Free The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe by William I. Hitchcock

arrange the resumption of train service, obtained coal to run the power plants, orga- nized road traffic, seized motorized transport, assured adequate supply of French currency in circulation, and tried to restore telephone service. Of course, they also imposed controls and restrictions on civilian life, such as blackouts, curfews, travel passes, and limits on telephone usage, all of which prompted the frequent complaint that the Americans were far more interfer- ing than the Germans had been. But such friction was inevitable. Cherbourg was being refitted to serve as a major supply and transport base to funnel goods from the port to the armies in the field, and in this effort, the Civil Affairs officers needed and found partners among the French authorities who themselves were eager to restore order. Civil Affairs men acted as a spark to revive the confidence of local authorities and “galvanized into action all available Municipal Services and Prefectural Services” by identifying and gathering judges, teach- ers, administrators, and town officials and providing them the tools to govern. A British Civil Affairs official felt that after forty-eight hours, the detachment could have left Cherbourg altogether, so well had French au-
    thority been reestablished. 54

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    I

    S THERE MORE to be said, however, about the na- ture of the order that French and Allied authorities imposed on liberated Normandy? The events of July
    14, 1944, in Cherbourg, offer intriguing hints of the var- ious ways order could be imposed on liberated space.

    On that day, July 14, Bastille Day, and France’s national holiday, Allied and French military and civilian officials arranged for a handsome public ceremony designed to consecrate the alliance and the transfer of power from Vichy to Gaullist France. According to the Ameri- can commander of the Civil Affairs unit who was pres- ent at the ceremony, “salvos of artillery and ringing of church bells took place at intervals during the day. In the afternoon a big parade assembled in the Place Na- poléon made up of French military, naval and civilian services, US Army units and British RAF and Army. This parade marched to the public garden to [pay respects at] the Memorial of the Dead. It was accompanied by
    M. François Coulet [the political representative of the Free French], Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, and all the notables of the city.” These Frenchmen were presented by the Allied soldiers with hastily made na-
    tional flags that the soldiers had sewn from the cloth of parachutes. “Next on the program was the renaming of the Place Pétain [Cherbourg’s town square] to Place Général de Gaulle”—a symbolic gesture to indicate the clear break with France’s wartime past. There followed a public concert on the square that featured “many of the old songs and tunes of France which had been pro- hibited for four years.” 55 The people of the city turned out in large numbers, waving hats and singing with all the pent-up gusto that a liberated people naturally felt after such a prolonged period of bondage.

In the main square of Cherbourg, townspeople attend a ceremony of allied unity. Hastily made flags bedeck the town hall. July 14, 1944. U.S. National Archives
    Not far from these official celebrations on July 14, at precisely the same time, another kind of public cer- emony was unfolding. About twelve women, publicly accused of consorting with the German occupiers, were dragged into a public square, where they were harangued by a number of self-appointed judges from Resistance groups. Then their hair was shaved off, as smirking young men gazed on with evident satisfac- tion. The women were placed into the back of a truck and paraded through the town, under a sign that read “ The Collaborationist Wagon.” As the truck rolled through the streets of the town, a man sat on the cab of the truck, beating a drum to call attention to these shorn captives.

    The public shearing of