Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [182]
No cables in Allen Dulles’s OSS files from Berne show that he or his agent Max Shoop, who was a governor of the American Hospital, either knew of or took any interest in the Jacksons at this time. The OSS was preoccupied with Resistance support for the Allies during the battle for France. The Wehrmacht and the Allied armies were capturing thousands of each other’s soldiers, and demands for information about prisoners overwhelmed the Swiss Consulate and the Red Cross. The Jacksons were now a humanitarian issue, and the OSS’s priority was to gather intelligence and organize the Resistance to win the war.
Two weeks after the Allies landed, Pierre Laval declared, ‘We are not in the war.’ But the war was in France. The Wehrmacht was forcing the Allies to fight hard for every acre of French ground they conquered. In Paris, freshly painted black and white signs with the words Zür Normandie Front pointed north where troops headed to stop the Allied invasion of the German-occupied continent. The Resistance did its part, blowing up trains, tracks and bridges to disrupt Wehrmacht supply lines. But, to Parisians, the American and British armies were taking too long.
‘The star of hope was now far above the horizon,’ Clara de Chambrun wrote. ‘The troops of General Eisenhower had obtained firm-footing in Normandy; we knew that the British were on the march towards Rouen while the American contingents were taking an oblique line which skirted Paris in a southerly direction. But progress was slow, and they still seemed desperately far away.’ Neither Clara nor the other inhabitants of the French capital were aware that capturing Paris was not part of General Eisenhower’s strategy. Ike planned to chase the German army from France and defeat it in Germany as rapidly as possible, leaving Paris’s German garrison to surrender later. He needed all his resources, especially fuel for his armoured divisions, to do it. Occupying Paris and feeding its two million inhabitants would only divert the Allied armies from their goal.
Paris, as its supply lines were cut, experienced more hunger and greater danger than at any time during the occupation. The railways and roads out of the city were either cut or blocked by Wehrmacht transports, and the majority of Parisians who normally spent August in the country or by the sea were confined to the city. The Metro stopped running from eleven in the morning until three o’clock every afternoon to conserve electricity. Without electricity and cooking fuel, people made fires with paper balls to boil water and to fry what little food there was. With no meat or vegetables coming in from the countryside, the city became a farm. People grew vegetables in their gardens and on their roofs. Many kept chickens, ducks and rabbits on balconies and in cupboards. The smoke that covered the city when the Germans advanced on it in June 1940 returned. Then, the French government had burned its files and its oil reserves. Now, it was the Germans’ turn.
To the leaders of the Resistance movement that Clara disparaged, Paris had only one option: to liberate itself.
FORTY-FOUR
Via Dolorosa
IN MID-JUNE, AFTER INTERROGATING Sumner, Toquette and Phillip Jackson, the Gestapo sent the family on a circuitous journey that would be hard to follow. Phillip wrote,
One fine day, I can hardly call it day, as there was no light and no air in my cell, where I remained shut up for 14 days, only getting out once –then we were transferred to the German military prison at Moulins. During the journey I sat next to my father, in the same bus and we saw my mother who traveled in another bus. Once arrived at Moulins, my mother and ourselves were enclosed in the prison, an old medieval dungeon, where we had to go up 118 steps to our cell. My father and I were in the same cell, my mother