Eleven Days in August Read online

  Food may also have been on Picasso’s mind when he began a painting of the tomato plant in his attic studio.56 Over the next ten days he would paint nine identically sized canvases depicting the plant, chronicling the daily changes and experimenting with form, colour and light.57 One interpretation of this series of pictures would be that the green fruits of the plant promise life, while the red tomatoes show the potential of what is to come, and that the whole series deals with the imminent liberation of Paris. A more prosaic view – which does not contradict the other, and which is supported by the fact that the number of fruit declined as the series progressed – is that Picasso liked eating tomatoes. Most of the tomato plant paintings show strong light and vivid colours, but in the painting of 7 August, the sky just visible through the window is dull and yellow, and the light in the room is flat and without contrast. That afternoon the capital was covered by a thick bank of coppery grey cloud drifting from the north as petrol depots at Saint-Ouen were destroyed in an Allied air-raid.58 The war was getting into Picasso’s pictures.

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  When General von Choltitz arrived in Paris, he spent much of his first day negotiating the handover from his predecessor, von Boineburg.59 Hitler’s primary order for Paris was immediately put into effect, and the Germans began preparing to evacuate the administrative services from the capital. Scouts were sent eastwards towards the frontier to find new offices for the thousands of German administrators. The evacuation plans created a logistical nightmare: there were simply not enough vehicles available. The Army was throwing everything it had westwards towards the front, while the vehicles owned by Parisians had long been pillaged.60 Many German offices began to destroy their archives, hoping the flames would erase the horrors of four years of occupation. Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar noted in her diary: ‘On the place de la Concorde, on rue Boissy-d’Anglas, from the Hôtel Crillon and all the other German offices, flakes of ash rain from the sky, falling on our faces, our hair, our arms.’61

  One of von Choltitz’s first actions was to try to intimidate the population by ordering his men to march through the city in a display of force. Parisian civil servant Yves Cazaux noted various troop movements in his diary, but was not sure what they meant: ‘At the moment there is a great deal of agitation in Paris . . . A cannon is pointed towards the Lion de Belfort statue in the rue Denfert-Rocherau near the Observatory . . . Artillery sections are moving down the avenue d’Orléans, towards Concorde . . . Large numbers of troops are marching down the Champs-Elysées, passing by rue Royale, boulevard Malesherbes; there are all sorts of forces – infantry, tanks and anti-aircraft guns.’62 Cazaux’s bemused response was not exactly what von Choltitz had in mind, but few Parisians were struck by the event and even the collaborationist press did not make much of it.63 The parade got only a brief mention in Marcel Déat’s fascist daily, L’Oeuvre: ‘Saturday 12 August, the General von Choltitz, military governor of Paris, deployed part of the German troops stationed in the capital on an emergency exercise, at the end of which they returned to barracks.’64

  Von Choltitz also tried to intimidate his subordinates. He removed General Erwin Vierow from command of German troops to the south and west of Paris, despite Vierow’s familiarity with the conditions in the area.65 This was just one of many changes in command that affected the Paris region in July and August, each of which further weakened the German forces. As Colonel Kurt Hesse put it three years later: ‘The effected removals of the military commander in France, General of the Inf. von Stülpnagel, the commander of Great-Paris, General von Boineburg, Major General Bremer and later on the commander in chief for the West, Field Marshal von Kluge, in the course of the events and their substitution by personalities that were not familiar with the difficult situation of Paris, brought about conditions that were considered as extremely disadvantageous for the ensuing mission.’66

  Von Choltitz soon realised that Paris was ill-prepared for an enemy assault. The defences comprised a series of anti-aircraft (‘flak’) batteries and a total of 36 heavy and 220 medium or light cannons.67 Designed for use against an aerial offensive, these weapons could also be employed against tanks and ground forces, but they were not adequately protected and would be vulnerable to any major attack.68 The flak batteries were backed up by sections of the 325th Security Division – 6000 men, split into four regiments of poorly armed, mainly non-motorised troops. However, one of those four regiments was miles away on the coast and so was useless for all practical purposes, while another protected the Grande Ceinture railway line 15 km around the capital. Alongside the remaining 3000 members of the 325th, there were another 17,000 German soldiers in Paris, most of them having minor security or administrative duties, many of them not young and few of them battle-hardened.69 The only other force at von Choltitz’s command was an armoured group that had been cobbled together by von Boineburg, composed of fourteen old tanks (captured French tanks and pre-war Panzer 1s) and eighteen Panhard scout cars.70 Von Boineburg himself later admitted these forces were ‘weak’.71

  Inside the capital, the Germans had reinforced concrete defences and thirty-two bunkered Stützpunkte (‘strong-points’) at strategic locations like the Senate building (the upper house of Parliament) or the German administrative centre at the place de l’Opéra, which were well defended and had sufficient supplies to hold out for a month. These defences would deter infantry but would not be able to resist a concerted armoured attack. The explanation for these apparently lightweight defensive preparations was that the Germans had been expecting a civilian insurrection rather than an attack by an Allied armoured column; the ‘defence of Paris’ was focused purely on internal threats. This was not unreasonable: throughout the occupation, Paris had been the centre of both sporadic large-scale civil disobedience, such as a student demonstration on 11 November 1940, and occasional waves of urban guerrilla action in which individual German soldiers were assassinated.72 This was expected to increase after D-Day.73 Kurt Hesse wrote: ‘Heavy arms – artillery, tanks – were not to [be] expected on the side of the Resistance, but then it was likely that they had in great numbers submachine guns, small arms, hand grenades and also incendiary material.’74

  As well as continuing to prepare for an armed confrontation with the Resistance, the Germans now had to deal with the perspective of a pitched battle on the western approaches to the French capital. Hitler might have wanted Paris to be defended at all costs, but he had not provided the means. The commander of the German 1st Army headquarters at Fontainebleau gave this damning description of the Paris garrison: ‘No combat troops, units lacking solid structure as well as uniform leadership and training. Insufficient armament. AA [anti-aircraft] detachments not equipped with necessary means of observation and signal equipment for ground-fighting. For the most not mobile. In view of the particular difficulties of fighting in a large city and the material superiority of the enemy, any real resistance on the part of the Paris Mil[itary] District could not be expected.’75 Daniel Boisdon, a 60-year-old lawyer and member of the Libération-Nord Resistance group, gained a similar impression of the military situation around Paris on 10 August. Boisdon had been in Bourges, 200 km south of Paris, and was trying to return to his home in the capital. He eventually got a lift with a butcher, who invited him for a meal on the way:

  I ate a piece of beef the like of which I hadn’t tasted for several months and we became the best of friends. In the Paris suburbs we dropped in on the mother of one of the drivers, opened a bottle of Pouilly and drank to the defeat of the Huns. By 20:00 I was at the Pont d’Austerlitz. Throughout our journey we had seen that the Germans were leaving. And what a departure! Their lorries were loaded with all sorts of things, including old furniture and sewing machines. Every now and again, hidden in the woods, we came across a piece of artillery or a few tanks. But very few troops. Certainly nothing that could resist a mass attack.76

  The fact that the Paris region was not well defended did not mean that there would not be a battle. As the Allied a
rmies advanced, retreating German units would be pushed in front of them. Hitler had insisted that Paris was to be the point at which that retreat would halt. The position of Paris at the heart of all road and rail routes back to Germany meant that the Allies would come to the gates of the capital, and the Germans would have to fight or flee. All indications were that they would fight. As Yves Cazaux walked past place du Châtelet he saw a column of Tiger tanks clanking their way south down the boulevard Sebastopol before turning left with a grinding sound and heading south-eastwards along the Seine: ‘The tanks are camouflaged with branches, they move clumsily. The massive machines turn slowly, with a series of slow movements. The Parisian tarmac is being seriously damaged by this long column of more than 25 tanks.’77 At lunchtime, 57-year-old university lecturer Paul Tuffrau strolled down to the sun-filled Jardin du Luxembourg, now completely closed to civilians. He found French labourers at the north-west corner of the park building a strange platform into the ripped-up paving stones. As they ate their lunch he asked them what the structure was for. ‘A cannon’ was the simple reply. Similar work was going on outside the Senate building, just up the road. The Germans were digging in. From time to time German fighter planes roared low over the city.78

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  Frustrated by the lack of action, the communist leadership of the armed Resistance group, the Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP – Sharpshooters and Partisans), issued a call to arms. Drafted by regional FTP leader Charles Tillon, and then amended by Communist Party youth leaders Albert Ouzoulias and Pierre Georges (‘Colonel Fabien’), the document was entitled ‘Forward to the Battle of Paris’. FTP units were immediately to cut all German lines of communication, attack the enemy forces, get all workers to cease working for the enemy and join the FTP, culminating in an armed insurrection:

  Together with groups of patriotic militias, smash the repressive apparatus of the traitors and the enemy. Exterminate the agents of the Gestapo . . . Attack and destroy police roadblocks manned by the French and the German police on major roads and in the cities. Lay siege to the arms depots and attack them. Distribute seized arms to the patriots . . . Francs-Tireurs et Partisans of the Parisian region, make de Gaulle’s slogan EVERYONE TO BATTLE the cry of the Paris uprising. Officers and Parisian soldiers of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, forward to the national insurrection. March to the sound of guns!79

  This might appear to confirm the worst fears of those who suspected the communists were planning to seize power, but this was not the case. Over the next few days there were no signs of any increase in FTP armed activity, for the simple reason that they did not have enough weapons. Nor was there any mass influx into the FTP, because they did not have the broad support they imagined they had. In some senses, this revolutionary rhetoric represented the high point of direct communist influence over the Paris insurrection. The FTP forces in the Paris region were now under the orders of the FFI, and had adopted an outlook that was similar to that of the whole Resistance: ‘Our slogan must be to respond to General de Gaulle with all our strength by opening the road to Paris for the Allies.’80 The 10 August call to arms was apparently the last attempt by the FTP leaders to intervene independently in the impending struggle for the capital. In the days that followed, they issued no independent orders, nor did they carry out any independent actions; everything was left in the hands of Colonel Rol, the undisputed leader of the FFI.81

  3

  Mid-August: Build-up

  On Thursday 10 August, Protestant priest Marc Boegner writes in his diary: ‘A beautiful day, the most beautiful that we have had this summer. Paris is full of lorries, of hastily camouflaged cars of all kinds. They are waiting for nightfall before leaving. People “in the know” claim that Pétain will be here on Saturday. Laval is already here. They say that the newspapers will be moving to Vittel or Nancy. Part of the German embassy has apparently already moved out. It’s odd, there are people moving in and moving out!’1

  As the sun rose on 10 August, around 500 workers went into the Noisy-le-Sec railway depot and stayed there, refusing to work, protesting against their low pay and poor working conditions, and against the continued imprisonment of some of their comrades following the 14 July events. The Germans were occupying the country, now the railway workers were occupying their workplace. A sprawling tangle of lines on the north side of the main Paris–Strasbourg line, Noisy was a central part of the rail network. All trains heading towards Germany passed through Noisy, and many of the locomotives that hauled those trains were housed and maintained there. Two weeks earlier, the depot had seen the last spasm of the strikes that began on 14 July; now it was at the beginning of a new and decisive wave of industrial unrest.2

  In a carefully planned movement organised by the banned trade union the CGT (Conféderation Générale du Travail – General Labour Confederation), railway workers were going on strike all over the region, and soon twenty-five depots were affected. This was not de Gaulle’s ‘national insurrection’, but it did show a shift in the balance of power. A railway worker described what happened in his Montrouge workshop: ‘Around 09:00, armed men arrived and called us out on strike. We wanted the liberation of the hostages arrested on 14 July, a pay increase and food reserves. Everyone walked out. Some of us were sent to other depots to spread the movement. Pickets were set up at the gates of the workshops.’3 The strike did not immediately take hold everywhere. At Mantes-la-Jolie, to the north-west of Paris, Louis Racaud recalled how although many drivers followed the call to cease work and disable their locomotives, others refused: ‘My mate Léon said, “I don’t get involved in politics. I’m going back to the canteen.”’4 At the Villeneuve-Saint-Georges depot, which still had seven of its workers held captive by the Germans, the strike was a flop.5 A local activist, protected by armed FTP fighters, spoke to three consecutive shifts of workers in the canteen but to no avail – the workers refused to go on strike.6 That night the regional CGT leader, ‘Véry’, tried to put a positive spin on the mood in the depot by describing it as ‘undecided’.7

  Even if the massive Villeneuve depot was not taking action, the movement had a major impact. The number of trains on the Grande Ceinture line around the Paris region fell from thirty-two to eighteen, with seventy-four trains stuck on the tracks, waiting to pass.8 All commuter traffic was halted: the Parisian stations were closed and passengers from Versailles had to walk the thirteen kilometres into the capital. In the late afternoon, Yves Cazaux called the headquarters of the state-owned railway company, the SNCF, to find out what was going on, but there was no reply.9

  Over the next few days, the Germans responded to the strike, seizing hostages from among strikers across the region. At the La Chapelle depot, where sixteen workers were arrested and threatened with execution, the strikers returned to work. At the nearby Batignolles depot, where hundreds of workers were occupying the workshops, the strikers decided to go home rather than run the risk of being taken hostage by the Germans. At Noisy, where the movement had begun, troops took hostages and threatened to kill them if the strikers did not go back to work. Although the strike was temporarily halted at Noisy, rail traffic did not return to normal: all the Noisy steam locomotives were cold as the drivers had dumped the red-hot contents of the fireboxes onto the tracks.10

  At the Gare Saint-Lazare, the management decided to run a number of suburban electric trains, arguing that if the service looked vaguely normal, the Germans might free the hostages. Pierre Patin, an engineer in his twenties, gingerly volunteered for the job, despite his fears that breaking the strike might compromise his Resistance work and that the train might be attacked by the Allies or the Resistance. To Patin’s amazement, there were actually passengers waiting at the stations he stopped at, and for eight hours he buzzed back and forth along the suburban lines that stretched westwards towards the rumble of distant artillery fire, singing strike songs and feeling ‘both very patriotic and very revolutionary’.11

  A handful of militants at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges met to s
ee how they could revive the flagging momentum of the strike in their workplace. Véry, the regional union organiser, explained the next day: ‘I decided to stay at Villeneuve to organise the work of the union militants, because things were pretty anarchic. On Sunday morning, I gathered together the leaders of the railway workers, and we decided to use diplomacy, force and sabotage to keep the strike alive.’12 By the afternoon of 13 August, around 300 German soldiers had turned up to intimidate the workers. They succeeded, and the strike stalled. The next day, which was a public holiday, Véry reported wearily: ‘The “strike” is effective because all the railway workers are on holiday.’13

  Elsewhere it was the strikers who were doing the threatening: one strike committee leaflet read ‘Death to those who drive trains’, while at La Villette, on the north-eastern edge of Paris, a driver and fireman were menaced by armed men until they refused to drive their convoy. At Montrouge, shots were exchanged between gendarmes and strikers, and at nearby Bercy a ninety-six-ton steam engine was driven into a turntable pit, putting the equipment – and the locomotive – out of action for the duration.14

  Responding to pressure from railway managers, the government asked the Germans to free all fifty-two railwaymen hostages, including sixteen who had been arrested on 14 July, to help end the strike.15 It appears that the Germans accepted this, as the SNCF was told that all the hostages would be released, with the exception of those who were arrested following the demonstrations of 14 July, and that their cases would be re-examined if the strike ended.16

  In some depots, the strikers began to return to work. At the Jules-Coutant workshop in Ivry the police reported there were few strikers: ‘The workforce in this workshop, showing their goodwill, hopes that the eight workers arrested following a strike will soon be freed . . . It can be assumed that if they are not freed, there will be more strike action.’17 Elsewhere, threats from the Resistance against strike-breakers meant that railwaymen were prepared to go back to work only if they were protected by the police.18