of resistance fighters. ********* and British troops, who’d invaded Normandy two months earlier, were pushing the ******* Army east, but they were still 150 miles away from the French capital. Parisians rose up to avenge France’s 1940 defeat by the Nazis and their subsequent years of oppression, hoping to liberate the city themselves.

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Soldiers from the French Second Armored Division ****** the ******* Army in Paris on August 25, 1944.

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The risk was huge, the decision contentious. Some resistance leaders had feared starting a bloodbath and provoking ******* reprisals that might ******** the city. Their fears were justified. Just a few weeks earlier, Adolf ******* had

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, his top general in Paris, to “stamp out” any insurrection “without pity.” Since then, Choltitz had also received orders to ******** Paris’ waterworks and power plants, as well as dozens of bridges over the River Seine: historic landmarks, from the centuries-old

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to the stunning

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.

As Paris’ revolt grew, *******’s orders to Choltitz escalated. On August 20, the ***** leader

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“the widest destruction possible” in the city. On August 23, ******* dictated another order. “Paris must not fall into the hands of the ******,”

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the führer’s cable to Choltitz, “or, if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins.”

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General Dietrich von Choltitz

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Why didn’t the ******* Army ******** Paris, as ******* wanted? The answer is surprisingly simple: Because the Paris uprising forced Supreme Allied Commander

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’s hand.

Eisenhower hadn’t planned to liberate Paris, but rather to encircle it so he could use the Allies’ limited fuel to drive *******’s armies back to the ******* border. The Paris uprising made the ********* general “damned ****,” he later

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Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre,

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of the 1965 nonfiction book

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It was “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,” Eisenhower said.

On August 20, Free French leader

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, anxious to get to Paris and claim leadership over liberated France, arrived in Normandy and visited Eisenhower’s advance headquarters, located in an apple orchard in Granville, near

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on the Atlantic coast. The supreme commander met de Gaulle in his map tent. Tapping the charts with a pointer, he explained the ******* States Army’s plans to surge around and past Paris.

“Why cross the Seine everywhere but Paris?” de Gaulle

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. He urged Eisenhower to reconsider. Liberating the capital was a matter of national importance to France, de Gaulle argued. He warned that the

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, a major force in the Paris resistance, might try to take over the city. Eisenhower told de Gaulle it was too early, concerned, he later recalled, that “we might get ourselves in a helluva ****** there.”

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General Charles de Gaulle (standing second from left, with ********** in mouth) and other French officers at Montparnasse railway station on August 25, 1944

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Meanwhile, back in Paris, the

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inside the Prefecture had used Molotov cocktails to thwart an ******* by three ******* tanks. A fragile cease-*****, negotiated by the

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in Paris, saved the French police just as their ******* and rifle ammunition was about to run out.

Resistance fighters erected around

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—made of paving stones, trees, carts and sandbags—to stall and harass ******* troops. They seized government buildings, including the

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(the city hall), where they

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a bust of

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, the French leader who’d collaborated with the Nazis, and replaced it with a portrait of de Gaulle. Uncensored newspapers appeared, their headlines celebrating Parisians’ ******: “France is resurrected!” “Paris wins its freedom.” “The Allies are approaching.” But the poorly armed resistance couldn’t push the Germans out of their strongholds around the city. According to Julian Jackson’s

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, 901 FFI members and 582 French civilians ***** in the fighting.

********** resistance leader

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sent an emissary,

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, west through the war’s front lines to ask the Americans to airdrop arms. But as Gallois slipped across the ******* lines on August 22, he decided to urge the Allies to send troops instead. The insurrectionists could not liberate the city alone, a worried Gallois told ********* commanders; they would be ******* if Allied soldiers didn’t arrive soon.

The Liberation of Paris (August 1944)

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That same day, Choltitz sat in the ******* Army headquarters in Paris’ Hotel Meurice, struggling with his conscience. *******’s military operations chief,

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, had just repeated his orders to demolish Paris’ industry and the Seine’s bridges—orders that Choltitz had stalled rather than carry out. Choltitz had seen ******* in person in Germany just weeks earlier, and the führer’s ragged condition and spittle-flecked rants about “final victory” had convinced him of two things: first, that the ***** chief was falling apart fast, and second, that Germany would lose the war.

Choltitz calculated that his 22,000 troops in Paris weren’t enough to stop a general uprising. He knew that the ******* high command was planning to withdraw more forces eastward. Paris would eventually fall to the Allies. So why ******** it? “To defend Paris against an ******, even at the cost of its destruction, was a militarily valid act,”

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Collins and Lapierre. “But wantonly [ravaging] the city for the sole satisfaction of wiping one of the wonders of Europe from the map was an act without military justification.”

To defuse the situation, Choltitz turned to Swedish Consul

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, a neutral diplomat. He

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that ******* had ordered him to ******** large parts of the city. If he ignored the demands much longer, he feared he would be relieved of command. The ******* general asked Nordling to pass a message to the Allied ******: Come to Paris quickly. Emissaries, including Nordling’s own brother, headed west and crossed the front lines, with Choltitz’s permission.

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Eisenhower (seated in passenger seat) in the summer of 1944

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Also on August 22, Eisenhower changed his mind about protecting the French capital. De Gaulle’s arguments had stuck with him. “It looks now as if we’d be compelled to go into Paris,” Eisenhower

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to his chief of staff that evening, scribbling on the top of a letter from de Gaulle. He ordered a Free French division toward the capital. “Information indicated that no great battle would take place,” Eisenhower

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in his 1948 memoir,

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.

What influenced Eisenhower’s decision besides de Gaulle? Some sources, like

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, credit Gallois’ personal plea to U.S. commanders. Others, including

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’

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of de Gaulle, note that the U.S. Army’s

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had told the Allied commander that the situation in Paris was worsening and that the Germans might counterattack.

“

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and his G-2 think we can and must walk in,” Eisenhower wrote to his chief of staff. And though Nordling’s emissaries didn’t reach the ********* commanders until August 23, de Gaulle biographer

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later

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that a diplomatic cable from Nordling had reached Eisenhower via London, predicting that a quick advance would lead to a ******* surrender.

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Choltitz, seated in car, is driven through the streets of Paris after surrendering to the Allies.

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On August 25, 1944—80 years ago this week—the Free French

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rolled into Paris, with the *********

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close behind. Rapturous crowds jammed the streets to greet the Allies, who encountered “15 solid miles of cheering, deliriously happy people waiting to shake your hand, to kiss you, to shower you with food and wine,” as a U.S. Army major recalled.

French and ******* tanks exchanged ***** on the

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and fought around the

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. The French troops reached the nearby

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, where

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after a short firefight. The general spent the next several hours convincing ******* holdouts around the city to lay down their arms. The French division liberated the capital, losing around 100 to 150 soldiers. “Is Paris burning?” ******* ranted inside his military headquarters. It wasn’t.

That night, Parisians and ********* and French troops celebrated all across the city. One U.S. soldier

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Collins and Lapierre ended up at “a café where everything was free, the French were wild with joy, the women danced on the piano tops, [and] we all got high and kept singing the ‘Marseillaise’ even though we didn’t know the words.”

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********* troops march down the Champs-Élysées on August 29, 1944.

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The next day, August 26, de Gaulle

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from the

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down the Champs-Élysées. Paris was liberated—and saved.

When Choltitz ***** in 1966, the

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called him “a central figure in saving Paris from destruction.” Eisenhower

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, meanwhile,

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that “Paris was saved” by the actions of several leaders, including Choltitz, who “disobeyed the führer’s instruction to demolish the city; … de Gaulle, who steadfastly exerted every ounce of influence as president of the provisional government to save Paris; and Eisenhower, who rejected textbook military doctrine and let common sense prevail.” He added, “When confronted with the most important decision of his career to that point, [Eisenhower] made it without flinching.”

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#World #War #Liberation #Paris #Saved #French #Capital #Destruction

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