The Second World War (118 page)

Young women served as stretcher-bearers. Boys too young to fight volunteered as runners. A nine-year-old was seen to climb on to a German panzer and throw grenades inside. Both Germans and Poles froze in disbelief at the sight. ‘
When he jumped down
,’ an eyewitness recorded, ‘he raced off to the gate [of a tenement building] and there burst out crying.’ The courage and self-sacrifice of the young was breathtaking.

On 4 August, Stalin reluctantly agreed to meet a delegation of the Polish government-in-exile. The prime minister Stanis
aw Miko
ajczyk did not handle the meeting well, but this almost certainly made little difference to the outcome. Stalin simply insisted that they should talk to the Soviet puppet ‘Polish Committee of National Liberation’. He had already given instructions that his tame government in waiting should be moved on to Polish territory in the baggage train of the Red Army. Its members were installed in Lublin and became known in the west as the ‘Lublin Poles’, as opposed to the ‘London Poles’.

The Lublin committee naturally accepted Stalin’s border along the Molotov–Ribbentrop Line, which had roughly followed the Curzon Line, named after the British foreign secretary who had suggested it in 1919. The Lublin Poles were closely controlled by Nikolai Bulganin and Commissar of State Security Ivan Serov, the NKVD chief in 1939 who had overseen the mass deportation and killing of Poles. Bulganin and Serov were also both keeping an eye on that half-Pole Marshal Rokossovsky, commanding the 1st Belorussian Front on Polish territory. Stalin’s attitude toward the Poles appears to have been that ‘my enemy’s enemy is still my enemy’.

Having almost washed his hands of the London Poles, Churchill was deeply stirred by the bravery of the Home Army and did his utmost to help them. On 4 August he signalled Moscow to tell Stalin that the RAF would drop weapons and supplies to the insurgents. The mainly Polish and South African bomber crews based in Italy began their dangerous missions that very day.

On 9 August, Stalin, presumably to keep up appearances, promised Miko
ajczyk that the Soviet Union would help the insurgents, even though their rising had been premature. He claimed that a German counter-attack had pushed his forces back from the city. This was partly true, but, more to the point after the great advances of Operation Bagration, the Red Army lead formations were exhausted and short of fuel, and their vehicles were in desperate need of repair. In any case, Stalin soon showed that he had little intention of providing real help, nor of aiding the airlift. No Allied aircraft were to be allowed to land on Soviet-occupied territory, although one flight of American bombers was given permission to refuel. Soviet aircraft did drop some weapons to the insurgents, but without parachutes, which rendered them useless. Stalin simply wanted a couple of examples of assistance to ward off any criticism later.

The Germans brought in their most savage anti-partisan formations, in which sadism and cruelty were glorified. They included the notorious Kaminski Brigade, part of the 15th SS Cossack Cavalry Corps, and the SS Sturmbrigade
Dirlewanger
, commanded by SS Brigadeführer Oskar Dirlewanger who walked around with a pet monkey on his shoulder as he
directed the slaughter. This
Korpsgruppe
was commanded by SS Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, one of Himmler’s main supervisors for the massacre of Jews in Belorussia and the man who had told the Reichsführer-SS of the strain his killers were suffering. In Warsaw, his men appeared to enjoy their work. The wounded in Polish field hospitals were burned alive with flamethrowers. Children were massacred for fun. Home Army nurses were whipped, raped and then murdered. Himmler encouraged the idea of annihilating Warsaw and its population both physically and ideologically. He now seemed to consider the Poles to be as dangerous as the Jews. Some 30,000 non-combatants were slaughtered in the Old Town alone.

In France during the first week of August, the Canadians, the British and the 1st Polish Armoured Division fought with difficulty down the road to Falaise. Patton’s Third Army had taken Rennes and charged into Brittany. On 6 August Hitler forced Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge to send his panzer divisions in a doomed counter-attack at Mortain, in the hope of advancing to Avranches on the coast to cut off Patton. Thanks to American determination and guts in the defence of Mortain, the plan proved militarily insane, and greatly accelerated the disintegration of the German army in Normandy. Hitler urged Kluge on to even greater disaster, ordering him to relaunch the attack, but by then Patton’s armoured spearheads had turned east towards the Seine and were well into the German rear, threatening Kluge’s supply base. The Seventh Army and the Fifth Panzer Army now risked complete encirclement in the Falaise Gap.

On 15 August, while the Falaise pocket began to shrink, Operation Anvil (now renamed Dragoon) landed 151,000 Allied troops on the Côte d’Azur between Marseilles and Nice. Most of the forces had been transferred from the Italian front. Field Marshal Alexander, unhappy to have lost seven divisions for this invasion, described Dragoon as ‘
strategically useless
’. Like Churchill, he had his eye on the Balkans and Vienna. But the British were wrong to have opposed Dragoon. The landings in the south of France prompted a rapid German withdrawal and thus reduced the damage and suffering done to France.

The escape route from the Falaise Gap was not sealed effectively for a number of reasons, but mainly because Bradley, now commanding 12th Army Group, and Montgomery, commanding 21st Army Group, failed to liaise properly or establish priorities. Montgomery, having agreed to a ‘short encirclement’ at Falaise, and thinking that the First Canadian Army would get through quickly, had not concentrated sufficient forces for the purpose. He had his eye on the Seine, and diverted most of his available forces towards it. He felt that he could always achieve a ‘long
envelopment’, trapping the Germans in front of the river. The result was that the neck of the Falaise Gap remained half open. The 1st Polish Armoured Division was left scandalously unsupported, to face the remnants of the SS panzer divisions and other formations fighting their way out of the pocket.

The other division trying to seal the exit was the 2ème Division Blindée, the French 2nd Armoured Division, commanded by General Philippe Leclerc. Leclerc had protested bitterly to his American commanders when his division was transferred from Patton’s Third Army. Both Leclerc and General de Gaulle wanted their American-equipped division to enter Paris first, as Eisenhower had promised. General Gerow, the corps commander, was distinctly unsympathetic to French political concerns. He did not know, however, that the French troops had secretly been stealing gasoline at every opportunity to create a reserve to allow them to strike towards Paris without authority.

The liberation of Paris was low on Eisenhower’s list of priorities. It would constitute a huge diversion of effort and supplies, at the very moment when he wanted to keep the Germans on the run all the way back to the borders of the Reich. Patton’s divisions had sliced through the German rear in the sort of armoured cavalry campaign for which he had been born. When he visited the 7th Armored Division outside Chartres, he asked its commander when he was going to take the city. He replied that there were still Germans fighting in it so it might take some time. Patton cut him short. ‘
There are no Germans
. It is now three o’clock. I want Chartres at five or there will be a new commander.’

On 19 August, the eve of the fighting breakout from the Falaise pocket, General de Gaulle arrived from Algiers at Eisenhower’s headquarters. ‘
We must march on Paris
,’ he told the supreme commander. ‘There must be an organized force there for internal order.’ Not surprisingly, de Gaulle was afraid that the Communists of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans would provoke a rising and try to establish a revolutionary government. He, meanwhile, had been infiltrating his own officials into occupied Paris to create a skeleton administration and take over ministries.

The following day in Rennes, de Gaulle heard that an insurrection had started in the capital. He immediately sent General Juin with a letter to Eisenhower insisting that Leclerc’s division should be sent straight there. The Paris police had gone on strike five days earlier, in protest at a German order to disarm them. General Koenig in London sent Jacques Chaban-Delmas to persuade the resistance not to rise in revolt yet. But the Communists, led by Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, the regional leader of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), wanted to liberate Paris themselves. On 19 August, the Parisian police, armed with their pistols but dressed in civilian clothes, took over the Préfecture de la Police and hoisted the
tricolore
.

Generalleutnant Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander of Paris, felt obliged to send in troops, and a very inconclusive engagement took place. Choltitz had been told by Hitler to defend the city to the last and destroy it, but other officers had persuaded him that this would serve no military purpose. On 20 August, a Gaullist group seized the Hôtel de Ville as the start of their strategy to take over key government buildings. The Communists, believing their own propaganda which decreed that power lay in the streets, failed to see that they would be outmanoeuvred.

Patriotic enthusiasm, with improvised
tricolores
at windows and spontaneous renditions of the ‘Marseillaise’, contributed to a fever of excitement. Streets were barricaded to deny freedom of movement to the Germans, Wehrmacht trucks were ambushed and isolated soldiers disarmed or killed. The Swedish consul-general negotiated a truce. Choltitz agreed to recognize the FFI as regular troops and allow them to hold on to their present buildings. In return the resistance would have to desist from attacking German barracks and headquarters. The Communists, claiming that they had not been properly represented, denounced the deal. Chaban-Delmas managed only to persuade them to wait a day before they attacked again.

As the remnants of the German forces from Normandy began to escape across the Seine, the First Canadian and the Second British Armies were joined by the 1st Belgian Infantry Brigade, a Czech armoured brigade and the Royal Netherlands Brigade (Princess Irene’s). Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, with the forces of at least seven countries, was beginning to resemble Roosevelt’s dream of the United Nations.

On 22 August, while the FFI responded to Rol-Tanguy’s order of ‘Tous aux barricades!’, Eisenhower and Bradley became persuaded that they would have to go into Paris after all. Eisenhower knew that he would have to sell the decision to General Marshall and Roosevelt as a purely military one. The President would be angry if he thought that US forces were putting de Gaulle in power. De Gaulle, on the other hand, tried to ignore the fact that the United States had anything to do with the Liberation of Paris.

Bradley flew back in a Piper Cub to give Leclerc the good news that he could advance on Paris. The reaction among his soldiers was one of fierce joy. Orders from General Gerow that they were to leave the next morning were ignored, and the 2ème Division Blindée set off that night. After some hard fighting in the outer suburbs on 24 August, Leclerc sent a small column ahead into the city through backstreets. Soon after they reached the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville that night, cyclists spread the word across the city and the great bell of Notre Dame began to peal. General von Choltitz and his officers knew immediately what it signified.