D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

south of Paris. After Cook’s XII Corps had taken Orléans and Châteaudun, General Patton, in inimitable fashion, simply told him, ‘Go where you damn well please eastwards!’ Cook said that he wanted to go straight for Koblenz on the Rhine. Patton was all in favour, Cook recorded, but Bradley was less certain. He thought that Montgomery would object because he needed to clear the rocket sites in the Pas-de-Calais as his top priority. But Patton was then forced to hold XII Corps at Orléans because of fuel shortages.
    Montgomery was indeed objecting. On 19 August, he had discovered at a meeting with Bradley that Eisenhower wanted to advance with the American 12th Army Group straight across eastern France to the German border. The British and Canadians would clear the Pas-de-Calais, then go into Belgium and take the port of Antwerp, as Montgomery had proposed. But Montgomery despaired of a broad front advance. He wanted both army groups to proceed in a massed group together under a single field commander. This difference of opinion on strategy led to a major rift in the Allied command. It was a battle which the weakened British were now bound to lose.
    Tensions between the Americans and the French also began to increase at an even higher level. Eisenhower was tipped off by the British commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean that General de Gaulle was about to fly from Algiers to France. De Gaulle, determined not to be beholden to the Allies in any way, refused to give detailed flight plans and rejected a fighter escort for his Lockheed Lodestar. The Americans, genuinely concerned for his safety, offered to provide a Flying Fortress. De Gaulle then insisted that it must bear French markings and have a French crew, but no French pilots were qualified to fly the aircraft.
    On 19 August, de Gaulle arrived at Eisenhower’s headquarters. He heard that the Americans had taken Chartres. ‘We must march on Paris,’ he said to Eisenhower. ‘There must be an organized force there for internal order.’ But Eisenhower wanted to bypass the city. Next day de Gaulle went to Rennes. News arrived that an insurrection had started in Paris. De Gaulle immediately sent General Alphonse Juin with a letter to Eisenhower insisting that it was ‘absolutely necessary to have Leclerc sent into Paris’. 75 If this was not done, then he, de Gaulle, would order Leclerc into Paris.
     
    The German commander of Gross-Paris - ‘Greater Paris’ - was now Generalleutnant von Choltitz, the former commander of LXXXIV Corps on the Cotentin coast. Hitler had summoned Choltitz to the Wolfsschanze on the morning of 7 August when the attack on Mortain was beginning. ‘Hitler made me a speech for three-quarters of an hour, as though I were a public meeting,’ he complained later. Hitler, looking sick and bloated, raged at the plotters of 20 July. He claimed that he had unmasked the opposition at one blow and would crush them all. Choltitz was convinced that he really had become deranged and that the war was lost. Hitler, having calmed down, then gave him his orders for Paris. Choltitz had full powers as the commander of a ‘besieged fortress’ over all Wehrmacht personnel in Greater Paris. The city was to be defended to the end.
    Choltitz later portrayed himself as an anti-Nazi as well as the saviour of Paris, yet Hitler trusted him because of his performance in southern Russia. Choltitz had indeed carried out Nazi orders faithfully. In British captivity that autumn, Choltitz said to General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, ‘The worst job I ever carried out - which however I carried out with great consistency - was the liquidation of the Jews. I carried out this order down to the very last detail.’ 76 (Choltitz, however, never faced a war crimes tribunal for these acts.)
    Choltitz reached Paris two days later when the Mortain counterattack had stalled. Leutnant Graf von Arnim met him at the Villa Coty, the residence of Generalleutnant Hans Freiherr von Boineburg-Lengsfeld, whom Choltitz was replacing. Arnim described the fifty-year-old general as ‘short of stature and round in shape, with a rasping voice, wearing a monocle, and on his round head he had a small parting almost right in the middle. He spoke rapidly.’ Arnim, who like many army officers in Paris had been linked to the July plot, was at first cautious with the new commander, purely because Hitler and the OKW evidently trusted him as ‘a bold and experienced general’.
    After a