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By Root 2575 0

largest of Notre Dame’s bells, rang out in F-sharp so loud it could be heard at least five miles away–for the first time since Robert Murphy heard the bells at midnight on 14 June 1940. Nearby, in the Hôtel Meurice, Paris commander General von Choltitz was speaking to Berlin. Holding the phone to the window, he told General Alfred Jodl, who had been ordering him again to destroy Paris, ‘What you hear is announcing that Paris is going to be liberated and Germany without doubt has lost the war.’ Outside, Parisians sang La Marseillaise. Celebration by the ‘Resistance of the Eleventh Hour’, as the real résistants derisively called the majority who declared their opposition to the Germans only that night when the bells pealed, was premature. The bulk of Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division had yet to arrive, and the Americans, who had the only force strong enough to defeat the Germans in battle, were massing for an assault in the morning.

The sound of the bells reached all the way to Neuilly. As Otto Gresser recalled, he, Aldebert de Chambrun, Elisabeth Comte, the other nurses and doctors ‘went to the roof of the hospital, we heard all the Paris bells ringing in the churches to celebrate the victory, while we were still surrounded by German troops with guns and tanks’. This was the roof where, for four years, Dr Sumner Jackson had gone to look at the night sky and enjoy a cigar. A year earlier on the same spot, he and his son Phillip had watched American and German warplanes duelling for control of the Paris skies. All that General de Chambrun knew for certain was that Jackson, his wife and his son had been missing since 24 May. There were many rumours: they had been arrested by the Gestapo, detained by the Milice, interned as Americans, tortured as résistants, deported, lost, killed. General de Chambrun had approached the Red Cross, which usually had access to internees and prisoners of war. The American Legation in Berne was informed, and the Swiss Consulate asked the Germans for information. Aldebert appealed to his friends in the Vichy government, but Laval’s arrest and departure on 17 August had closed that avenue. On 19 August, even General Karl Oberg, whose secret police knew where the Jacksons were, had fled Paris. The one member of the hospital’s staff who had done more than any other to hasten the liberation was not on the roof to witness it.

On schedule, a command car and a tank from Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division appeared near the American Hospital at nine thirty on the morning of 25 August. Austrian Colonel Bernhuber, carrying a white flag of surrender, walked cautiously to the boulevard Inkermann–avenue Victor Hugo roundabout. A French officer accepted his capitulation, and Bernhuber ordered his men, ‘Stack arms.’ The battle of Neuilly, however, was not quite over.

The ‘fanatic’ Major Goetz and his men refused to abandon their Stützpunkt without direct orders from General von Choltitz. The French tank fired on their bunker, setting their trucks ablaze. Before Goetz and his men were burned alive, they laid down their arms and surrendered. The American Hospital of Paris was saved.

Supplies for the hospital had run short. To find food for more than five hundred staff and patients, Otto Gresser drove out in a hospital car into almost-liberated Paris. He recalled that ‘we met within three hours German, French, American and British troops and again German troops when returning to the hospital’. Gresser, whose resourcefulness had kept the hospital well victualled for four years and was revered in the food markets of Les Halles as the buyer ‘Ferdinand’, brought back enough for the hospital’s personnel to survive until the American army brought fresh provisions. In the meantime, Gresser managed to save the rifles, thirty grenades and 2,000 rounds of ammunition that he had taken from the German patients in the hospital. When more units of Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division arrived, he proudly donated them to the French army. General de Chambrun was not as fortunate with the weapons and military vehicles of Colonel