Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [189]
Free French forces landed in the south of France on 15 August, moving north to join the Anglo-American invaders and the French Second Armoured Divison on their way south from Normandy. One of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s officers in the First French Army was an American. William Christian Bullitt, the last American ambassador to Paris, had spent the previous four years in the United States. President Roosevelt denied him a cabinet post but persuaded him to run, unsuccessfully, as a Democrat for mayor of Philadelphia. When 53-year-old Bullitt asked Secretary of War Henry Stimson for a commission in the American army to fight the Nazis, Stimson turned him down. Charles de Gaulle cabled Bullitt from Algiers on 25 May as the Allies were preparing to invade France: ‘Come now! Good and dear American friend. Our ranks are open to you. You will return with us to wounded Paris. Together we will see your star-spangled banners mingled with our tricolors.’ De Gaulle commissioned him as the French equivalent of major, commandant, in the Free French army.
Bullitt accompanied the First French Army, which he called ‘the only French Army’, as it captured Marseilles and Toulon. His admiration of General de Lattre, a First World War hero who went into battle wielding his grandfather’s Napoleonic era sabre, was unbounded. He wrote to his brother, Orville, ‘He goes into the front line constantly with your humble brother along.’ In the midst of battle, bon vivant Bullitt appreciated Lattre’s ‘superb’ chef and found time to buy ‘a lot of the best wines in Burgundy’. He wanted only two things: to see free Paris again and to defeat the Nazis, whom he had condemned as enemies of America when most Americans wanted to stay on the sidelines.
FORTY-EIGHT
The Paris Front
THE PARTING AT THE HÔTEL MATIGNON had been painful for Clara, who loved both Jeanne and Pierre Laval. She feared she would never see them again, and she had no idea when René and Josée could emerge from hiding. That night, she faced an even more difficult separation, from Aldebert. She wrote, ‘Heartbroken as I was, and feeling the true gravity of what had happened to us and to the country, life had to go on with thought for the morrow. I was obliged to seek courage where best I could find it, for I could no longer rely on my husband’s reserve stock of optimism. His presence at the hospital was essential, and my own duty was clearly at home.’ The American Hospital needed all of 72-year-old General de Chambrun’s energies if it were to remain, in its final hours under occupation, as free of Germans as it had been throughout his stewardship. Just as importantly, his duty was to save it from becoming a battle ground between the Resistance and the German garrison beside the hospital. The loss of the commanding presence of Dr Sumner Jackson made his task all the more difficult. The general worked day and night, helping the hospital to function amid shortages caused by fighting on the roads into Paris and overseeing the treatment of civilian and Resistance wounded. His round-the-clock presence there left Clara alone in the rue de Vaugirard, which was about to face a crisis of its own.
From her balcony, Clara saw over the hedges and iron fence of the Luxembourg Gardens into what had become a Luftwaffe fortress:
Inside the gardens, there is a small two-storied villa–perquisite of one of the city engineers taken over by the German air service–and heavily fortified. On the side of the house they had built out a broad-roofed terrace on which they had placed a battery of automatic cannon and machine guns commanding the entire row of windows. At the crossroads dominated by this improvised fortress, the Wehrmacht (after mid-August) had erected a sort of wooden redoubt, lined by a triple row of heavy sandbags, with room enough inside for a large armor-plated tank and its crew to take shelter.
The Luxembourg’s defences threatened Clara’s ‘respectable-looking quarter’, but more ominous were the preparations that Clara could not see. The Germans were laying