De Gaulle was then taken by car to the cathedral of Notre-Dame. Cardinal Suhard was conspicuously absent. He had been prevented from attending because he had welcomed Pétain to Paris, and had recently presided over the memorial service in honour of Philippe Henriot, the Vichy minister of propaganda assassinated by the Resistance.
When de Gaulle entered Notre-Dame more fusillades broke out, both inside and outside the cathedral. But de Gaulle never flinched. As almost everyone threw themselves to the ground around him, he continued to march up the aisle, doubly determined to disarm the FFI, which he regarded as a far greater threat to order than any remaining miliciens or Germans. ‘Public order is a matter of life and death,’ he told Pasteur Boegner a few days later. ‘If we do not re-establish it ourselves, foreigners will impose it upon us.’ American and British forces now appeared to be seen as ‘foreigners’ rather than allies. France was truly liberated. As de Gaulle himself put it, France had no friends, only interests.
Although the French reluctance to acknowledge American help still rankled deeply, General Gerow subsequently accepted Leclerc’s peace-making overture. His 2ème DB was ready to move on 27 August and went into action against the Germans round Le Bourget aerodrome. Also on that day, Eisenhower and Bradley paid ‘an informal visit’ to Paris. Eisenhower had invited Montgomery, but he refused on the grounds that he was too busy. Despite the informality of the event, General Gerow could not resist meeting his superiors at the Porte d’Orléans with a full armoured escort from the 38th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron to accompany them into the city. The following day, V Corps reported, ‘General Gerow, as military commander of Paris, returned the capital city to the people of France.’ When informed of this by Gerow, General Koenig replied that he had been in charge of Paris all along.
Gerow arranged for the 28th Infantry Division, newly attached to V Corps, to march through Paris the next day to create ‘a parade of the might of the modern American Army for the populace’. Generals Bradley, Hodges and Gerow were joined by General de Gaulle at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, where they laid a wreath. Then the four men reviewed the march-past from a stand erected by American engineers out of a Bailey bridge turned upside down on the Place de la Concorde. It was entirely fitting that Norman Cota, now the commander of the 28th Division, should lead the parade. Few men had demonstrated so clearly, as he had done at Omaha, the need for determined leadership in battle.
The ugly side of Liberation reared up almost immediately, with denunciations and revenge on women who had had liaisons with German soldiers. Marshall and Westover saw one woman scream ‘collaboratrice! ’ at another. The crowd turned on the accused woman and started to rip her clothes. Marshall and Westover, with a couple of American journalists, managed to save her. In Paris too the head-shaving began. On the balcony of a local mairie, barbers attacked the hair of women rounded up for ‘collaboration horizontale’ with Germans. The crowd below yelled its approval and applauded. A young woman who had been present recorded afterwards how much she despised herself for having been part of that crowd. And a young officer with the 2ème DB wrote, ‘We are sickened by these dregs who mistreat women with shaved heads for having slept with Germans.’ Altogether some 20,000 Frenchwomen are estimated to have had their heads shaved in the summer of 1944.
Disillusionment between liberated and liberators also increased. Americans and British saw Paris not just as a symbol of Europe’s freedom from Nazi oppression, but as a playground for their amusement. ‘As we neared the city we were seized by a wild sort of excitement, ’ wrote Forrest Pogue. ‘We began to giggle, to sing, yell and otherwise show exuberance.’ American supply services, to Eisenhower’s irritation, commandeered all the best hotels to lodge their senior officers in style. No French people were allowed to enter without an invitation. They were naturally jealous of the food. Simone de Beauvoir described the Hôtel Scribe, reserved for foreign journalists, as ‘an American enclave in the heart of Paris: white bread, fresh eggs, jam, sugar and Spam’. In the centre of the city, US military police assumed full powers, often treating the local gendarmerie as auxiliaries. Soon the French Communist Party labelled the Americans ‘the new occupying power’.
Pogue himself was shaken to find that the Petit Palais had been taken over, with a large sign announcing the distribution of free condoms to US troops. In Pigalle, rapidly dubbed ‘Pig Alley’ by GIs, prostitutes were coping with over 10,000 men a day. The French were also deeply shocked to see US Army soldiers lying drunk on the pavements of the Place Vendôme. The contrast with off-duty German troops, who had been forbidden even to smoke in the street, could hardly have been greater.
The problem was that many American soldiers, loaded with dollars of back-pay, believed that hardship at the front gave them the right to behave as they liked in the rear. And American deserters in Paris, combined with a few Milo Mindbenders in the supply services, fuelled a rampant black market. The capital of France became known as ‘Chicago-sur-Seine’.
Sadly, the behaviour of a fairly unrepresentative minority soured Franco-American relations more profoundly and permanently than was understood at the time. It distorted the huge sacrifice of Allied soldiers and French civilians in the battle for Normandy, which had freed the country from the suffering and humiliation of the German Occupation. It also diverted attention away from the massive American aid. While combat engineers deactivated mines and booby traps, over 3,000 tons of supplies per day were rushed to Paris, bringing much of the Allied advance on Germany to a virtual halt.
‘Paris had fallen very suddenly,’ the Central Base Section reported. ‘People thought that we had an inexhaustible supply of food and lots of clothing and plenty of gasoline for their cars. Our offices were as crowded as the Paris Metro.’ There was an overwhelming demand for penicillin as well as morphine for civilian use. Major General Kenner, SHAEF’s chief medical officer, organized a monthly allocation to be made to the French government. Meanwhile, the medical services of the American, British and Canadian armies did whatever they could for injured and sick civilians in their area.
The success of the Allied double invasion, first in Normandy and then on the Mediterranean coast, had at least spared most of France from a long-drawn-out battle of attrition.
30. Aftermath
News of the liberation of Paris had provoked almost as much emotion in the rest of France as in the capital itself. In Caen, Major Massey with the British civil affairs team wrote, ‘I saw Frenchmen in the streets crying with joy as they took off their hats to the playing of the “Marseillaise”.’ But the citizens of Caen and other stricken towns and villages feared, with justification, that amidst the jubilation in Paris their suffering would be forgotten. This proved even more true as the war moved towards the German border. De Gaulle finally visited Caen in October and promised his support, but two months later the minister of reconstruction warned the region that it would be ‘many years’ before Calvados could be rebuilt.
The cruel martyrdom of Normandy had indeed saved the rest of France. Yet the debate about the overkill of Allied bombing and artillery is bound to continue. Altogether 19,890 French civilians were killed during the liberation of Normandy and an even larger number seriously injured. This was on top of the 15,000 French killed and 19,000 injured during the preparatory bombing for Overlord in the first five months of 1944. It is a sobering thought that 70,000 French civilians were killed by Allied action during the course of the war, a figure which exceeds the total number of British killed by German bombing.