Free Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949 by Antony Beevor Page B

been heavy, with well-concealed anti-tank guns (unidentified by Hemingway’s scouts) ambushing Leclerc’s Shermans and causing manycasualties. * After knocking out the German detachment holding the prison of Fresnes, Dronne was ordered by his column commander, Colonel Billotte, to withdraw and rejoin the main axis of advance. Dronne was furious as he led his much reduced group back. On the way, he encountered General Leclerc.
    ‘Dronne, what the hell are you doing here?’ Leclerc demanded.
    ‘
Mon général,
I’m following the order to pull back.’
    ‘No, Dronne, head straight for Paris, enter Paris. Don’t allow yourself to be held up. Take whichever route you want. Tell the Parisians and the Resistance not to lose hope, that tomorrow morning the whole division will be with them.’
    Dronne quickly briefed his vehicle commanders – he was down to three Sherman tanks and eleven half-tracks – and set off.
    That same afternoon, Leclerc’s American commander (furious to find that the French division had changed the main thrust of its advance over to the right, where the US 4th Infantry Division was supposed to be advancing in support) passed on General Omar Bradley’s order that the American troops were to force on into Paris, whether or not the French had got there first. Clearly, neither de Gaulle nor Leclerc wished to acknowledge the fact that the 2e DB was under Allied orders.
    Dronne, having been given
carte blanche
by Leclerc and now guided by Parisian resistants who had reconnoitred the routes into the city, was able to advance rapidly via a network of back streets, avoiding all German strongpoints. In an hour and a half – just before half past nine – the little column of Shermans, half-tracks and jeeps reached the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. Dronne climbed out of his jeep to look around. He was seized by the exultant defenders of the Hôtel de Ville and, amid cries of ‘
Vive la France!
’ and ‘
Vive de Gaulle
’, was carried inside in triumph, to be embraced by the president of the National Council of the Resistance, Georges Bidault.
    Even before Dronne crossed the Pont d’Austerlitz to the right bank of the Seine, cyclists had started to spread the news of his arrival. The radio broadcast an appeal to priests to begin ringing their church bells. One group of ringers started to toll the great bell of Notre-Dame. Othersjoined in, one after another, until bells were pealing out right across the city. After four years of silence, this for many people was the most memorable sound of the whole war. With the occasional boom of a heavy gun and the constant refrain of the Marseillaise, both broadcast on the radio and sung spontaneously in the street, the Liberation of Paris started to sound like the 1812 overture.
    In the more fashionable districts, joy was less spontaneous; and not just in the apartments of Pétainists, who awaited the future in grim silence, nor in the shuttered hiding places of those advocates of the New European Order who had decided to stay behind and now listened to the rejoicing outside, wondering what fate awaited them. There were also those who had continued to live their lives much as before, caring little for politics. If they had consorted in various ways with Germans during the Occupation, their motives had been purely social and they had thought little of it.
    General von Choltitz, on hearing the bells, telephoned his superior, General Speidel, and held the receiver to the open window so that Speidel knew what had happened.
    While the bells rang out, Albert Camus, in the offices of the Resistance newspaper
Combat,
surrounded by ‘enormous disorder and enormous gaiety’, worked on an editorial which became famous: ‘The greatness of man,’ he wrote, ‘lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.’
    For many people, that night was spent in excited anticipation. Women curled their hair and pressed their dresses. Most planned to wear the tricolour in some form