D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

told him to go back and stop it at all costs. The Allies did not want to take Paris before the beginning of September. That night Colonel Rol-Tanguy issued an instruction on how to attack tanks with Molotov cocktails, following the ‘shining example of the dinamiteros of the Spanish Republican army’. 77
    On 17 August, the National Council of Resistance and its military wing held a meeting to debate the call to arms. The Communists, led by Rol, wanted to start immediately, even though the Resistance in Paris had little more than 400 weapons. Although the British had parachuted nearly 80,000 sub-machine guns to the Resistance in France, only just over 100 had reached Paris. The Gaullists were in a difficult position. In spite of Koenig’s instruction, they knew that if they refused to act, the Communists would seize the initiative and perhaps power in the capital.
    Hopes increased that day, which became know as ‘ la grande fuite des Fritz ’,‘the great flight of the Fritzes’. The diarist Jean Galtier-Boissière, striding the streets of the capital, observed the departure of senior German officers and office staff with amusement as the Feldgendarmerie directed traffic with their discs on the end of a stick. ‘Along the rue Lafayette,’ he wrote, ‘coming from the luxury hotels around the Etoile, sparkling torpedoes pass by containing purple-faced generals, accompanied by elegant blonde women, who look as if they are off to some fashionable resort.’ The departure was accompanied by a great deal of last-minute looting. The contents of wine cellars were loaded on to Wehrmacht trucks, as well as rolls of carpet, Louis XVI furniture, bicycles and works of art. Parisians, who had tried to ignore their German occupiers during the last four years, now jeered them openly. Sylvia Beach, the founder of the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, described how a crowd of Parisians waved lavatory brushes at them, but then the angry and nervous soldiers opened fire.
    The next day, 18 August, Communist posters urging revolt appeared on walls. And early on the morning of 19 August, 3,000 members of the police in civilian clothes, but carrying their pistols, took over the Préfecture de Police. The tricolore was hoisted and they sang the ‘Marseillaise’. Charles Luizet, appointed by de Gaulle as the new head of the Parisian police, slipped into the building on the Ile de la Cité. Amédée Bussière, his predecessor appointed by Vichy, was locked up in his apartment.
    The Germans had no idea of events at the Préfecture de Police. ‘A deceptive calm reigned in the city glowing from a hot August sun,’ wrote Leutnant von Arnim later. Choltitz sent Arnim off in an open Kübelwagen with two sergeants as bodyguards on a tour of the city to find out what was happening. The streets were almost entirely empty. They drove along the Seine embankment on the north side and past the Palais de Justice, which was ‘quiet as the grave’. They spotted nothing untoward at the Préfecture de Police. But when they reached the Place Saint-Michel on the left bank they suddenly came under fire. The NCO next to Arnim yelled out as he was hit in the upper arm. They grabbed their machine pistols and fired back blindly. A shot hit one of the front tyres. Arnim slapped the driver’s back and shouted at him, ‘Drive on! Drive on!’ Fortunately for them, the firing came only from one building, and they were able to reach the Feldkommandantur. But the Unteroffizier who had been shot in the arm had also received a bullet in the chest and died that afternoon.
    Choltitz, finally hearing of the revolt in the Préfecture de Police, sent infantry in trucks and two tanks to force a surrender. The Panthers had only armour-piercing rounds, which made holes right through the building but caused few casualties. Unable to achieve their objective, the small force withdrew. This caused ecstatic cheering and gave rise to a dangerous optimism. Following Rol-Tanguy’s order to ‘create a permanent state of insecurity among the enemy and to prevent all his movements’, many attacks were carried out on isolated vehicles, but by that evening, the Resistance in Paris was almost out of ammunition. 78
    Over the next twenty-four hours, Parisians began to build barricades to bottle up the Germans. The rue de Rivoli, on which the Hôtel Meurice stood, was blocked at numerous points all the way to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. German officers watched from the hotel’s