Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (8 page)

General Lee, the authoritarian commander of Com Z, was appalled by the informal and at times insulting behaviour of GIs on leave in Paris. He tried to instil some smartness by sending out officers from his headquarters to take the name of any soldier who failed to salute. The Avenue de Kléber soon became known as the
‘Avenue de Salute’
among front-line soldiers who resented the officers and MPs trying to make them behave.

GIs offset the expense of prostitutes and drink by buying cartons of Chesterfield, Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes for fifty cents through the US Army’s
PX
organization, then selling them for anything from fifteen to twenty dollars. French authorities complained in vain that US troops were exploiting their exemption from both import duties and exchange controls. American soldiers were able to make a killing at the expense of the French government by converting their pay in francs back into dollars at the official rate, then selling the dollars on the black market at a huge profit. Soldiers lured women with the offer of cigarettes, tinned ham, nylon stockings and other items posted from the States.

University graduates and anyone with a feel for European culture sympathized with the French and yearned, not just for carnal reasons, to see Paris, the intellectual capital of the world. But those with little knowledge of foreign countries tended to despise the French as losers who could not speak a proper language. They expected French girls and
women alike to be ready to service the desires of their liberators. One of the very few phrases that many of them bothered to learn was ‘Voulezvous coucher avec moi?’ The American embassy described US troops in Paris as
‘ardent and often very enterprising’
in the pursuit of women. In fact the lack of subtlety soon became counter-productive. Summoned in a café by a whistle and a proffered pack of Lucky Strike, one young woman earned the cheers of French onlookers by taking a cigarette from the GI, dropping it to the ground and grinding it under her foot. Young French males, unable to compete with American largesse, became increasingly bitter at what they saw as the presumption of their liberators. Mutual suspicion and resentment grew on both sides.
‘The French, cynical before defeat; sullen after rescue,’
wrote Louis Simpson. ‘What do the sons of bitches want?’

If the black market in Berlin was flourishing, in Paris it became rampant when American deserters teamed up with local criminal gangs. The profits from stolen US Army gasoline were so large that even drug dealers were drawn to this new market. Up to half the jerrycans in continental Europe went missing. Increased criminal penalties, making the fuel more traceable by adding coloured dye, and numerous other attempts by the American authorities failed to dent a trade which made the supply situation at the front even worse. Paris soon became known as ‘Chicago-sur-Seine’.

The most notorious racket that autumn was perpetrated by the railway battalion. These troops would stop the train on a bend so that the MPs guarding against theft at the end of the train could not see, then unload meat, coffee, cigarettes and canned goods to their confederates. A twenty-pound drum of coffee could go for $300 and a case of 10-in-1 rations for $100. Blankets and uniforms were also stolen from hospital trains. Some 180 officers and enlisted men were eventually charged and sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from three to fifty years. Altogether some 66 million packs of cigarettes disappeared in a single month.

French dislike for the ‘new occupation’ increased with the signs of American military privileges. White-helmeted American MPs directing traffic on the Place de la Concorde gave priority to US vehicles approaching the American embassy. Roosevelt had delayed recognition of the provisional government because he suspected that de Gaulle wanted to be
a military dictator, but after much pressure from the State Department and Eisenhower, the President gave in. On Monday 23 October Jefferson Caffery, the US ambassador, Duff Cooper, the British ambassador, and Aleksandr Bogomolov, the Soviet representative, finally presented their letters of credence. De Gaulle invited Cooper and his wife to dinner that night, but he was still in such a bad mood that the British ambassador in his diary described the evening as an
‘extremely frigid
and dreary party, worse even than his entertainments usually are’.

Caffery was far more sympathetic towards the French than most of the senior officers at SHAEF, and as a result a number of them held him in contempt. He was an awkward man, both formal and ill at ease, and clearly did not enjoy diplomatic life. The Francophobe senior officers were determined to subordinate him to their own hierarchy and not allow any diplomatic independence. Caffery and Georges Bidault, the inexperienced French foreign minister, commiserated with each other over their difficulties. Bidault was constantly apologizing to Caffery and Cooper for de Gaulle’s needless provocations. He even said to Caffery later that
‘there is absolutely no one
else in sight and that it must be admitted that de Gaulle loves France, even if he doesn’t like Frenchmen’. Cooper’s main problem was his old friend Winston Churchill. The Prime Minister wanted to visit SHAEF, without saying a word to de Gaulle beforehand, an act which would have been seen as an insult. Eventually, Churchill was persuaded to formalize his visit, and he walked down the Champs-Elysées with General de Gaulle, acclaimed by vast crowds. Their furious contretemps on the eve of D-Day was tactfully forgotten.

De Gaulle’s displays of bad temper were due in part to the grave economic and political difficulties his government faced. Food and fuel supplies were uncertain, causing frequent protests. SHAEF estimated that 1,550,000 buildings had been destroyed during the war. Factories and mines were still not working properly, and the country’s ports and transport system remained half paralysed after all the destruction from Allied bombing and German looting. De Gaulle also needed to deal with an embittered Resistance movement, which resented both its own loss of influence and the re-establishment of state power by the Gaullists returned from London. The French Communist Party and its supporters were the most vocal in their protests. Their hopes of carrying
liberation into revolution had been thwarted, but they did not know that Stalin was totally opposed to the idea. He feared that the United States might cut off Lend-Lease support if there were disturbances in France behind Allied lines.

De Gaulle played his trump card towards the end of October. He would allow the French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez to return to Paris from Moscow, but in return the two Communist ministers in his government would have to support his decree to abolish the ‘patriotic militias’ and force them to surrender their weapons. With uniforms and weapons provided by SHAEF, de Gaulle began to incorporate the patriotic militias into the regular French forces, sending the majority to General Jean-Marie de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army advancing towards Strasbourg at the southernmost part of the Allied line.

One person who had no intention of surrendering his weapons was Ernest Hemingway, who had played at partisans around Rambouillet just before the liberation of Paris. At the beginning of October, Hemingway had to leave his roving court on the German frontier where the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the 4th Division had been breaching the Siegfried Line. After committing perjury to a court of inquiry into his illegal military activities at Rambouillet, he was acquitted and allowed to remain in France as an accredited war correspondent.

Although he took time and trouble in Paris to encourage the writing of Sergeant J. D. Salinger of the 4th Division, who had already started
Catcher in the Rye
, Hemingway remained an inveterate war tourist: he was after all the man who had coined the term ‘whore de combat’ during the Spanish Civil War. He returned to the Ritz in Paris to drink and sleep with Mary Welsh, the next Mrs Hemingway. Some time later, when drinking with Colonel ‘Buck’ Lanham, the commander of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, he seized a photograph of Mary’s husband, threw it into the lavatory and fired a German machine pistol at it, with disastrous effects on the Ritz plumbing.

He also flirted paternally with Marlene Dietrich, who was in France entertaining American troops. One of Dietrich’s
‘ardent admirers’
was General Patton, who gave her a set of pearl-handled pistols. Another was Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, the extraordinarily young and good-looking paratrooper major general who became her lover. Gavin also
later became the lover of Martha Gellhorn, the third Mrs Hemingway, who now could not stand the sight of ‘Papa’ any more. Paris was indeed a turbulent feast for the last year of the war.

Brussels was the leave centre for the First Canadian and the Second British Army. British officers used to say wistfully that, for someone who loves Paris, to go to Brussels was like having tea with the sister of the girl you love. The Belgian capital may not have been as riotous as Pigalle, but for their soldiers it offered the beer and women they so eagerly sought. And it too became a haven for deserters and black marketeers.

The political situation in Brussels was perhaps even more complicated than the one in Paris. Major General G. W. E. J. Erskine, the head of the SHAEF mission in Belgium, had tried to help the Belgian government of Hubert Pierlot re-establish order after its return from exile in London. The largely left-wing Resistance movements, rather like their counterparts in France, were hardly enthusiastic at being told what to do by conservative politicians who had spent the war years in the safety of London while they had suffered such dangers. Totalling some 30,000 members at the beginning of September, their numbers grew to 70,000. Those who had fought closely with British and American forces did not welcome the idea of being brigaded into the Belgian army and gendarmerie to act in a subordinate role.

General Eisenhower issued an order of the day on 29 September praising the work of the Resistance but also supporting the request of the Belgian government for them to hand over their arms and equipment and volunteer for military service in special battalions as auxiliaries. At a time of acute coal and food shortages when Belgium was short of manpower, this was greeted with a mixture of scorn and irritation. On 21 October, General Erskine pointed out to the Supreme Commander that the fractious members of the Resistance who refused to give up their weapons outnumbered the police and gendarmerie by more than ten to one. A breakdown in governmental control was a distinct possibility. Eisenhower then prompted the Belgian government to declare that the unauthorized possession of weapons in a combat zone was not permissible.

On 9 November Eisenhower made an official visit to the Belgian capital, where he addressed parliament. A few days later the Belgian ministry of
national defence announced that all Resistance forces would be demobilized on 18 November. Two Communist ministers and a representative of the Resistance resigned from Pierlot’s cabinet in protest. But General Erskine managed to convince them at a meeting later that SHAEF fully supported the government on this measure, and nobody should want to see clashes between the Resistance and Allied forces. Resistance groups backed down and agreed to hand over all weapons to the ‘inter-Allied authorities’.

On 25 November, however, British troops and armoured vehicles were moved in to support police and gendarmerie facing a large demonstration in the government district of Brussels. Rather as was happening in Greece, this made it look as if the British had decided to maintain an unpopular government in power. Erskine was forced to justify his actions publicly, on the grounds that order had to be maintained behind the lines of a combat zone. However, until elections could be held, the military authorities had no option but to support governments which had survived in exile and were totally out of touch with all those who had suffered through a long occupation.

While American veterans of the fighting in Normandy had their seventy-two-hour passes back to Paris, a constant stream of replacements for those killed or wounded in action were sent forward from Cherbourg to holding camps. Most were teenagers freshly arrived from the United States, but there were many older men reassigned to infantry rifle platoons which had suffered about 80 per cent of the casualties, a far higher proportion than predicted.

Just about the only improvement that winter to the depressingly unimaginative system was to change the name ‘replacements’ to ‘reinforcements’ in an attempt to take away the idea that newcomers were just filling dead men’s boots. This did little good. A regimental officer with the 28th Infantry Division said:
‘We’re still a
first-class outfit, but not nearly as good as when we came across the beach [in Normandy]. We have a great deal more prodding to do now. The replacements, both officers and men, are green. They don’t know how to take care of themselves. They become casualties very fast sometimes. They don’t know their leaders and their buddies well, and it is hard to get them worked in as members of the team.’ In one company twenty men reported sick,
mostly with colds and
trench foot
, otherwise known as ‘immersion foot’. All were new arrivals who had not been taught even the most basic rules of hygiene in the field, of which the most important was to change your socks. Their company commander admitted that he had lost twenty-six men to hospital in ten days because of trench foot. J. D. Salinger in the 4th Division was indeed fortunate to receive each week a pair of woollen socks knitted by his mother.

The Communications Zone personnel in charge showed little interest in the fate of their charges. For them, it was simply a question of processing the required numbers. Replacement depots were known as ‘repple depples’, and they resembled a gangmaster’s collection point for casual labour.
‘Each morning,’
wrote a newcomer called Arthur Couch, ‘some 1,000 men would stand outside a headquarters unit where someone would read out a list of some 100 or more soldiers’ names who would go off in trucks to their division or regiment. The rest of us would go back to our tents until another name calling.’ Young replacements had often been made even more apprehensive by wounded veterans returning from hospital to combat, who took pleasure in recounting weird and gruesome tales of fighting at the front.