Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

reconnoitring the routes into Paris over the last few days, but their methods were unsubtle. A pathetic little German soldier, a straggler seized a few kilometres down the road, was brought back to the hotel in triumph, his hands tied behind his back. Hemingway asked Mowinckel to help bring the prisoner up to his room, where they would interrogate him at ease while drinking another beer. ‘I’ll make him talk,’ he said. Once in the room, Hemingway told Mowinckel to dump him on the bed. Then he said: ‘Take his boots off. We’ll grill his toes with a candle.’
    Mowinckel told him to go to hell and the little soldier was released. Hemingway did, however, lend ‘Mouthard’ an automatic pistol to execute a traitor.
    Another arrival was Major Airey Neave of MI9, who wanted to get into Paris as soon as possible on a mission of retribution. He was after a British army sergeant, Harold Cole, who had deserted in northern France in 1940, had later joined the French Resistance, then betrayed its largest escape line. As a result of his treachery the Germans arrested 150 people, of whom around a third had been executed. After this great coup for the Abwehr, Cole was transferred to the Gestapo in Paris, where he was still managing to trap other Resistance workers.
    Irwin Shaw, the author who later wrote
The YoungLions,
turned up with his combat camera detachment of the Army Signal Corps. Shaw had introduced his lover, Mary Welsh, to Hemingway not long before D-Day, an encounter which led to her becoming the fourth Mrs Hemingway. (The third Mrs Hemingway, the journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, had infuriated her husband by getting ashore in Normandy well before him.)
    A group of American war correspondents arrived next. They were piqued to find Hemingway acting as the local commander of Rambouillet. When the Chicago journalist Bruce Grant made a disobliging comment about ‘General Hemingway and his
maquis
’, the object of the remark strode over and knocked him to the ground.
    At six o’clock that evening, General de Gaulle joined Leclerc at the Château de Rambouillet, a former residence of the kings of France.While the soldiers of the 2e DB cooked their rations in the woods and, on the assumption that they would be in Paris the next day, shaved with ritualistic care, their commander explained his plan of attack to the head of the provisional government in one of the salons of the château. When he had finished, de Gaulle reflected for a short while, then agreed with his proposals. ‘You are lucky,’ he said, thinking of the glory ahead.
    On the following morning, Thursday 24 August, while the two columns advanced to make contact with the enemy, Paris began its last day under the Occupation. Several key figures in the future administration received the call to report for work. Jacques Charpentier, the leader of the French Bar, set off on the very uncertain journey across a barricaded and enfiladed city to the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. He encountered a twelve-year-old urchin proudly showing off an automatic pistol and boots taken from a dead German officer. The boy then acted as his guide frombarricade to barricade, on a complicated but effective route.
    The courage shown over previous days did not slacken. People responded at once to an announcement on the radio that the
mairie
of the 11th
arrondissement
was under heavy attack by the Germans and that the defenders were almost out of ammunition; anyone with a weapon should go to their aid. Thanks to the unflagging work of telephonists at the central exchanges, people were able to pass news back and forth. Some soldiers in Leclerc’s advance units, as they drove through villages or outer suburbs of the capital, asked bystanders to ring their families in Paris to tell them that they were about to arrive. Inhabitants in one district kept friends in another up to date on events with a running commentary. Windows had become theatre boxes, albeit dangerous ones. Many watchers were mistaken for snipers or killed by stray bullets. Often, if they had been living alone, their bodies lay on the floor undiscovered until the smell of decomposition alerted a neighbour.
    The Resistance fighters in Paris could now hear Allied tank guns. Captain Dronne’s group, a troop of Shermans from the 501st Tank Regiment and the half-tracks of ‘
la nueve
’ had reached the suburb of Fresnes, from where they could see the Eiffel Tower. But the fighting had been heavy,