Paris’
Unlikely Savior

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Adolf Hitler had decreed that Paris should be left a smoking ruin,
but Dietrich von Choltitz thought better of his Führer’s order.
By Kelly Bell

By August 1944 Adolf Hitler had few prizes left in his beleaguered domain. From Tripoli to Rome to Kiev, the conquered metropolises had been retaken. He had just lost the first capital he had won almost five years earlier, as Josef Stalin’s surging Red Army replaced Warsaw’s brown yoke with a red one.

When resistance forces within Warsaw rose against the Germans in anticipation of the Russians’ arrival, Stalin paused. Seasoned guerrilla fighters would not be a valued commodity in Soviet-occupied Poland, so the dictator ordered his advancing hordes to halt mere miles from Warsaw, leaving the hapless guerrillas alone against a German garrison determined to thoroughly eradicate this rioting gang of “subhumans.”

By the time the new rulers marched in, the city was a smoldering rubble heap whose inhabitants were in no state to present difficulties. It was a situation the Führer also found quite appealing, if for a very different reason. If Hitler and Germany could not have Warsaw, why should anyone else? For that matter, why should anybody else have Paris?

Far from Warsaw, a very powerful American was also preoccupied with the fate of Paris. For General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the French capital, the cultural and artistic nucleus of Western civilization, was a gargantuan headache. Two miles inland from the Normandy coast, the supreme Allied commander sat in his nondescript, rain-drenched command caravan and reluctantly decided that he would have to postpone the liberation of the “City of Light.”

On the desk before Eisenhower lay a 24-page report which warned that taking Paris would seriously limit the Western Allies’ ability to maintain pressure on the Germans elsewhere. Fuel demands alone for the required armor would be a crippling drain because gasoline had to be trucked over steadily increasing distances from the Normandy beaches in convoys that burned almost as much as they delivered. Then there was the projected 75,000 tons of food and medical supplies that would be needed for the winter stockpile, and the 1,500-ton daily coal allotment.

In conjunction with the high command’s determination to achieve a bridgehead over the Rhine before the arrival of winter, the Allied planners had concluded that the “great liberation” should be postponed a couple of months and suggested an alternate plan. British General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group could strike eastward between the Seine and Oise rivers, secure the potentially invaluable port of Le Havre and neutralize the V-1 and V-2 missile emplacements at the Pas-de-Calais. Meanwhile, the American Twelfth Army Group could move south of Paris to cross the Seine at Melun, advance the 100 miles north to Reims, then swing west and link up with the British moving down from their newly captured jumping-off point of Amiens. Eisenhower could readily see the advantages of the plan: A destructive urban battle in Paris proper would be avoided, the terrain in question was suitable for the passage of armor, and since the city’s German garrison would be neutralized by encirclement rather than direct assault, with its accompanying attrition, precious gasoline would be conserved for the coming attack on the Siegfried Line, which defended the German frontier. The operation was tentatively set to begin sometime between September 15 and October 1, 1944, and while the supreme commander had grudgingly come to agree with his planners, General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, certainly did not.

American recognition of the collaborationist government of Vichy France, the failure of Washington to inform de Gaulle of the impending U.S. landings in North Africa the previous year, and the persistent friction between him, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already strained de Gaulle’s relationship with his allies. And the French general also had other foes to consider. Determined to be his country’s postwar head of state, de Gaulle saw in his political opponents, the Communists, a threat as great as the occupying Germans. With the French underground resistance movements predominately left wing, he had dispatched agents to spy on his countrymen as well as the Nazis. He learned that the Communists were planning a major uprising in Paris to liberate it themselves before the Allied armies arrived, hoping to entrench themselves politically as the emancipators of the capital and shunt the towering general into the obscurity and exile he so feared.

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