The liberation of Paris was the most romantic event of World War II. It was not necessarily the most dramatic or the most important. The D-Day invasion and the atomic bombing of Japan were surely more dramatic, while the defeat of France in 1940 and the cross-Channel evacuation from Dunkirk were certainly more important developments from a strategic standpoint. But for sheer romance, joy, delight, tears of happiness and emotional dizziness, the liberation of Paris surpassed all the other momentous events of the war. It was a moment of supreme elation.

The City of Light had been home to the American expatriates of the 1920s and ’30s–F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson and others. George Gershwin’s musical production An American in Paris and Josephine Baker’s extravagant exploits on the stage made the city a romantic dream to many Americans.

To the French, Maurice Chevalier’s Paris had long been the most beautiful place on earth, where love flourished and couples necked in the metro and kissed along the Seine River. Painters made Paris the center of the art world. The accordion was the typical musical instrument of the bal musette, a slow dance in which men wore berets and held dead cigarette butts in the corners of their mouths. And the vistas! The Champs Elysées, the Place de la Concorde, the Place des Vosges. For sheer beauty, Paris was unrivaled.

All this was lost in June 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris. They were there for more than four years. Their presence was distasteful. Their signs to offices and headquarters were everywhere. Their restraints, like the curfew, plagued the population. They took hostages and forbade playing jazz. Paris, it seemed, no longer belonged to the Parisians.

And then the Allies arrived. In August 1944, when the Americans finally broke out of the Norman hedgerows and were on the move, many inhabitants who had left the capital hurried back to the city. The Americans had been bogged down far from Paris for far too long–ages, it seemed. Now they were on their way and the Parisians hastened to return. They did not want to miss the gladness of welcoming their liberators and the glorious spectacle of seeing the Germans go.

Many legends have arisen to explain how the liberation happened. One of the most entertaining is Ernest Hemingway’s, who claimed he entered the city, took command of the bars at the Crillon and Ritz hotels and let the champagne flow, thereby liberating all of Paris. S.L.A. Marshall corroborated Hemingway’s feat, for Marshall said he was there, too. Sam Marshall was the chief historian of the European theater and my boss during the war. I respected him a great deal, but, as everyone used to say, Sam never let a fact stand in the way of a good story.

Actually, the liberation was somewhat more complicated. It all started long before the invasion of Normandy. In 1943, the Allies listed a French division among the units earmarked to travel from England to the Continent. According to Allied planners, the reason was primarily so that there would be a major French formation present at the reoccupation of Paris. The 2nd French Armored Division was selected for the task. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as supreme Allied commander, promised to use the division to liberate the capital.

The division commander was Maj. Gen. Philippe Leclerc, the wartime pseudonym of Philippe François Marie de Hautecloque, an aristocrat and thorough patriot. Leclerc had served as a Regular army captain during the 1940 campaign. After the French surrender, he made his way to England and joined General Charles de Gaulle. Leclerc burned with desire to erase the shame of the French defeat. He was headstrong and impatient. He possessed a formidable will and generated an immense charisma.

De Gaulle sent Leclerc to Chad, where he raised and trained a column of mobile troops. He took his men through the interior of Africa to Libya, and at Koufra attacked and defeated the Italians. He then attached his outfit to Lt. Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army and fought on its left flank. In the process, Leclerc advanced rapidly in rank and gained a legendary reputation. Having functioned in Africa more or less independently, he was ill-suited to the discipline of the chain of command.

Toward the end of 1943, de Gaulle instructed Leclerc to form the 2nd French Armored Division. Leclerc pulled the division together from a variety of sources. It contained Free French from the United Kingdom and Syria, soldiers from French North Africa and equatorial Africa, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Animists, all of whom mingled in friendship, as did Communists, Socialists, free thinkers, militant Christians and Quakers. Binding them together were hatred of the Germans, love of France and the spirit of Leclerc, who imparted a sense of adventure to men who exhibited the exuberance of freebooters.

After training in Algeria, the division moved to England. The troops knew that their mission was to cross the Channel and liberate Paris. They could hardly wait. ‘We shall not stop,’ Leclerc said, ‘until the French flag flies over Strasbourg and Metz.’ Along the route to the capitals of Alsace and Lorraine, Paris was a holy place. The division’s activity in metropolitan France would reach its climax in the freeing of Paris. Anticipation of the impending ecstasy, however, made the division difficult to control.

On August 1, 1944, almost two months after D-Day, the 2nd French Armored Division arrived in Normandy at Utah Beach. It was to be part of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s Third U.S. Army. Patton needed units, and he called Leclerc in for a talk. Patton offered Leclerc the opportunity to go into battle immediately instead of waiting to liberate Paris. According to Patton, the Germans were about to surrender. If Leclerc wanted to fight, he had better get started. Leclerc jumped at the chance.

Patton put Leclerc and his division into the XV Corps. Its commander was Maj. Gen. Wade Hampton Haislip, a well-heeled Virginian who had been a student at the Ecole de Guerre, the war college in Paris. Patton and Haislip, who also spoke French fluently, were especially welcoming to Leclerc. They tried to make him feel at home.

Leclerc was skeptical of Americans. His service with the British in North Africa had given him something of an anti-American bias. Like many of his British associates, Leclerc considered the Americans newcomers to the war, green, untried and not very savvy. Leclerc believed that solutions to battlefield problems came to him in an instant, whereas Americans required time and paperwork to grasp military situations. If the Americans committed stupidities, he claimed, the French ought to avoid doing the same. Leclerc announced to his principal subordinates, ‘If an American is an ass, there is no reason for a Frenchman to be one, too.’

Part of Leclerc’s outlook came from resentment. The French were the proprietors of France, but the Americans were running the show. Leclerc would try Haislip’s and Patton’s patience, and he would get on the nerves of all of his American superiors–Lt. Gens. Omar Bradley, the Twelfth Army Group commander; Courtney Hodges, the First U.S. Army commander; and Leonard Gerow, the V Corps commander.

The 2nd French Armored Division traveled to Le Mans and took its place on the southern jaw of the Allied advance, moving north to close what became known as the Argentan-Falaise pocket, the maneuver to surround the Germans in Normandy. Against little opposition, the division advanced well, covering about 30 miles to the town of Alençon. The French on the left and an American armored division, the 5th, on the right continued together toward Argentan. Ahead of them was an upland forest. Haislip instructed them to avoid this difficult terrain. Instead, the French were to go around the left side of the town, the Americans around the right.

In a defiant, yet inexcusable, gesture of disobedience–or perhaps because he was inexperienced, having never commanded a division in combat–Leclerc disregarded Haislip’s order. Instead of continuing on his assigned route, the impetuous French commander sent his vehicles around the left side, through the middle, and around the right of the town. Those Frenchmen traveling on the right used a road Haislip had reserved for the Americans.

It took Leclerc’s men six hours to get through the forest. During this time, they blocked the American armored division and prevented it from hurrying to Argentan. Amid the ensuing confusion, three panzer divisions arrived in Argentan to defend the town. They kept the Allies out. Leclerc and his men then found themselves stuck on the outskirts of Argentan, maintaining the southern jaw of the Falaise pocket. Paris was a hundred miles away.

On the following day, August 14, Patton sent part of the XV Corps, but not Leclerc’s division, to the east and toward the Seine River. Leclerc asked Patton when the French could go to Paris. Patton bluntly told Leclerc to remain where he was.

On August 15, Patton recorded in his diary: ‘Leclerc came in very much excited. He said, among other things, that if he were not allowed to advance on Paris, he would resign. I told him in my best French that he was a baby and said I had left him in the most dangerous place on the front. We parted friends.’

After his audience Leclerc wrote to Patton. Argentan, he said, was quiet. It was probably time for him to assemble his troops for movement to Paris. Patton wrote in his diary, ‘Leclerc cut up again today.’ In his journal entry, Patton wondered whether Leclerc would obey orders.

Leclerc visited Patton’s headquarters that evening and found Bradley there. Both Bradley and Patton assured Leclerc that he would have the honor of liberating Paris when the time came.

These promises did not reassure Leclerc. American troops were closer to Paris than he was. Haislip’s XV Corps crossed the Seine River on August 19, 25 miles below the city. Major General Walton H. Walker’s XX Corps at Chartres and Maj. Gen. Gilbert Cook’s XII Corps at Orléans were within shouting distance of the city. If Eisenhower had to liberate Paris quickly, one of these forces would be able to reach the city much sooner than Leclerc.

With Haislip’s corps headquarters gone, Gerow’s V Corps headquarters–part of First Army–took over the Argentan area. Hodges invited Leclerc to lunch on August 20. All the Frenchman could talk about was Paris. Hodges was disgusted with him. Yet he noted in his diary that he would send Leclerc to liberate the capital.

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