Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

 

54th of 2021, Is Paris Burning? Is a 1965 book by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre telling the story of the Liberation of Paris during the Second World War. The book examines the military and political actions surrounding the events of late August 1944 around Paris and how these events unfolded. The title is taken from the question reportedly asked by Adolf Hitler following his order to destroy the city rather than let it be re-captured by the Allies. The story was adapted into a feature film by the same name in 1966.

The book is presented in three parts;

Part 1, "The Menace", examines the military and political situation at the beginning of August 1944, and the considerations of the various parties involved.

Part 2, "The Struggle", is a day-by-day account of the actions between 19 August, when the uprising by the French Resistance in the city commenced, and 25 August, when the German garrison surrendered.

Part 3, "The Deliverance", describes the activities of 26 and 27 August, detailing particularly the consolidation by General de Gaulle of his position as leader of the liberated French state.

The book is written as a series of vignettes based on interviews with, and the written memoirs of, the people involved, on all sides, in the liberation of Paris.

These include members of the various factions of the French Resistance, and of the Free French Forces and citizens of Paris; members of the American Armed Forces; and members of the occupying German Army.

Researchers spent nearly three years locating survivors of the Liberation of Paris, and undertook over 800 interviews of persons in France, Germany and the United States. They also had access to Allied and German action reports, war diaries, memoirs, and official records.

Senior Allied officers who assisted the authors included Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and Allen Dulles (of the OSS); French interviewees included Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Henri Rol-Tanguy (of the French Resistance), Mme Leclerc (widow of Jacques Leclerc) and Alain de Boissieu (son-in-law of Charles de Gaulle); and from Germany, Dietrich von Choltitz (Commandant of the Paris garrison) and Walter Warlimont (of the German High Command).

The conflict, each service, the civilians, families, famous persons and regular folks. Some happy endings, some tragic ones, each gives you a feel for what it was like to be there.

On the first day of the Paris uprising, the Resistance takes over various buildings throughout Paris. The Germans counterattack in Neuilly and retake the building. Survivors are escaping into the sewers below the building, carrying some wounded:

Charles Caillette, the sharpshooter, carried Henri Guérin, a World War I veteran whose wooden leg had been shot away by a fragment from a tank shell. Looking at it, Guérin had remarked, “Thank God, they always shoot the same one.”

Speed was the key. Hitler wanted Paris defended or destroyed. If he couldn’t have Paris, then nobody would. All the bridges and structures in Paris are mined and ready for demolition. Hitler wanted Paris to look like Stalingrad or Warsaw if he lost. The Allies were 122 miles to the west, two SS Divisions were 188 miles to the north. All racing to Paris and whoever got there first would determine the course of the battle. The German commander was willing to surrender Paris if the Allies got there but he would have to fight if the Panzers got there first.

All along the three advancing columns of the 2nd Armored, tough and costly bottlenecks like Toussus-le-Noble slowed progress. On each of the division’s lines of advance, the country ahead now flattened out into a network of villages and suburbs laced with intersecting crossroads, each offering the Germans an ideal emplacement for an antitank gun. In their rush to batter their way to Paris, the men of the 2nd Armored frequently tried to smash head on at those guns instead of nipping them out with infantry. It was a tactic that saved time. But it left behind each advancing column a sad and growing trail of blackened vehicles.

But time above all had to be saved this gray August day. In each column, relentless and unforgiving, the order was “Faster, faster.” Rounding a curve just past the river Bièvre, Private Georges Simonin, leading a platoon of tanks in his Sherman Cyclone, saw five wounded Germans sprawled on the highway before his treads. One, frantically working the pavement with his elbows tried to drag himself away. Simonin instinctively took his foot off the accelerator. As he did, he heard in his earphones the angry voice of his platoon commander crying, “Cyclone, nom de Dieu, get going!” Simonin shuddered, closed his eyes, and stamped on his accelerator.

The book is filled with great little vignettes, here are a couple from the Americans approaching Paris:

But of all the experiences along their route, nothing stood out more for these men than the sheer emotional impact of the hundreds of thousands of exultant, overwhelmingly grateful Parisians swarming over them. Frank Burk, of Jackson, Mississippi, submerged in a sea of people, thought it was “without a doubt, the happiest scene the world has ever known. Burk reckoned there were “fifteen solid miles of cheering, deliriously people waiting to shake your hand, to kiss you, to shower you with food and wine.”

A beautiful girl threw her arms around code clerk Brice Rhyne and sobbed, “We waited for you for four years.”

The precise Virginian said, “But the United States has only been in the war three years.”

“So what?” answered the girl, “We knew you’d come anyway!”

There are many stories from the French forces, sons calling their families from the outskirts of Paris and letting them know they would be there shortly. Some make it, some don’t. The authors keep you waiting to the last moment.