Women of Valor (14 page)
Authors: Ellen Hampton
When most women go to Paris, they think about what they’re going to wear. The Rochambelles were no exception. Zizon was in a particular fix because her dress uniform had been shot up and burned at Ducey. All she had were fatigues. Toto said she could take advantage of a lull in the action to run to a PX the following day and get a new uniform. She would have to leave at 5:00 A.M. and get back early. “I went to sleep with the comforting perspective of being able to contribute to edifying the Parisians on the well-known elegance of the Rochambelles,” she wrote.
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But she was awakened at 3:00 A.M. They were moving out for Paris, and the army did not care how Zizon would look when she got there.
The Rochambelles’ route to Paris, August 24-25, 1944
Paris was home for many of the Rochambelles and the Second Division soldiers and officers, and absence had sharpened their affection for the city to hugely sentimental proportions. For others, it was the first time they had set foot in the city of legend, city of light. Paris, repository of France’s soul, treasury of its historical jewels, and wellspring of its vainglory, lay at its liberators’ feet on the morning of August 25. But the insouciant Paris they had left behind had changed, four years of occupation having stripped bare the shelves, emptied the store windows, and strangled the flow in the streets. Ordinary bustle and hum had been muted by the staccato of jackboots on the paving stones.
During the occupation, Parisians had become accustomed to not seeing the Germans in the capital, to looking right past them as though they did not exist. But in the first ten days of August 1944, as the Allies pushed southward from the Normandy coast, Parisians watched closely as the Germans began burning papers, removing archives and evacuating German civilians. The capital sensed a breeze of liberation blowing its way and edged into a state of nervous anxiety, excited at the prospect of freedom, worried about possible destruction, concerned about the political aftermath.
By August 15, the moribund economic life of the capital had ground to a standstill. No subway trains were running, electric power was cut to ninety minutes a day, little to no cooking gas was available. German soldiers at street barriers began confiscating every bicycle they saw. The railway train engineers had gone out on strike on August 10, but no passenger trains had been running for weeks at any rate. Then the city police went on strike, and that had a strong psychological effect on Parisians. By August 18, mail service disappeared and Resistance posters began appearing on walls.
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The only thing running in the streets was rumor, spinning around the date the Allies would reach the capital.
The changes in the capital were not only physical. Four years of occupation also had distilled political differences into sharply divergent camps, and nowhere was that more evident than in the ranks of the Resistance. If the occupation was a long dark night, the dawn of liberation was being viewed in very different colors. Historian Adrien Dansette defined three goals of the Resistance: a unanimous goal of national insurrection against the occupier, a less-unanimous goal of political revolution to oust the Vichy regime, and a highly contested goal of social revolution to redraw the economic map of France.
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In broad strokes, the far right hoped to reinstate the order of pre-war institutions and the far left hoped to install a worker’s republic along Soviet lines. The center, a precariously thin turf, was rapidly being occupied by de Gaulle.
De Gaulle had managed to pull all the major Resistance factions under an umbrella eventually called the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) in 1943, and put the legendary Jean Moulin, a prefect turned Resistant, in charge of them. It was a fragile coalition, in which individual political interests were barely outweighed by the national interest of liberation. By the summer of 1944, the Resistance had prepared the terrain for victory, and the Paris regional commander, Henri Rol-Tanguy, a communist union leader, was maneuvering sharply to put the left in power. De Gaulle was conscious of the delicate political balance at hand; Leclerc and his soldiers instead were focused on the military task of cleaning out the Germans.
This was the Paris the Rochambelles were on their way to discover. First they had to get there, and German defenses in the suburbs around the capital were strong. The U.S. Fourth Infantry Division swung around to the eastern side of the city, charged with taking control of the bridges across the Seine. Leclerc sent his tactical groups on different routes through the southwest and southern suburbs, and urged them to swiftness. German resistance stopped the division on August 24 just south of the capital.
The Second Company was caught by a German antitank battery outside the town of Antony, about ten kilometers south of Paris, where a tank had its cannon muzzle shot off by an 88mm shell. A civilian resident showed the Second Company soldiers how to get behind the guns, and they filed through the back streets to within 100 meters of the enemy. Just then, the Germans noticed they were there, and started turning their big gun around to shoot. It swung slowly, but the French tank gunner was quick, and one well-aimed shell took out the German battery. The intersection at Croix de Berny would soon be theirs.
At Longjumeau, Toto and Denise set up a temporary treatment center for the influx of wounded soldiers, while Raymonde and Zizon drove their ambulances alone, one stretcher-bearer between them and a local member of the Resistance to help them get around. On the night of August 24, they were exhausted by the time some American soldiers stopped them outside Dourdan, about forty-five kilometers southwest of Paris. German troops were still in the area, it would be dangerous to continue through the night. Zizon and Raymonde slept in one ambulance, the men in the other. They were awakened before dawn by flashlights shining on their faces and commotion outside the ambulance. Some black American soldiers were looking at them, laughing loudly. Zizon tried to find her sense of humor but failed, and explained that they really needed to sleep. The soldiers left. At daybreak they discovered the source of their hilarity. She and Raymonde had slept with the windshield open, and the exhaust from passing tanks had left their faces encrusted with a fine black powder. They were unknowingly in blackface.
Jacotte and Crapette had driven through a raging thunderstorm the night of the 23rd, and normally Jacotte was afraid of lightning, but that night she was hoping for more so she could see the road ahead. Jacotte asked Crapette about her nickname once, and got a terse reply: Crapette was her name and that was that. She didn’t ask again. It also was the name of a popular card game at the time, but Crapette played a lot more music than cards. At any rate, Jacotte and Crapette were becoming fast friends, and would remain partners throughout the war. “She was an exceptional young woman,” Jacotte said. “She left a memory for everyone who ever knew her.” They drove across the town of Chartres at 2:00 A.M. in a streaming rain, and yet the streets were lined with people who had turned out to cheer them on.
On August 24, they worked around the fighting at Croix de Berny, which, aside from the Second Company’s tank battle, was well defended by Germans behind the high walls of the Fresnes prison. Finally that night they were sent to get some rest, and told to park the ambulance in a nearby field for safety. They were just tucking into their stretchers when a mortar hit nearby and peppered the ambulance with shrapnel and mud. Several soldiers were hit; one of them died in Jacotte’s arms. She and Crapette took the injured men to the Longjumeau treatment center in lights-out conditions, avoiding the gaping holes punched in the road, as well as the wires hanging down from trees, set to trigger hidden mines. It was a very tense ride, and they stayed the night at the hospital rather than return to Fresnes.
Rosette and Arlette, meanwhile, had another little accident, this time driving off the road in the dark into a cannon. It caused no damage, and they recovered the road fairly easily, but the bump apparently knocked a duffel bag off its hook on the outside of the ambulance. In that duffel bag were the baby clothes, diapers, and supplies Arlette had carefully selected in England to prepare for her impending marriage to Georges Ratard. They had arranged their personal belongings outside and on top of the ambulance in order to leave more room for injured soldiers inside. They discovered the loss the next morning, as they were working with the wounded in the suburbs. Arlette was inconsolable, going on and on about the baby clothes to Rosette. The next day, Georges Ratard found the bag and brought it to them. “Whew! The future little Ratard will have a wardrobe and we can go liberate Paris with a light heart,” Rosette wrote with a touch of sarcasm.
The Americans had told Leclerc that he couldn’t move an armored division more than twenty-five kilometers a day. To get to Paris, he pushed them nearly 200 kilometers in a little over two days, and they had fought hard through the day of the 24th. They needed to rest and regroup. Leclerc saw that he would have to wait for morning to approach the city, and he couldn’t stand it. He was afraid the U.S. Fourth Division would get in first, if its eastern approach were less well defended, and then the Americans would go down in history as the liberators of Paris. Leclerc pointed at the first captain he saw and ordered him to get a company inside the capital that night. It was Raymond Dronne’s Ninth Infantry Company. Three Second Company tanks were told to accompany them, and the soldiers left behind in the suburbs listened to sketchy reports over the radio along the way.
Gaston Eve, a twenty-four-year-old Anglo-Frenchman, was driving the tank
Montmirail.
A Resistant rode with them to guide them through the suburbs. As they progressed closer to the city, windows in buildings lining the route began to open at the sound of the tanks and vehicles passing by. “Windows were opening, and hundreds of people started coming out, thinking we were the Americans. No one wanted to believe we were a French division. An amazed old man kept repeating, ‘Impossible, impossible…’ The people gave us bottles [of wine] and asked where we were from in America,” he wrote.
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Daylight faded as they reached the Seine, and turned left along the quay to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, where Paris city hall stands. On the island in the river, the cathedral of Notre Dame began ringing its bells, and nearby churches joined in. A tank radio operator signaled to the division behind in the suburbs, told them to listen to the music, and held his microphone up outside the tank. The church bells of Paris were ringing, chiming out the news that liberation had, at long last, arrived. Paris was on her way back to independence.
A French radio journalist reached Dronne that night and interviewed him on the scene, emphasizing to his audience that it was French troops liberating the city, and then turned to Dronne’s adjutant and said, “Let’s see where this French soldier is from, where were you born, young man?” And the soldier replied, “Constantinople.”
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Simple formulas never applied to the Second Division. In the morning, a Paris newspaper had a photograph of the three tanks outside city hall, and the tank crews saw it and laughed aloud with pleasure. It had to be true, they were really there: it was in the newspaper.
At first light on the following day, August 25, the rest of the division rolled toward the capital. Paris was in view and they were all in a state of high anticipation. They did not know how defended the city would be, or what it would cost to retake the capital, but they were on their way.
Toto and Raymonde entered the city through the Porte de Gentilly in the stillness of early morning, and as word spread, people came pouring into the streets. Women in hairnets and nightgowns, unshaven men, barefoot children, everyone throwing themselves onto the French troops. Some sniper fire from rooftops scattered the crowds briefly but did not stop the great embrace. Tank driver Gaston Eve remarked later that he had never been kissed so much in his life, before or after, as on the day of liberation.
Jacotte called the crowds “a human tide.” The Parisians threw themselves at the soldiers, and at the ambulance, and then backing off in surprise when they saw that the drivers were women. “As soon as they approached us, people were visibly surprised to see a woman at the wheel,” she wrote. She couldn’t believe it had been five years since she had been home. She pulled the ambulance up in front of Notre Dame behind the rest of the column, and joined many of the soldiers in a silent, heartfelt prayer of thanks. “If everything had ended right then, life would have been worth living.”
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A tank battalion was sent down to Place Saint Michel, and discovered a nest of enemy artillery around the Senate building and the Ecole des Mines at the Luxembourg Gardens. Some 600 German troops were holed up and shooting, and a Panzer defended the entrance. A group of French militiamen, Nazi supporters, fired on the French soldiers from the Lycée Saint-Louis on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. A tank maneuvered into position behind the Panzer and shot, ripping off its rear tread. The crew abandoned the vehicle and disappeared into the city. The battalion commander, Colonel Joseph Putz, brought in a German prisoner, a colonel, to order remaining troops to surrender.
