War and Liberation in France: Living with the Liberation

War and Liberation in France Living with the Liberators

Hilary Footitt

War and Liberation in France: Living with the Liberators

Also by Hilary Footitt WOMEN, EUROPE AND THE NEW LANGUAGES OF POLITICS FRANCE, 1943–45: The Politics of Liberation (with John Simmonds)

War and Liberation in France Living with the Liberators Hilary Footitt

© Hilary Footitt 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–0284–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Footitt, Hilary. War and liberation in France : living with the liberators / Hilary Footitt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–0284–4 (alk. paper) 1. World War, 1939–1945—France. 2. World War, 1939–1945— Social aspects—France. 3. France—Social conditions—20th century. 4. France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945. 5. France— History—1945–1958. I. Title. D761.F66 2004 940.53′44—dc22 2003062672 10 13

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents vi

List of Maps List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

List of Abbreviations

x

Introduction

1

1

Welcoming the Liberators

10

2

Liberation on the Move: Normandy

37

3

Meeting Private Ryan: Cherbourg

66

4

The politics of disappointment: Liberation in the South

95

5

Removing Inflammable Material: The Pyrénées-Orientales

122

6

The Long Goodbye: Reims

147

7

Liberated and Liberators

175

Notes

193

Bibliography

213

Index

217

v

List of Maps* 1

Map of case study areas

7

2

Map of the ‘D’ Day Landings

38

3

Map of North Normandy

41

4

Map of La Manche

67

5

Map of the Landing area in the South

96

6

Map of the Pyrénées-Orientales

123

7

Map of the Reims area

149

* Maps by Tim Absalom

vi

List of Figures 2.1 Normandy: Caen cathedral shelters homeless Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: B8086 (SF19F) 2.2 French refugees fed by Civil Affairs Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: B5305 (SF11) 3.1 French rebuild homes in Cherbourg. French civilians clear out the rubble to start rebuilding a home in Cherbourg after the Germans surrendered the city to American forces, 27 June 1944 Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: EA 28019 (SF35C) 3.2 First edition of Cherbourg paper. David Yon, editor of La Presse Cherbourgeoise, and members of his staff proudly inspect a copy of the first newspaper published in Cherbourg after its Liberation. At left is Captain Fernand Auberjondois of the PW Division of the AEF in France, who started the press running. Holding the paper, at right, is Captain Patrick Dolan of New York City, Cherbourg head of the PW Division, which assisted the Frenchmen in publishing the paper Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: OWIL 29711 (SF35a) 3.3 Allied supplies in Cherbourg. US soldiers transfer supplies and material to trucks which will carry them to a depot for shipment to the AEF. Loaded from ships lying in Cherbourg harbour, the cargo comes ashore by rolling up a ramp to the docks Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: PNA OWIL 4605A (SF 35F) 4.1 Marseille in victory parade. Marseille residents burn German propaganda in victory parade Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: NYP 39433 (SFA8) 4.2 French patriots decorated by US Commander in Southern France. Lt-General Patch, Commander vii

47

56

69

79

83

99

viii

List of Figures

of the Allied 7th Army in southern France, decorates members of the FFI for their courage in the battle for St Tropez Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: NYF 38946 (SFA7) 6.1 Reims cathedral in Liberation. Reims residents throng in front of the city’s famous cathedral, as they welcome US troops who liberated the town, 31 August 1944. Children and adults may be seen swarming over an American jeep in the foreground Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: EA 36202 (SF11 A) 6.2 American soldier in Reims. An American soldier rests in a street of Reims, while people and children laugh and chat with him Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: Keystone 482851 (SF11)

109

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151

Acknowledgements This book would not have been written without the help of numerous archivists and librarians in Cambridge, London, Washington, Paris, Caen, Cherbourg, Marseille, Perpignan and Reims. The Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation kindly gave me a scholarship to support travel costs associated with the project, and I am grateful to them. I acknowledge, with thanks, permission from the Imperial War Museum, London, to quote from their archives. A great deal of what I have learnt about being a historian has come from working on earlier projects with Don Simmonds. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Douglas Johnson, Roderick Kedward, Siân Reynolds and Bill Kidd, all of whom have shown consistent interest in this project over several years. Lena and Martin Powell have kept me going, and encouraged me warmly throughout. This book has been an obsession for over three years. Richard Footitt shared the travelling and the obsession, and I am profoundly grateful to him. H ILARY FOOTITT

Cambridge

ix

List of Abbreviations AFHQ AMGOT CA CBS CGT CFLN COSSAC ETO FFI FTPF GPRF GTE MRP MUR OSS PWE SHAEF SIS SOE UNE

Allied Forces Headquarters Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory Civil Affairs Continental Base Section Confédération Générale du Travail Comité Français de la Libération Nationale Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander European Theater of Operations Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française Groupes de Travail Etranger Mouvement Républicain Populaire Mouvements Unis de la Résistance Office of Strategic Studies Political Warfare Executive Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Secret Intelligence Service Special Operations Executive Unión Nacional Española

x

Introduction

The sixtieth anniversary of the Liberation of France (2004) has coincided with a very contemporary interest in the processes and implications of one set of countries liberating another. The very words ‘liberation’, ‘invasion’, ‘occupation’ have come to have a currency and a renewed relevance in our discussions. ‘Invading’ a country in order to ‘liberate’ it; ‘occupying’ a country, and ‘changing its regime’, no longer seem actions that might solely have involved our fathers and mothers in much remoter times. In this context, a re-examination of the Liberation of France is not only a timely anniversary enterprise, but is also highly relevant to our present-day preoccupations. In the sixty years since the 1944 Liberation of France, a great deal of examination and research has of course already taken place. What is particularly interesting about this considerable body of work is the sharply different standpoint adopted by Anglo-American historians on the one hand, and French historians on the other. In the geography of the Liberation, in its temporal context, and in the focus of the studies undertaken, Anglo-American and French commentators have tended to use very different perspectives. Historical studies by British and American historians have traditionally concentrated on a Liberation which takes place in the north of France, on the ‘D’ Day beaches, and through the pastures and bocage of Normandy. This is a Liberation that is largely contained in the period from 6 June 1944, until the early weeks of July, with the breakout from the Normandy bridgehead. Military studies have focused on the battles themselves, and on the lived experience of those Allied soldiers who were involved. 1 Outside the battles, Anglo-American researchers have been interested in the diplomatic build-up to ‘D’ Day, particularly as it concerned relationships between the principal protagonists: Churchill, 1

2

War and Liberation in France

de Gaulle and Roosevelt. There have been studies, too, of the politics of Liberation from an Allied perspective, with commentators assessing the extent to which the Liberators were actually planning to take over the Government of France themselves via an Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory (AMGOT), or the ways in which power passed ‘on the ground’ from the liberating armies to the French.2 French historians on the other hand have studied a Liberation which took place at several different times – from June 1944 on through the autumn and winter of that year – and in many different places all over France. One of the earliest historical series on the Liberation provided a separate monograph for events in each of the main regions of the country.3 Much of the energy of French Liberation studies in the 1960s and 1970s was focused on political issues: the process by which the centre, the new government, managed to gain and impose its power all over France; the intentions and actions of the Communist Party; the ‘missed opportunity’ of Revolution. 4 In the 1980s and 1990s, this unitary power framework (the centre regaining power) was replaced by a much greater awareness of the diversity of Liberation experiences, with Liberation seen as an explosion of multilevel movements of power all over France. Part of this more eclectic approach involved the use of interpretative insights derived from cultural and ethnographic studies. Scholars examined how specific groups had lived the Liberation – the experience of women, of immigrants, or that of prisoners in Vichy/ German internment camps. Attention focused on what the French have termed l’ imaginaire social, the ways in which the Liberation of France was represented by particular communities in their various, very different encounters in 1944/1945. 5 These two broadly separate perspectives on the Liberation of France – Anglo-American and French – are also strongly ethnocentric. In AngloAmerican studies, it is the British, Americans and Canadians who tend to occupy the centre of the stage, with the French portrayed as a backdrop to the major action on the beaches and in Normandy, or as (usually) junior partners in preparatory discussions and activities. French scholars, on the other hand, represent the Liberation as a fundamentally French-centred series of events, in which the Allies are accorded at best a walk-on role, in a much broader and wider history of developments in France. In this book, I want to try and begin to integrate these two separate and parallel narratives of Liberation. Over the past few years, French scholarship has shown us with great brilliance how differently the events of 1944/45 were lived by communities all over France. Important

Introduction

3

components of some of these communities were troops from the USA, from Britain and from Canada. The number of Allied servicemen in France in this period was formidable. By 1 September 1944, approximately two million men had already been landed, and this ‘invasion’ continued at an even more hectic pace in the succeeding months. An estimated three and a half million British, American and Canadian soldiers disembarked in France in the seven months after ‘D’ Day. As the war progressed, many of these men moved on into Belgium and Germany, and were then speedily replaced by others who were pulled back from the front line after the surrender of Germany, and garrisoned in France until they could be despatched to the Pacific theatre. At the very end of the war in September 1945, large numbers of Allied soldiers were still stationed in France, and remained there through 1946, waiting for transport to take them back to their home countries so that they could be demobilized and resume their civilian lives. The conditions operating in France at this time tended to localize Liberation experiences. There was not one Liberation of France, but many. In the towns and communes of France, local experiences of Liberation depended on the specific military situation, on the balance of fighting forces, and on the timing of events in the region. As opposing armies fought, the communications system of the country had collapsed, leaving large parts of France isolated within their own local experiences. Even when the Provisional French Government was installed in Paris at the end of August 1944, it was in no position to find out what was going on in the rest of the country. At the first cabinet meeting, the new Minister of the Interior recognized that the Government’s authority was limited to Paris itself, and at a pinch the outer suburbs of the capital, but certainly nothing beyond this.6 The train link between Paris and Marseille was not restored until early October 1944, and there was not even any phone communication between the two cities until the end of September. In a very real way, France’s Liberation was a patchwork of different Liberation experiences, with communities living the events in quite separate, and usually isolated ways. My contention in this book is that some of these Liberation communities were multinational. Given the sheer number of Allied troops in the country, there were inevitably areas in France which became sites for these often sustained encounters between foreign Liberators and French people in the locality. In some places, indeed, Allied soldiers and French civilians lived in close proximity for a considerable time. AngloAmericans, I am arguing, should be seen, and should see themselves, as an integral part of this patchwork of liberated France. Giving a voice

4

War and Liberation in France

to some of these multinational communities, and gaining insight into the ways in which their component parts related to each other, is the principal task of this book. In looking at these mixed communities of Liberation, I shall be adopting an ethnographic approach, trying to uncover how it felt at the time for people to be placed in these contexts of forced proximity. Rather than using post hoc testimony and memories, I am aiming to capture some of the more contemporary voices of those involved at the time, as they described their reactions and feelings. Diaries and letters home from soldiers involved, and the regular and detailed accounts of Civil Affairs officers and observers, together with newspapers of the period, provide an insight into how the Liberators understood some of these encounters. The voices of French people in these communities are heard in their letters and witness statements, in the local records of Allied–French discussions, of Liberation Committee activities, and of police and prefect reports. Neither French people nor their Liberators, of course, came to these encounters innocently. France in 1944 had suffered the humiliation of defeat, followed by four long years of occupation by the Germans. During this time, the country was in many ways in the grip of a civil war, with different factions supporting the Vichy Government of Marshal Pétain, the enemy occupying forces, the external Resistance in London and Algiers, or the many internal Resistance movements which gradually formed after the shock of defeat. Through the years of Occupation, these groups developed a number of different and complex impressions of the countries that were now to liberate them. The Allies, for their part, arrived in France in June 1944 with war experiences which were very different from those of the French, and often indeed from each other – experiences which had shaped their preconceptions about what they would eventually find in France. Chapter 1 of this book tries to situate the local specificities of Franco-Allied encounters within the overall emotional history of these pre-Liberation relationships. In the following chapters (Chapters 2 to 6), I shall be looking at five different multinational Liberation communities. I have chosen these to try and illustrate some of the variety of contexts and circumstances in which encounters between Liberated and Liberators took place. The nature of the Liberation process, the distribution of roles between foreign and French protagonists in liberating an area, the political balance of forces locally, and the actual duration of the resulting meetings, varied considerably from one part of the country to another. The multinational communities in this study appeared in the wake of very different Liberation events, and offer, I would suggest, an insight into the range

Introduction

5

and complexity of Allied–French relationships at this time. Given the numerical dominance of American troops in the ‘D’ Day Landings, the Landings in Southern France, and the ongoing campaign in the east of the country, the position of US personnel in many of these communities is more evident than that of British or Canadian soldiers, although Liberators from all three countries, and indeed from Republican Spain as well, provide some of the ‘foreign’ components in these local studies. The first of the case studies (Chapter 2) looks at the earliest Liberation in France, that of northern Normandy. This was a mobile Liberation, with a huge contingent of Allied troops – their numbers would rise to two million – driving on, often very slowly, over a hundred-mile battlefront. The French therefore met their Liberators in the maelstrom of battle, as the Allies bombed a town, and inched over the fields and roads of Normandy. This was a Liberation meeting ‘on the run’, with impressions of the foreigner fleeting and kaleidoscopic on both sides. Mutual perceptions of Liberated and Liberator were strongly influenced by the mobile and bloody Liberation process that had thrown them together in the first place. The second case study (Chapter 3) is of a much longer and more settled meeting, in the port town of Cherbourg, liberated by the Americans in late June 1944. Cherbourg was of considerable strategic importance to the Allies and had been designated as a key entry point for military supplies and troops. US soldiers and personnel therefore stayed on for fifteen months after the Liberation, rebuilding the damaged port, and running it as a transit area for troops arriving in and departing from France. The confined urban space of Cherbourg, with a French population of around 30,000, provided the setting for a prolonged meeting between Liberators and Liberated. The situation in southern France was very different from that in the north. The Landings in Provence in mid-August 1944 gave a key role to French fighting forces, both the French Army of Africa, and members of the internal Resistance. Allied units found that towns and villages had often been liberated by internal Resistance activity before they actually arrived. In many cases, power passed directly to committed and politicized French resisters, without any overt intervention by Anglo-American troops. Chapter 4 examines the Franco-Allied encounter in Marseille and its surrounding area. Here, in the second largest conurbation in France, liberated by the French themselves, the Allies established a large presence, using the port facilities, and taking over tracts of the Nice–Cannes coastline for the rest and recreation of their troops. The relationship that developed between the two sides in the course of this experience

6

War and Liberation in France

would be very different from that which was being established in the north. Further south, communes were often liberated without any major fighting, either by the Allies or the French themselves. These areas were largely abandoned by German forces, who were thrown into disarray by the speed and efficiency of the Landings in August. In the frontier region close to Perpignan, the Department (the Pyrénées-Orientales) was liberated, but virtually cut off from the rest of France for several months. In this area, the Resistance Maquis was dominated by foreigners, ex-Spanish Republicans who had fled over the border when Franco took over Spain in 1939, and who intended the Liberation of France to be a staging-post on the way to the Liberation of Franquist Spain. The Allies, fully engaged in fighting elsewhere in France and, like the French Government in Paris, unable to get very precise information on what was actually happening, relied increasingly on assessments from their observers just over the border in Spain. The Liberation community of the Pyrénées-Orientales became a very particular sort of frontier community, and the setting, as Chapter 5 suggests, for an encounter between local inhabitants, Spanish Resisters and Allied personnel, crossing and re-crossing an apparently permeable and unstable border. The last case study (Chapter 6) deals with the Liberation of Reims, in the east of France. This was an area which in many ways exchanged one intense military occupation by the Germans for an even more intense military occupation by the Liberators. Almost immediately the Allies arrived in the town, Reims became the forward headquarters for the Army as the Americans pressed forward over the border into enemy territory. The German surrender document was indeed to be signed in the city in May 1945. This ceremony did not, however, mark the end of the Franco-Allied encounter. Instead, the numbers of foreign troops coming into the area markedly increased in 1945, as Reims became a redeployment zone, with eight vast camps established to provide holding spaces for soldiers on their way back from Germany, en route to the Pacific, and later in the war stationed in the area, awaiting transport home to demobilization and civilian life. The American military presence, and the economic and social needs that it had, were to affect the region’s life for well over two years after the Liberation of Reims. It was, in every way, for both French inhabitants and Allied soldiers, a unique, and particularly long goodbye. These case studies provide examples of a variety of meetings between the French and their Allies in the course of Liberation. There are encounters which were fleeting and hurried in the turmoil of an ongoing

Introduction

7

N

GREAT BRITAIN

BELGIUM

English Channel GERMANY

Cherbourg Arromanches Bayeux St-LÔ Caen

F

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LUXEMBOURG

Paris

A

N

Reims

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SWITZERLAND

Bay of Biscay

ITALY

Nice Marseille Toulon 0

km

0

miles

Perpignan

150 SPAIN 100

ANDORRA

Mediterranean Sea Mountain High Maps

Map 1

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Copyright

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1993 Digital Wisdom

Case study areas

battle; meetings in a small town where inhabitants lived with their Liberators for over a year; relationships established in places where Liberation was a French affair from the beginning, and where Allies and French ostensibly met as equals; a frontier Liberation in which French, Allies and other foreigners negotiated their understanding of the delineation of national borders; and a military reoccupation which was to last into the beginning of the post-war period of French reconstruction. In all these sites, I have been interested to see the ways in which encounters between nationals of different countries developed, and how each group represented the other in the course of the experience. In doing this, I have tried to bear in mind a number of key questions.

8

War and Liberation in France

To what extent did the representations of ‘the other’ which emerged relate to the specific situation in which they both found themselves, or to the previous wartime emotional baggage which protagonists necessarily brought to the meetings? How did French and Allies perceive each other, and were these perceptions notably different in areas which had experienced different sorts of Liberation? To what extent did the duration of the meetings affect the understandings which participants had of each other? Were impressions formed more related to a generic encounter between army and civilians rather than to a meeting between people of different nationalities? Quite apart from the specificities of Allied encounters, there are more general questions to be asked about the nature of any relationship between Liberated and Liberator. How does a people which has been occupied by a foreign enemy react to being liberated by equally foreign friends? How do you reassert national identity in a situation in which some of your national space does not belong to you? How are the borders of your national self-image to be redrawn? What is it like as a Liberator to interact with a friendly nation, but one whose future is dependent on rebuilding a national sovereignty which will ultimately exclude you? How do your short-term and focused objectives as a Liberator fit in with the necessarily longer-term and wider aspirations of those whom you have liberated? Are there situations which make a harmonious meshing of these different objectives quite impossible? At the root of this study is a concern about how we describe and represent ‘foreignness’ – less the foreigner who is our acknowledged enemy, and more the foreigner who is our ally and friend, and who may live among us. It is my belief that the ways in which we perceive and represent this ‘foreignness’ are closely related to the situations in which we find ourselves, in particular places and at particular times. Beyond national stereotypes and racial presuppositions, the FrancoAllied communities in the Liberation, I shall argue, adopted a variety of tactics to deal with the presence of the foreigner amongst them, either as guest or as host. Bringing some of the voices of these particular multinational communities into the ‘consultable record’ of the Liberation of France7 will help us, I hope, to begin to combine our previously separate national narratives of this shared event. It may also offer some insights into the ways in which national groups, forcibly brought together, develop their working understanding of the foreigner with whom they are temporarily living. Perceptions, feelings and representations are above all the stuff of words and images, and I have tried throughout this book to treat what people actually said at the time with respect and

Introduction

9

accuracy. The result does not claim to be an historical picture of events in the Liberation. It is rather an attempt to represent aspects of these multinational relationships as they seem to have been actually experienced at the time in, as Greg Dening would have it, both their ‘ordered and disordered natures’. 8

1 Welcoming the Liberators

Hosts and guests During the Liberation, one of the propaganda leaflets which the Americans dropped over France carried a photo of a Frenchman, surrounded by American troops. Together, they are drinking wine . . . ‘Buvons un coup!’ runs the caption. ‘His house and fields have suffered badly, but this French peasant knows that this is the price of freedom, and he is more than pleased to drink with his liberators, his traditional allies’.1 This picture of friends drinking together in the midst of battle is one of the lasting and iconic memories of Franco-Allied relationships in the Liberation. The official Allied Civil Affairs history of the period describes the Liberation of the first sizeable town in France, Bayeux, as marked by the offering of traditional Normandy food and drink: ‘Food, wine, Normandy cider, were pressed on the troops’.2 Long after the event, participants recalled being welcomed by French civilians with local food and alcohol. John Lee Wilson, a British officer with the 7th Black Watch, could still remember the way in which two French people in Lisieux had invited him to a meal: ‘nothing elaborate – they made a lovely meal.’ 3 Nurse Rachel Millett, landing at the other end of the country with the Liberation forces in the south of France, recalled in detail how civilians came up to her: ‘“I know English people like breakfast – I’ve got breakfast for you”, and she’d got fried eggs for us and everything she could produce and she said I want you to come and have dinner with us next night’.4 More than fifty years after the Liberation, American war veterans described being given a warm welcome in French villages: ‘Each town prepared in their own way for our arrival and all were anxiously waiting to see us and greet us – with wine for good luck.’ An understandably strong memory amongst them is of the Normandy liquor, Calvados: ‘A French 10

Welcoming the Liberators 11

peasant gave me a drink of Calvados. I nearly strangled.’ Others recalled less fiery offerings: ‘A young innocent girl, perhaps 12 or 13, came to one of our first bivouacs with a huge apron-full of apples as gifts to the whole company. In my mind the girl’s welcome remains ever precious’.5 War diaries at the time, and letters home to loved ones, equally picture Allied–French meetings bathed in the warm glow of shared hospitality. Captain Lappin, with the 7th Battalion Duke of Wellington’s, noted his welcome in one Normandy village: ‘The cider flowed freely, even the local gendarmes were giving it away.’6 American soldier T.N. Seckle, writing back to his wife, described the strangely surreal experience of driving through the devastated towns of northern France: ‘These French towns are really shot to hell . . . the people swarm all over you . . . Where they all come from I don’t know because all the houses are in ruins, but they are there all right, by the thousands. They offer us all sorts of things, like wine.’7 On the French side too, contemporary accounts provide a strong sense of celebrating Liberation through the giving and receiving of wine and food. Anne de Vigneral, with a bird’s-eye view of the Normandy Landings from her village three miles away from the invasion beaches, described the family’s first meeting with Allied soldiers on 6 June: ‘We could hardly speak . . . we found bottles of champagne which we brought down. We gave them glasses and stood together on the step, drinking.’ 8 In the Cotentin, the local priest at Varenguebec, Abbé Paul, went with the villagers to meet the Allied advance: ‘We gave them what we could: milk, cider, coffee, eggs. They drew up close to the fire . . . to try to warm up a bit and dry their clothes . . . Some of them ate the soup with us; the others mixed it all up and drank the milk and cider together!’9 In these vignettes of hospitality offered and received, the French and their Allies stand in the traditional roles of host and guest. The French welcome the Allies to their towns, villages and homes, and the Anglo-Saxon troops enter French territory as guests, and are warmly and hospitably greeted. Of course, the events which had led up to the Liberation – the Fall of France, Occupation, American entry into the war, planning for ‘D’ Day – in fact provided a context for these meetings which was far more problematic than the iconic scenes themselves might suggest. Beneath the host–guest relationship symbolized in these memorable encounters with wine, champagne, cider, calvados, milk, eggs and apples, lies a hinterland of much more complex perceptions and expectations, shaped by the very different pre-Liberation experiences of participants concerned. The liberators who arrived in France ostensibly as guests in June 1944 were coming to a country which had been defeated, and defeated in a matter of weeks, by their common enemy, and then suffered the

12

War and Liberation in France

humiliation of four long years of occupation. At the Fall of France in 1940, the historic governmental and social structure of the country had collapsed. Through the following years, France had been in many ways a country in the grip of a civil war, with different factions supporting variously the Vichy Government of Marshal Pétain, or the German occupying forces in Paris, or again the external Resistance movement in London, symbolized by General de Gaulle, or the various internal Resistance movements and Maquis groups which painfully came into existence in the long months after the Fall of France. Most of these militant factions were of course relatively small, but for the bulk of the population, living through the nightmare of Occupation, and struggling to provide food and security for their families, the existence of viciously competing interpretations of what had happened in France, and of the best way in which France could progress in the future, was a given of daily life. As hosts in 1944, the French therefore welcomed their liberators into a home which had been profoundly divided upon itself, and which had developed a number of reservations about, if not outright antagonisms towards, those who were entering the country to liberate it. For their part, the Allies came to this highly complex situation with experiences very different from those of their French hosts, and often indeed from each other. Their perspectives had inevitably been shaped by the separate recent histories of the outbreak of war, the defeat of France, the Blitz, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the end of isolationism. As guests, they arrived therefore with a number of half-formed views about France, developed through the very recent experiences of war in their own countries and based on what relatively meagre information about the French situation they had been able to obtain. All host–guest relationships are of course potentially sensitive, depending ultimately on mutual generosity of intention, and a shared perspective on what is appropriate and possible. For the hosts and guests in the Liberation of France, the ground on which they could base a satisfactory encounter was particularly fragile and uncertain.

French perspectives An indication of the ambiguous situation of the hosts in this encounter can be gauged by one of the posters put up by the French to welcome their Allies at the Liberation: Welcome to you our Allies for whom we have been waiting during the dreary days of occupation. For over four years, we have suffered

Welcoming the Liberators 13

cruelly, physically as well as mentally . . . above all, we ask you to believe that the treacherous ways of the enemy and their so-called ‘correct’ behaviour, corrupted only a handful of traitors who will be punished as they deserve . . . We cannot receive you as we should like . . . We ask you to show understanding towards your brothers in arms, who welcome you today.10 The French position as conscientious hosts was compromised first then by the physical state of their country, in the grip of war and a variety of physical deprivations: ‘We cannot receive you as we should like’; secondly, by the fact that a group of French people, albeit a minority, were said to have collaborated with the enemy. This necessarily meant that the role of host could not plausibly be played by every Frenchman and woman: ‘a handful of traitors who will be punished as they deserve’. Thirdly, the Allies were being welcomed as fellow soldiers – ‘brothers in arms’ – although the great majority of the able-bodied French population, it was clear, was not in uniform at all. Finally, and most tellingly for the position of host, the French had been through a very different recent experience from that of their guests, an experience of enemy Occupation – ‘for over four years’. A key aspect of this different recent experience had been a four-year presentation of their foreign Allies in unremittingly negative terms. The common approach in France during the Occupation had been to lump together popular representations of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, rather than separate out the Americans from the British. At least at the outset, however, there had been some slight differences in the ways in which the British and the Americans were characterized in the popular presses of Occupied France and the Vichy south. The initial neutrality of the American Government provided a brief honeymoon period in the approach that Vichy adopted to describing the Americans. Until the middle of 1941, articles mildly favourable to the USA still appeared in the Vichy media, extolling the US Military Academy at West Point for example, and suggesting that American aid to France would be well within the best European traditions of the spirit of Atlantic cooperation.11 With the American entry into the war, however, the Vichy propaganda line moved decisively towards the depiction of America as a decadent, mongrel society which threatened not only the cultural heritage of Europe, but also the moral regeneration of the youth of France, a project which was of course particularly dear to the hearts of the Pétainist administration. Vichy was arguably the first French government to fight actively against a perceived cultural threat from the United States, officially

14

War and Liberation in France

stopping the import of American cinema films, and mounting a loud campaign to denounce the evil influences of American-inspired jazz. The Vichy Ministry of Education indeed subsidized the production of a film which pictured the demoralizing effects which American cinema had already had on the young people of France. In comparison with Vichy, the collaborating faction in Paris was much quicker to denounce American society and values, even before neutrality had been suspended. The USA was dominated, the argument went, by a Jewish, Bolshevik-sympathizing plutocracy which was racially and culturally doomed to failure. The strongest element in these descriptions was the alleged primitive nature of United States society and culture. Lucien Rebatet felt that the Americans were like ‘children’. 12 Roosevelt was said to be surrounded by ‘sexed-up robots’ and ‘hopeless brutes’. 13 The major enemy in the French press of the Occupation period was, however, undoubtedly the British. Traditional anglophobia, stretching through the long historical lists of grievances from the burning of Joan of Arc to the conflict at Fachoda, was given renewed impetus by the later perceived betrayals of Dunkirk and the sinking of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. In many ways, media presentation of Britain oscillated uneasily between contempt for a country which was on its knees in the war, and led by the ‘whisky soaked’ Churchill,14 and a persistent suspicion that the ‘mad dog of Europe’15 might still prove capable of doing real damage to France and her Empire. Despite this propaganda from the controlled presses of the occupied and Vichy zones, prefects’ reports of the period suggest that public opinion in France stayed largely favourable to the Allies, particularly after the Pétain–Hitler meeting in Montoire on 24 October 1940 at which a more explicit Franco–German collaboration was announced. 16 Shortly after the publicity surrounding Montoire, the French authorities found it necessary to issue directives to the police and gendarmerie ordering them to ensure that there was no public demonstration of people listening to BBC radio broadcasts. By the spring of 1944, the Overseas Branch of the Voice of America estimated rather ruefully that: ‘more than 90 per cent – virtually all those who had radio sets – listened to the BBC’. 17 On the whole, sympathy with the Allies seemed, however, less linked to Britain and the USA as countries, and much more related to what appeared to be a growing impatience on the part of the French population with the continued German presence on their soil. It was also a sympathy which apparently co-existed with widespread continuing respect for the person of Marshal Pétain who, despite the unease occasioned by the Montoire declarations, still drew considerable crowds during subsequent visits to

Welcoming the Liberators 15

large urban centres like Toulouse, Clermont-Ferrand, Lyon, Marseille and Toulon. The Allied aerial bombardments that started with the RAF raid on Boulogne-Billancourt in March 1942, and intensified in the months leading up to ‘D’ Day, however, undoubtedly did serious harm to French perceptions of the Allies, quite apart from the physical and material losses that they caused. Vichy newsreels of the period made much of the apparently deliberate damage inflicted on France’s cultural symbols, and on her innocent population. In May 1944, for example, cinema newsreels carried a series of shots of the devastation wrought by Allied bombing. Chartres, with its Hôtel de Ville and library in ruins, was followed by pictures of the damaged cathedral at Orléans, significantly showing the statue of Joan of Arc, with her sword blown off. The newsreel then cut immediately to smouldering ruins in Chambéry, with refugee messages scrawled on the walls, and pictures of Lyon being bombed by the Allies, with a voiceover deploring this form of modern warfare which attacked the innocent and the civilian.18 Evidence from Vichy censorship of private correspondence in the immediate period leading up to the Liberation, and then in the weeks after, suggests that public anxiety about Allied bombing stayed high, second only to the persistent worries expressed about how family members were going to be fed.19 By the time of the Allied Landings, fears about the country being laid waste could be usefully exploited in anti-American and anti-British propaganda. Thus for example, one tract, under a picture of the contentious American French Liberation currency, proclaimed: The Anglo-Americans are killing our men, women and children, destroying our towns, ravaging our countryside. Now, with this worthless scrap of paper, they are intending to pay the French for what they’re taking which is theirs. They’ve attacked Europe through France because they want to use our children, by mobilising them as cannon-fodder. Because, before conquering Germany, they want to punish France and give England a victory over the ruins of our country.20 Pierre Laborie, reviewing Vichy censorship of private correspondence during the first few weeks of the Liberation period, argued that there was a widespread mood of lassitude in both the north and south of France. He noted sentiments in the letters like: ‘We’re exhausted . . . Whatever the decision is, we want it over with as soon as possible . . . Terrible alternative on offer: slavery or deliverance in the midst of ruins,

16

War and Liberation in France

with an infinite number of victims.’21 The cause of this lassitude was undoubtedly in part the fact that the French themselves could do very little in practical terms to effect the outcome of the war, and change their own immediate situation. Pierre Bourdan mused on the way in which time and distance operated corrosively on the spirit of those who waited, and who could do relatively little on their own: ‘One of the complex forces which dominated this war and which played a terrible and new game with men’s hearts and blood was the element of distance: distance, not only in terms of physical space to cross, but also as a product of time and space.’22 In addition, general belief in the likely efficacy of the internal Resistance in influencing events positively was not enormously high. As Laborie suggests, the attitude of the general public towards the Maquis and the Resistance in this early phase of Liberation was considerably more nuanced than the poster welcoming the Allies to France might have suggested. The Occupation authorities and Vichy had anyway been waging, it must be remembered, a high-profile campaign of vilification where the Maquis was concerned, and this was a campaign which gained momentum in the early months of 1944, before the ‘D’ Day Landings. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac estimates, for example, that the notorious Minister of Information, Philippe Henriot, was speaking at least twice a day on the radio from February 1944 onwards, and that approximately 30 per cent of these interventions in the spring were in effect virulent denunciations of Maquis activity.23 Attitudes towards the Resistance and the Maquis continued to be very uncertain as the Liberation advanced. On the evidence of censorship material, it appeared as if positive comments on the Maquis in the general population were generally never higher than 20 per cent, going over 30 per cent only briefly around the beginning of August. Negative attitudes – sentiments like ‘real brutes. A lot of Spanish Reds; brigands . . . bandits’ – were by far and away the more numerous throughout the June–August 1944 period.24 People within France thus prepared to meet their Anglo-Saxon/AngloAmerican Liberators with some very mixed emotions. They had been subjected for four years to a continuous negative battery about the real intentions of their future Allies. Whilst the most generally shared popular opinion seemed to be that the Allies would at least rid the country of the German Occupiers, the experience of Allied bombing raids had undoubtedly fed the official hostile anti-Ally propaganda. A low level of confidence about the activity of the internal Resistance and the Maquis, and a widely shared mood of fear and lassitude seem to be the chief characteristics of popular French feeling on the eve of ‘D’ Day. The

Welcoming the Liberators 17

guests that they were to welcome to France were people who had been portrayed in starkly black terms for four years before, and they were guests who would inevitably bring more of the same destruction of property and life which had already been visited on France during the Occupation. If ordinary people within France had a number of sensitivities about their future Allied Liberators, the Free French and the Resistance had also found pre-‘D’ Day relationships with the British and Americans by no means easy. At a very basic level, justifying the loss of life and property occasioned by Allied bombing of France had been a real challenge for Free French spokesmen on the BBC. The tactic they adopted was generally to argue: (a) that the RAF was doing its best to minimize loss of civilian French life; and (b) that it was anyway the fault of those currently in power in France. Thus Maurice Schumann addressed the bombing of French factories in 1942 with a passionate condemnation of the Vichy regime: the tragedy, the passion, the great sorrow of France . . . not only has she been subjugated and betrayed . . . not only have those very people who betrayed her . . . knowingly made of France a vast military target, a battle field, by harnessing her economy to the war economy of the enemy, but here are the French again . . . reduced to the most terrible of fates . . . to be dealt death without being able to mete it out, and to be dealt it by their friends, without being able to mete it out to their enemies. 25 Both the Free French and the Metropolitan Resistance were faced with the additional difficulty of seeking to persuade their compatriots that the sedulously maintained anglophobia of the Vichy press was unjustified, at precisely the time that many of them were in fact viewing British intentions towards the French Empire with mounting concern. Typical of the necessary ambiguity of their response to this dilemma was the article which the clandestine newspaper Défense de la France published in October 1943, entitled ‘l’Angleterre et la France’.26 In this presentation, the writer sought to meet head-on a number of the common anti-British themes repeated by Vichy and Paris sources: France had been abandoned by Britain in 1940; Britain was selfish; and so on. Whilst taking issue with these, however, the paper also made clear to its readers that a close eye would need to be kept by the French on their future Liberators. ‘You should know’, he told the English, ‘that France must not be treated either as a poor relation (your real friends, like General de

18

War and Liberation in France

Gaulle, have warned you enough about this), nor as a dangerous rival, but rather as a loyal ally, who has twice been sacrificed at the front.’ The events of late 1942 in North Africa would put a particular strain on the relationship between the Free French/Resistance and the AngloAmerican Allies. The preparedness of the invading American forces to deal first with Admiral Darlan, the former Vichy prime minister, and then with the non-Gaullist candidate for French leadership, General Giraud, seemed to indicate to many friendly French observers that their fears about Allied intentions were wholly justified. By early 1943, the clandestine press was publishing clear condemnations of the American failure to understand the limits of collaboration with Vichy personnel like Darlan. Combat, for example, chastised the United States under the guise of straight talking between friends: American friends. You are our friends – we’re fighting together: we want to speak to you without beating about the bush . . . Thanks to you, North Africa has become a land of division. Thanks to you, the men of Vichy have been able to hang on to a desperate last hope. Everywhere people are whispering ‘The Americans are quite willing to make arrangements with us.’27 The failure to recognize the claims of de Gaulle, and this apparent willingness on the part of the Americans to adopt a pragmatic approach in their dealings with France before Liberation, provoked widespread alarm in French Resistance circles. There were other concerns besides American actions in North Africa, and persistent suspicions about British colonial rivalry. Sections of the French Resistance, looking forward to the post-war international settlements, worried about the wider implications for France of a future dominated by Anglo-Saxons. The Resistance constitutional planning body, the Comité Général d’Etudes, for instance, argued that, ‘imposing English and American law on the West might bring very serious consequences. Western civilisation is not mono-lingual or mono-religious’.28 For the Free French outside the country, and the internal Resistance, their future Allied guests were then by no means above suspicion. Allied intentions towards the future of France and of her Empire were far from clear, and the cultural hegemony that the Allies threatened to assume in any post-war settlement might be deeply threatening to French interests. The British and the Americans clearly provided the only means by which France could oust the German Occupier, but the process by which this long-desired outcome would be realized, and the likely long-term effects

Welcoming the Liberators 19

of Anglo-American involvement in French affairs, were matters of considerable concern to many members of the French Resistance outside and inside France. As ‘D’ Day grew near, this French anxiety became more and more acute. French representatives in London and Algiers were dismayed to find themselves exiled from the Allies’ concrete planning for the Liberation and the political future of their country. Symbolically perhaps, when American officers arrived at the school in Wimbledon which had been set up to train a Civil Affairs cadre for the Landings in Europe, French liaison officers noted that they sat apart from everybody else, eating alone, and talking about decisions that had to be taken at a higher level.29 If the prospect of an AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory) in France appeared to have receded, the French found themselves planning for their Liberation within what amounted to a complete Allied policy vacuum. There was no French administration that had been officially recognized by the Allies, and the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, was under specific instructions from President Roosevelt to keep all options open, and negotiate ‘on the ground’ with whomever seemed most appropriate at the time. Understandably, in these uncertain waters, tensions and diplomatic confusions came to a head in the days immediately preceding ‘D’ Day. By the time de Gaulle arrived in Britain from Algiers on 4 June 1944, arguments about the future legitimacy of a Liberation French Government had reached a critical point. When the General heard that the Allies were intending to issue their own ‘French’ currency, he exploded with rage: ‘I have just learned . . . that despite our warnings, the troops and services about to land are provided with so-called French currency, issued by foreign powers, which the Government of the Republic refuses to recognize.’ 30 The subsequent arguments about Eisenhower’s right to broadcast to the French nation on the eve of the Landings, and the issue of whether, in these circumstances, de Gaulle would actually allow French liaison officers to sail with the troops, produced serious FrancoAllied dissension, with Churchill threatening to send de Gaulle back to Algiers if he would not comply. 31 De Gaulle’s post-war memoirs of this troubled beginning to the Liberation state clearly that what he saw to be at stake in these pre-‘D’ Day disputes was the future independence of his country, and its security from likely Allied interference: ‘[Eisenhower] seemed to think he was taking charge of our country, whereas he was simply an Allied general who had been given the task of commanding troops, but had no right whatsoever to interfere in its government.’32

20

War and Liberation in France

Whilst the details of these eve of battle Allied–French dissensions were not common knowledge in France as the Liberation was launched, the uncertainty about exactly how the British and Americans would order their future relationship with the French appears to have been widely shared. For those Free French and Resistance personnel who were better informed, the Allies had a vital role to play in freeing France, but needed to be watched with care as to their future political intentions and likely cultural hegemony. To those within France who awaited an Allied landing with some trepidation, the British and Americans had already been given a particularly negative press by German– Vichy propaganda. Their arrival would symbolize both the ending of the Occupation nightmare, and a period fraught with danger, from renewed bombing raids, to land battles, to the possibility of large-scale civic disorder. As hosts, the French were in the uniquely difficult position of being unable to refuse entry to their guests, and unable to exercise any real influence on the behaviour and attitudes of those whom they were forced to welcome. The clandestine paper Défense de la France expressed it well: ‘We want France in War, the France of the Resistance to keep its independence. When the Allies arrive on our territory, France will receive them with joy, but she’ll welcome them as friends, that’s to say she’ll stay in charge of her own house.’33

British perspectives If the hosts had some difficulties in addressing forthcoming relationships at the Liberation, however, the guests also found themselves placed in an ambivalent position. British perceptions of the country they would invade in June 1944 had been greatly complicated by the events of the war. To begin with, the extremely rapid defeat of France in 1940 had been a considerable shock to the whole country. The first official reactions from the British Government were restrained. In his broadcast on 17 June 1940, Churchill was sympathetic and loyal: ‘I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune. Nothing will alter our feelings towards them, or our faith that the genius of France will rise again.’34 Whilst, as Philip Bell suggests,35 accusations of betrayal by the Vichy Government surfaced in the press when the actual terms of the armistice were made known – The Times called Pétain ‘nothing but a puppet of the nazi regime’ – these were, publicly at least, remarkably muted in tone.

Welcoming the Liberators 21

On the other hand, the tenor of popular opinion appeared to be a good deal sharper. Reports to the Ministry of Information noted that people were talking with relief about being rid of potentially unreliable allies; ‘We’re better off without the French.’36 The diary of one Midland woman hinted at a greater level of animosity among some groups: Everyone feels very bitterly the capitulation of the Bordeaux (French) Government. And so many of the French are amazed and ashamed, too. We cannot know how much they suffered, but we had been led to understand that they were ready to withstand the onslaught of the Germans when it should come. Instead of which the Meuse bridges were left unharmed for the enemy to pour into France. We sent a telegram to the Prime Minister! It said: ‘Why not declare war on the treacherous Bordeaux Government, seize French ships and protect French colonies.’37 On the whole, however, France inevitably fell from the forefront of people’s minds, as concentration centred on the Battle of Britain. In many ways, the physical isolation of the country from continental Europe leant a particular detachment to the affairs of France as war progressed. Pierre Bourdan (pseudonym of Pierre Maillard), who had been in London at the time of the armistice and stayed on to work with the French radio service (Les Français parlent aux Français) saw this detachment as a major quality in British attitudes to France: The key fact of British history, and one of the key facts of modern European history, is that, for some three hundred and forty-two years, Britain has had no conflict over national borders . . . From this fact, the British have derived a national feeling, and a vision of the world which is radically different from those of other nations . . . After the last war, the Englishman who looked over at Europe from the top of his cliffs doubtless recalled that from time to time a despot had issued forth from that mass of peoples to defy the power of England.38 That this proud detachment from the affairs of continental Europe remained a factor in British attitudes to France at the Liberation can be gauged by an early description in The Times of the ‘D’ Day Landings: ‘This is not the first time that Great Britain, as one of a coalition of nations, has undertaken the reconquest of a continent from which her armies have previously been driven.’ 39

22

War and Liberation in France

As well as the physical and historical detachment from the continent which underlay some British attitudes to the French, the British experience during the Battle of Britain, with the large-scale devastation and loss of life which was suffered in many of the principal towns of the country, provided a context for understanding the implications of Liberation which was different from that of both the French and the Americans. Revealingly perhaps, in the early weeks of the Liberation, the British press seemed more inclined than the American to print photos of the bombed and desolate landscape of war-torn Normandy. In a sample of Allied newspapers from 6 June 1944 until the end of August, 40 18 per cent of British photos, compared with only 3 per cent of American, showed images of the effects of war: ‘Caen after the occupation’, ‘Fleury destroyed’, ‘First men into Caen’, ‘The Caen–Falaise road’, ‘The Orne bridgehead.’41 The expectation and acceptance of Allied bombing raids on French territory seemed well developed. The War Illustrated, for example, carried a photo of a bombing raid on a factory in Colombelles which had completely smashed the building, captioning it: The ‘Factory removers’ went to Colombelles. Pounded to rubble by the RAF was this huge cement works at Colombelles, an industrial district north-east of Caen in Normandy . . . Together with German guns and snipers concealed there, it was obliterated by the new and terrifically powerful bombs known as ‘factory removers’ during a concentrated attack on this area on July 18, 1944. 42 Not only did the British have an isolation and war experience which was different from that of the French, they were also the main supporters and paymasters of the voice of liberated France, de Gaulle and his Free French Movement. From the time the General arrived in Britain and made his subsequently famous appeal of 18 June on the BBC, the costs of raising and maintaining the Free French forces were initially met by London. Contacts between the Gaullists and the metropolitan Resistance were provided by RAF flights and equipment, and French forces ultimately fighting in Bir Hakeim were supplied with uniforms and armament by the British Army. On a personal level, there is no doubt that the ties forged between French and English participants in the course of this developing and highly practical alliance were enormously important. As the New Statesman suggested, anglophiles in France might say, ‘Let’s hope the English win’, whilst anglophobes would say, ‘Let’s hope those English swine win.’ 43 Dependency, however, to this degree, and at such a crucial time

Welcoming the Liberators 23

for the future of France, inevitably produced its own difficulties that were to surface regularly in frequent rows between de Gaulle and his English partners. Disastrous Free French plans for an attack on Dakar, internecine conflicts in the ‘Muselier affair’, and problems attaching to the Syrian campaign and the so-called ‘rallying’ to the Free French of the islands off the coast of Canada (Saint Pierre et Miquelon), all severely strained relationships between the principal protagonists.44 Nicholas Atkin argues that public opinion towards de Gaulle and the Free French was mixed. Early on after the defeat of France, there was considerable admiration for the courageous stand that de Gaulle had taken. Indeed, when the British press announced that the General had been condemned to death in absentia by the Vichy regime, the Free French headquarters at Carlton Gardens was apparently deluged by anonymous gifts of jewels. Despite this, however, Mass Observation reported in 1943 that only half of their respondents had expressed any respect for the Free French as allies. 45 Early British policy towards France had anyway included working with de Gaulle as simply one part of a three-sided French policy. In addition to support of the Free French, Churchill’s Government reserved the right to deal directly with any Resistance groups which might appear on mainland France. Even more controversially, at the end of 1940, the Foreign Office was continuing to pursue the possibility of an ‘understanding’ with Vichy.46 The invasion of North Africa, and the events subsequent to this, were contributing factors in modifying British views on the wisdom of pursuing contacts with Vichy. Whilst de Gaulle was still not formally recognized as the head of a future government of France, the North African débâcle with the Americans solidified views across Whitehall that the Gaullists had to be seen as the real future of France: ‘de Gaulle is not like a quantity of gin which can be put back into a bottle’. 47 By September 1943, the director of the French Region in the Foreign Office Political Intelligence Department was claiming that earlier divisions and doubts about the wisdom of supporting de Gaulle had now receded. It was vital to espouse the Gaullist cause, he claimed, if the Resistance were to be, ‘a valuable friend in the difficult period following liberation . . . The strength of de Gaulle depends entirely on how we treat him . . . The only possible people who could gain from our mistreatment of de Gaulle are the Communists.’48 The new and key factor in Franco–British relations, however, was clearly the American presence. Churchill came under increasing pressure from Roosevelt to align himself more fully with American views on the future of France. The Prime Minister, acutely aware of British dependency on

24

War and Liberation in France

the USA, found himself uncomfortably sandwiched between the Foreign Office on the one hand, with its increasingly pro-Gaullist attitudes, and the American President on the other, with his intransigent refusal to make decisions on the political shape of France before it was actually liberated. The closer the Allies got to ‘D’ Day, the clearer it was that political decisions on France were still in abeyance. The Foreign Office was becoming ever more suspicious that the American preference for dealing with whatever local authorities they might find ‘on the ground’, on a purely local basis, really masked a desire to internationalize parts of the French Empire, an approach which would pose a not too dissimilar threat to the colonies of the British Empire: ‘The next step might be to apply the same criterion to our own West Indian colonies.’ 49 The only way to break the pre-Liberation stalemate between the Allies and clarify the future position of France appeared to be for Churchill to exploit his personal relationship with Roosevelt and bring the issue out into the open. This he steadfastly refused to do through the spring and early summer of 1944. Foreign Secretary Eden was reprimanded for always wanting to rush decisions, and reminded of Talleyrand’s famous, ‘Surtout pas trop de zèle.’50 As Churchill pointed out to the Dominions Secretary, with the build-up to ‘D’ Day, it was a very unwise moment to be ruffling the American President’s feathers: ‘I get a large number of very favourable decisions from him every week, and I do not want to spoil this process.’51 Whilst the Army and the Foreign Office envisaged a potential political vacuum in their dealings with liberated France, the Propaganda Division (the Political Warfare Executive: PWE) continued its preparations for the Liberation. Inevitably this would necessitate some kind of positive engagement with the population no matter what sort of political settlement had or had not been agreed by the time the troops landed. As they sought to prepare soldiers for future encounters with the French, PWE received a number of suggestions on presumed French attitudes to the British. In August 1943, Captain Gosling filed a report surmising that the current Franco–British relationship was based on a serious misunderstanding: We, with memories of our fathers going to Paris to misbehave themselves, look upon the French as a light-moraled, rather lecherous race, not hospitable but grasping and ready to overcharge on the slightest pretext [much as we are now overcharging the Americans and all foreigners in England]. They judge us on our late Victorian reputation for prudery . . . Both couldn’t be more wrong.52

Welcoming the Liberators 25

More seriously, Lt-Colonel Buckmaster, who had up-to-date experience of the climate of opinion in France from his work in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), argued that the important thing for the British to remember in the Liberation was the need to ensure that their troops behaved themselves properly in France: I wish to draw your attention to a subject which may have grave results on the future of Anglo-French relations when our armies land in France. From the first day of occupation German troops have behaved towards the French population with the greatest courtesy. Even after three years of occupation, and although discipline has fallen off, the German Army has maintained a high standard of correct attitude. It was therefore vital that British troops landing in France realized that they had to behave as good guests in a foreign country: It would have the worst possible effect if the French population were to draw a disparaging comparison between the German Army and ours. The Allied troops are awaited with the greatest impatience by the French people, who are ready to see in them their liberators, and the welcome they will be given may lead them to think that everything is permitted to them. Should they once abuse this privilege, the enthusiasm would turn to bitterness.53 This need to behave with sensitivity as a guest in France certainly found its way into the Information Booklets issued to British soldiers before the Landings in June 1944. Troops were told not to get drunk: ‘If you get the chance to drink wine, learn to “take it”. The failure of some British troops to do so was the one point made against our men in France in 1939–40 and again in North Africa.’ They were exhorted to be abstemious if their hosts offered to feed them: ‘Don’t, even if food is offered you, eat the French out of house and home. If you do, someone may starve.’ One of the potential problem areas in the relationship identified by the Booklets was that of France’s very different wartime history. Men were advised to refrain from making comments on the Fall of France in 1940: ‘many French are convinced that they had a fine but insufficiently equipped army, not very well led. Many others are themselves critical of the French Army of 1940, but they, too, will resent their own criticism coming from a foreigner.’ Above all, they were told to stay well clear of arguments on how the British had behaved to France over the past four

26

War and Liberation in France

years: ‘If a Frenchman raises one of the points which have strained Anglo-French relations since 1940, drop the matter. There are two sides to every question, but you don’t want to take either.’54 As guests, then, the British were entering France with a clear sense that their own war experience had been very different, and implicitly more glorious, than that of their neighbours. Both in popular understanding, and in official policy terms, continued French resistance to the Germans had been largely sponsored, and supported, by the British Government. The tumultuous relationship with the leader of the Free French had initially been only one of a series of options for dealing with France, and whilst the Foreign Office in particular had moved to the view that the Gaullists represented the only safe and reliable proto-government for France, the influence of the American President made it difficult on the eve of ‘D’ Day to develop mechanisms to support de Gaulle’s accession to power. In the resulting policy vacuum, British planners worried about the ways in which their troops would relate to the French civilians they met, and the extent to which their behaviour would be favourably or unfavourably compared with that of the Germans. Good conduct as sensitive guests, they suggested to the soldiers on the ground, meant holding their drink, and declining to make comparisons between British and French behaviour over the Occupation period.

American perspectives If the British perceptions of the French were tinged with the intrinsic superiority of those who had not surrendered and who had, as it were, endured, United States perspectives on France were a good deal less focused. Their own experience of the war had nurtured a far more distanced and ambivalent attitude towards the future of France. The Fall of France in 1940 had, of course, come at a time when the isolationist current in the States was still strong. The tragic events in France had given additional support to those who favoured a more interventionist approach by the American Government. On 24 June 1940, Life magazine, for example, published a list of American agencies which had been set up to help the fighting/suffering Europeans. Eight of these were particularly focused on France: the American Friends Service Committee, for instance, directed aid to ten French Departments; the Committee of Mercy Inc. collected 44,000 dollars to provide help for homeless babies and children in France; the Foster Parents Plan for War Children had established a camp at Biarritz for 1,300 refugee children.

Welcoming the Liberators 27

For many Americans, the speedy defeat of France carried a number of highly relevant lessons, particularly those concerning the nefarious activities of Fifth Columnists. William Donovan and Edgar Mowrer produced a series of articles in August 1940, widely reproduced in the American syndicated press, which explored the issues of internal domestic opposition. 55 As Henriette Louis suggested, 56 the lessons of the French defeat became an element in the American election campaign, and with this, a contribution to the ongoing interventionist/ isolationist debate in the United States. In this situation, and until the USA entry into the war in December 1941, the Americans continued to maintain diplomatic relations with the legal Vichy Government of France. This background inevitably produced a more open approach than that of the British to the continued claims of Vichy, and a correspondingly more pragmatic attitude to future post-Liberation political arrangements in France. Roosevelt’s established view, after the American entry into the war, was that he had recognized the regime at Vichy and would offer no other recognition until France had been liberated, and the French people given the chance to express their own opinion for themselves. 57 The events in North Africa at the end of 1942 were a very public demonstration of this American agnosticism on the future of France. The agreement signed in Algiers between the American commanding officer, General Clark, and the former Vichy Prime Minister, Admiral Darlan, on 13 November 1942, was greeted by a storm of protest from the press in Britain and America, and incredulous anger from the metropolitan Resistance and the Free French. With the assassination of Darlan on Christmas Eve 1942, the Americans turned to a French general in North Africa, General Giraud, who had recently escaped from German captivity, deliberately eschewing any contact with General de Gaulle and his colleagues. American relations with the Gaullists hit an all-time low when President Roosevelt suggested there should be a ‘shot-gun wedding’ between the two rival candidates, Giraud and de Gaulle, in Casablanca in January 1943. By the time Churchill visited Washington in May 1943, American Government attitudes to de Gaulle had become so deeply hostile that the Prime Minister wired back to the War Cabinet in London that he was now under considerable pressure to jettison de Gaulle altogether: ‘I ask my colleagues to consider urgently whether we should not now eliminate de Gaulle as a political force and face Parliament and France upon the issue.’58 Whilst the Cabinet response to this was a robust refusal, the incident illustrates both the depth of hostility to de Gaulle in American Government circles, and the very different

28

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official perceptions of post-Liberation France held by the British and Americans at this late stage of the war. This political context for Franco-American relations inevitably influenced general American perceptions of the French as they planned for the Liberation. American propaganda leaflets prepared in French in May 1944 to explain the US position to the liberated population took care to present previous events as ‘a few storms . . . It sometimes happens that very good friends have violent passing quarrels, and that they are led to say and do things to each other that they would prefer to forget later.’59 Any former disagreements of this type had to be set, the leaflet contended, against the long and solid friendship between the two countries. Two elements of this historic friendship were particularly emphasized, and these would recur constantly in American portrayals of France – France’s role in developing American democracy, and the experience which American troops had had in France during the First World War. The first of these, French contributions to the American Revolution, was presented as a subject of still contemporary interest in the USA, and this theme was echoed in the American domestic press in the early days of Liberation. Thus, for example, the full-page War Bond adverts which some American firms sponsored in the summer of 1944 included one which posed as an open letter to Thomas Jefferson: ‘Dear Mr. Jefferson, When you went to France in 1784, to join Benjamin Franklin, your travels must have taken you to the Normandy Coast, where our soldiers are fighting today . . . repaying in blood the debt we shall always owe Lafayette.’60 The second, the Franco-American relationship in 1918, had become, in André Kaspi’s terms, something of a mutual French and American myth.61 For the purposes of the Normandy and Mediterranean Landings, the First World War was publicly imaged as a highpoint of good personal intercultural relationships: ‘In the towns and hamlets where they camped or were put up, our men were received by the French much more like family or close friends than like the soldiers of a foreign army.’62 Both the people at home and the troops in the field were frequently reminded about the 1917/1918 ties that bound France and America together. For the older domestic readership, the armies fighting in northern France were explicitly related to their own past war experience: ‘Two American armies are sweeping across France towards the Rhine . . . One is Eisenhower’s, the other Pershing’s. It is 1918 all over again . . . In their imagination, the veterans of Black Jack’s AEF, now gray-haired, bay-windowed and fiftyish, are back.’63 The American troop

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newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, took care to provide the same historical framework, with headlines like, ‘The Doughboy returns to France after 26 years’,64 and occasional photographs of young American soldiers paying tribute at First World War memorials: ‘Verdun and its million dead. Mute witnesses to Blitz of 1944.’65 The problem with this popular interpetative framework was that it inevitably and visibly drew attention to the very different situations between 1918 France and France in June 1944. Stars and Stripes, for example, produced a photo montage for its troops mixing First and Second World War photographs which drew clear parallels between the ‘bearded Poilus, backbone of the French Armies’, and the powerlessness of current French forces. One caption ran: Allies in the last war, allies in this . . . Here US troops of last war Occupation Force pass French reviewing officer in German city of Coblenz. Now Allied bombers, some of them manned by Fighting French crews, plaster the city, Frenchmen in US uniforms and using American equipment fight beside GIs. The peripheralization of the French in American perceptions could hardly have been clearer. The Poilus and Verdun had become minority contingents in borrowed uniforms and gifted equipment. American soldiers should understand, it was explained, in a plethora of accumulated negatives, that the current military force of France was characterized by its total absence: The big fact that applies to practically all the French is that they are without arms. There is no French Army in Northern France. Whatever arms the French civilians have are small weapons . . . and stuff we can deliver by parachute. They have nothing to stop tanks. They have no artillery or planes. They have no modern equipment; and even if they had they lack the supplies to put up a really stiff fight against an organised army like the Germans.66 Both of these historic representations of the French – as contributors to American democracy, and as valiant and friendly co-fighters in 1918 – made it possible to avoid the deeply contentious issues of current Franco– American relations, with the recent arguments in North Africa, and the President’s continued agnosticism on the political future of the country. American troop preparations for the Liberation of France made clear to the soldiers that Americans on the ground had to maintain an essentially

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neutral approach to French politics. The ‘Pocket Guide to France’, which was produced by the Information and Education Division of the American Army and given a print run of 1.5 million, urged Americans going to France to refrain from commenting on the circumstances of France’s Fall, or the complexities of internal politics: The causes of France’s early collapse in this war were so complicated that even the French bitterly disagree as to who or what was to blame. It stands to reason you know less about it than they do. Our Sunday morning defeat at Pearl Harbor still galls us. France’s defeat is a raw spot which the Nazis have been riding for nearly four years. Don’t help them by making the French sore . . . There are also purely French problems. General de Gaulle and his Fighting French are one of them, to some people. To most of the French he has symbolised resistance to the Nazis. He and General Giraud now have some sort of mutual agreement which will be for the help of all. 67 Underlying the booklet was the repeated message to the soldiers that Americans were popular in France even before their arrival on French soil: Mostly, the French think Americans act square, always give the little fellow a helping hand, and are good-natured, big-hearted and kind. They look up to the United States as the friend of the oppressed and the liberator of the enslaved. The French trust both you and your country more than they do most other men and nations; We are friends of the French and they are friends of ours. You are a member of the best dressed, best fed, best equipped Liberating Army now on earth. You are going in among the people of a former Ally of your country. They are still your kind of people who happen to speak democracy in a different language. 68 There was some attempt in American publications to place perceptions of France within the context of an acknowledged French cultural sophistication: a French-language history prepared for the Landings, for example, suggested that, ‘There is in Paris something that is more universal than in any other town in the world,’ 69 and on a more popular level, the troop paper, Stars and Stripes, occasionally alluded to the assumed superiority of French cooking: one cartoon, for example, showed GIs in a trench, looking at a sumptuous à la carte French menu, above the caption’ It’s to remind me what we’re fighting for!’ 70

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On the whole, however, references to the elegance and cosmopolitanism of the French were largely underplayed in American representations of the country. In the event, this was perhaps a wise tactic, given what the American soldiers were to discover about the country when they actually landed. American war correspondents entering Paris at the Liberation, for example, were to use the image of a faded debutante to describe what they saw of the capital. Paris had once been beautiful, but was now sadly diminished by war and Liberation: Paris, the light-hearted. Glitteringly marcelled debutante of pre-war Europe, is a faded grande dame with scarred heart and champagnedrenched memories. She’s a little down on her luck and a little worn at the heels. Four years of war have changed her face, stilled the laughter on her lips and taken the sparkle from her eyes. It’s been a long time since she flounced her skirts and smiled coyly when the world whispered ‘Gay Paree’. 71 In preparing troops for their forthcoming French experience, the American Army sought instead to make the essential strangeness of France slightly more comprehensible. First, there was the problem of explaining to soldiers the relative sizes of the two countries. This could be expressed as France being a small country ‘punching above its weight’: ‘As a country France is a small place to have pulled such a big weight as she has over the centuries. You could put nearly all of France into our two states of Utah and Nevada’, 72 or, in Stars and Stripes parlance, as the equivalent of several American states: ‘France, before the war, covered 212,000 square miles. That’s quite a piece of country – about the size of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin combined.’ 73 Then there was the problem of the very different ways in which French people and Americans behaved in social situations. Troops were given specific instructions on how to behave as good guests in France. They should be aware of the priorities which French people were said to place on different aspects of their homes: ‘Whatever French houses lack as far as bathrooms are concerned is more than made up for in the kitchen.’74 If invited for a meal, they were told to be grateful and polite, and give a hand around the house. Perceived physical exuberance on the part of the French was carefully placed in context for the incoming soldiers: ‘Don’t be surprised if a Frenchman steps up to you and kisses you. That doesn’t mean he’s a queer. It just means he’s emotional, French, and damn glad to see you.’75

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The potentially most sensitive set of encounters were seen to be those in which American soldiers might meet French women. Soldiers were urged to ‘Treat the women of the house the way you would want your family at home treated.’76 In an effort to deal with problems before they arose, the troop newspaper engaged in some straight-talking with its readers: This is the straight dope. It is not true that ‘all French women are easy’. France, particularly Paris, got that reputation on the basis of some pretty fancy joints which were run, before the war, for foreign tourists. Any guy who has the idea that the way to make friends and influence Frenchmen is to slip alongside of the first good-looking gal he sees and slip her a quick pat on her fanny is going to be in trouble. 77 The most obvious symbol of the ‘foreignness’ of France when the GIs landed there was undoubtedly the language. The American Army made some effort to educate its soldiers in the need to pick up basics of the French language in order to communicate with civilians. Through the troop press, it gave regular lessons in what it called, ‘parlez-vous for GIs.’ 78 As American contingents in France grew ever larger, the paper ran a daily phrase on its front page by the banner headline. These give a fairly clear indication of the type of survival skills American troops actually felt that they were needing in France: identifying themselves, ‘Je suis Américain’, and getting something to eat, ‘je voudrais manger.’ 79 Most insistently, however, the phrases dealt with the ways in which American soldiers might relate to French women. A sample of the daily phrases being taught in September 1944, for example, provides a kind of soap opera of developing relationships: ‘Voulez-vous promener avec moi?’; ‘Non, je ne suis pas marié’; ‘Où est votre mère?’; ‘Il faut que je vous quitte maintenant’; ‘Vous allez beaucoup me manquer.’80 On the whole, the American presentation of the French language to its troops suggested both its innate strangeness for an American, and the most likely direction of its use by the soldiers – as a prelude to sexual exchange. Stars and Stripes in late September 1944 tried to put across some useful French phrases for the soldiers, using the cartoon character, Hubert: Here are eight episodes of Hubert’s contribution to Franco–American relations . . . presented, with sound effects, because they may help

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some struggling GI to savvy the parley-voo chatter. This is no college French course, it’s just intended to provide a couple of laughs and a couple of phrases which may come in handy, somewhere in la belle France. Pick out the ones that fit and try ’em out on your French girlfriend (petite amie). 81 For the United States, preparations for the Liberation of France had been developed within a context that made them a good deal more agnostic about the future of the country than their Allied colleagues. A difficult and ambivalent relationship with actual and potential French governing groups created a pre-Liberation climate which made it difficult for military planners to be explicit with French people about their likely intentions. In this situation, there was a tendency to rely on popular representations of the French drawn from a less problematic historical period – the foundation of the American Republic, or the solidarity of the First World War. With this went an explicit understanding that the current position of the French was severely constrained in both military and political terms. Effort was therefore directed to helping those American soldiers who were entering France to understand something of the essential foreignness of the country to American eyes – the housing conditions in which French people lived, their social customs, their language.

‘D’ Day minus one Both British and American forward planning for ‘D’ Day had gone well beyond the purely military and tactical. It had been clear to both Britain and the USA that they would need to set in place systems to administer newly liberated territory in France, and ensure that civilian life could resume as quickly as possible after the fighting had moved on. As early as June 1942, the War Office in Britain had foreseen the likelihood of two distinct phases of Liberation – the first, when only a small amount of territory would be held, and where the Commander-in-Chief and his officers would need to retain complete control, and the second, when the liberated area would be larger, and where the Commander-inChief could hand over as much administrative control as possible to some specially constituted body. 82 By the end of 1942, it had been decided that a full-scale Civil Affairs organization would be necessary, which could train personnel ‘for the work of administration and military government in areas of Europe’.83 A school for this express purpose was

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indeed created at Wimbledon in 1943, an extension of the original training programme that had been set up at the Cambridge Intelligence Centre in 1941. In parallel with these arrangements, the American War Department had also established a military government training school at Charlottesville to deal with precisely the same sort of problems in liberated territories. As Allied military planning for ‘D’ Day advanced, these two separate Civil Affairs operations were brought together in a joint Civil Affairs Division of the Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), based at Norfolk House in London. By ‘D’ Day, any ideas that the military would use Civil Affairs as the basis of an AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory) to administer France for a prolonged period had been completely abandoned. The Civil Affairs model that the Allied military were working with as they prepared to land in France was that of officers attached to the general staff, with the mission to help the military and the indigenous administration to restore civilian order, and then move on. Political guidance issued to Civil Affairs units had an appendix in the form of a ‘white list’, indicating resisters and other loyal personalities, and a ‘black list’, naming collaborators and others under suspicion. The appendix went into considerable detail on the political and social background of the area, strongly implying that Allied officers should seek to pass authority to representatives of the Gaullist Provisional Government as soon as they could. 84 The proposed Civil Affairs operation for the Normandy Landings – some 3,000 British officers, and slightly more American – indicated the importance that the Allied military were attaching to liaising with the local population, and restoring civilian order. Crucially, however, such an agreed concept of Civil Affairs would have to operate on the ground in a wholly pragmatic way, since on the eve of ‘D’ Day there was still no joint Anglo-American policy on the future of France. As troops prepared to embark from Southampton for the Normandy Landings, the British and American governments had come to no settled agreement on either the nature of a future French administration, or the exact timing of a possible transfer of control from Allied Civil Affairs to an independent French government. Roosevelt in particular was strongly opposed to anything other than a pragmatic approach which would enable officers on the ground to deal with whichever French groups seemed most appropriate, for as long as military commanders judged this to be suitable. The President’s directive to General Eisenhower on this explicitly ordered him to talk to de Gaulle’s representatives, or to ‘any other group that he might determine’. This directive

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was deemed to be so deeply insulting to the French that it was said to be tucked away in a drawer at Supreme Command Headquarters, to be used only in extremis as an unofficial guide.85 As 6 June approached, many American agencies had grown increasingly more certain that it would be sensible to relinquish control of French territory to de Gaulle and his colleagues as soon as possible. Roosevelt, however, continued to hold his view that a pragmatic, wait-and-see approach to the political future of France was the only acceptable course: I don’t want any of them (French) to think that we are going to recognise anyone or any group as representing the French Government or the French empire. The people of France will settle their own affairs when we have won this war. Until then we can deal with local Frenchmen on a local basis – wherever our armies occupy French territory. And if these local officials won’t play ball we will have to replace them.86 Far from being seen as hosts who would be welcoming the Allies to their country, the French were positioned in Presidential discourse as people who were not yet able to take control of their territory, much less offer hospitality and support to foreign friends. For those like the Supreme Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had to manage the Franco-Allied relationship on the ground after ‘D’ Day, the position had become awkward and full of risks: ‘the limitations under which we are operating in dealing with the French are becoming very embarrassing and are producing a situation which is potentially dangerous.’ 87 On ‘D’ Day minus one, therefore, the French and their Allies were preparing for an encounter which would be far more complex than that of simple host and guest. Above all, a shared host–guest perspective on what might be thought appropriate behaviour for both sides was clearly missing. For the French, the experience of defeat and Occupation had left the country deeply divided, and provided a fertile bed for virulent anti-Allied propaganda. Whilst the general feeling among the population seemed to be that an Allied Landing would at least rid the country of the Germans, there was very real anxiety about the physical costs that the battle in France might bring, and a deep concern about the nature of Allied intentions for the future of France, a concern shared as much by French people outside the country as by those within. The guests who were to arrive in France on ‘D’ Day were neither freely invited in, nor likely to leave at the whim of their hosts.

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For many Anglo-Americans, the hosts they were about to meet were members of a country that had let them down in previous encounters. For others, they were a people so deeply divided, and so problematic in their current relationships with the Allies, that it was preferable to represent them in relation to their glorious past rather than their uncertain present and future. In any case, these were hosts who were clearly not in control of their own territory and who could only win back their independent space through the activity of the uninvited guests. As ‘D’ Day finally approached, it was apparent that there was no official Allied framework for the way in which relationships with the civilian population would be conducted. In the absence of an agreed political policy, decisions would then inevitably be made by those men on the ground directly involved in the process of Liberation. Pragmatism, and what the French planners described themselves as ‘a great deal of empiricism’88 would therefore characterize the development of Allied–French relationships from ‘D’ Day onwards.

2 Liberation on the Move: Normandy

The first Liberation The first Liberation meetings between Allied personnel and French men and women took place in northern France. It was here that Operation Overlord was launched on 6 June 1944, with the Allied 21st Army Group mounting their assault on the beaches in the east of Normandy, near Sainte-Mère-Eglise (Utah Beach), further west near Pointe du Hoc (Omaha), at Arromanches (Gold), Courseulles ( Juno), and Lion-sur-Mer (Sword). Once ashore, however, after fighting which was in many cases bloody and extremely costly, actual progress on the ground went more slowly than had been expected. By the second half of June, positions on both sides of the bridgehead that the Allies had established in France seemed to be solid. The American army, turning westwards, was halted in its drive to Saint-Lô. Despite attempts to outflank Caen from the west, the city was still in German hands at the end of June, with British and Canadian soldiers fighting their way up to the River Orne only in early July, in the wake of immense Allied bombing raids. In this situation, the bridgehead of land that the Allies secured was becoming increasingly cramped, and there were still more American divisions in England waiting to land. The Allied breakout from this bridgehead began in two waves: in mid-July, with the British mounting an offensive east of Caen, and in late July, with the Americans driving west to Brittany, and east towards Le Mans and Alençon. The battle was vicious and Allied losses were to be considerable: the 2nd British Army, for example, suffered around 6,000 casualties. By mid-August, however, all four Allied armies had reached the River Seine, and the Battle for Normandy was at last over. 37

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From ‘D’ Day, on the beaches, until the crossing of the Seine, Normandy saw three months of the most intense fighting on the ground, accompanied by devastating aerial bombardment. A huge contingent of Allied troops fought in the region – by the end of July 1944, there were approximately 1,450,000 Allied servicemen operating over the 100-mile battlefront of Normandy – 812,000 Americans and 640,000 British and Canadians – and their numbers would rise to two million by August. Column after column of men landed on the ‘D’ Day beaches in the

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weeks after 6 June, with their equipment and heavy armament, and wound their way towards the battle zones, past Allied signs nailed to trees or fixed to telegraph poles: ‘Keep to swept path’; ‘Frontline. No vehicles forward of here’; ‘Dirt means death.’ From ‘D’ Day onwards, the Allied imperative was to move forward, off the beaches, and then on through the north of France to the military objectives set. Driving on was the aim, and movement was key. Very often, of course, the movement was to be desperately slow: getting troops off the killing beach of Omaha, for example, digging in for the attack around Caen, or struggling through the bocage to get to Cherbourg. As Max Hastings suggested, the struggle in Normandy to gain ground, often as little as a few fields, came close, ‘to matching the horror of the eastern front or of Flanders thirty years earlier’. 1 The French who lived through this Liberation experience were thus to meet their Allies in the maelstrom of battle, as they bombed a town, moved through a commune, and inched their way over the fields of Normandy. In the first half of this Liberation, French civilians often found themselves as injured spectators, refugees displaced from their homes by the fighting, victims of air raids and Allied shelling of villages. Towards the end of the battle, as the drive towards the Seine gathered momentum, French people whose lives had been less directly affected by the fighting watched the impressive columns of Allied troops march through their towns and hamlets. This was a Liberation meeting which happened ‘on the run’, with armies whose major objective was to move on as quickly as they could. On both sides, therefore, impressions of the foreigner they were meeting were fleeting and kaleidoscopic. For the soldiers moving through, and for the French men and women whose country they traversed, perceptions of ‘the other’ were intimately bound up with this context of mobile and often bloody Liberation.

Landscapes of Liberation In this first Liberation, the experience that Allied fighting men had of France was intimately connected to the landscape of the country that they moved over, and their understanding of this landscape was, of course, strongly influenced by when and how they actually first saw it. General Ridgeway, for instance, preparing to parachute into France with his men very early on 6 June, looked down at an apparently peaceful bucolic scene: ‘No lights showed . . . but in the pale glow of a rising sun, I could clearly see each farm and field below. How peaceful the land

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looked, each house and hedgerow, path and little stream bathed in the silver of the moonlight.’2 Donald Gilchrist found himself early on ‘D’ Day cycling through sleeping French villages towards Pegasus Bridge, with his parachute draped over his handlebars: ‘And as I cycled through parts of the village, it seemed rather strange – everything was so quiet. And I seemed to be the only person there. And yet you had this curious feeling that perhaps eyes were watching you.’3 Later on that day, for the men landing on the Normandy beaches, the landscape had become gruesomely hostile. Nineteen-year-old John Slaughter, with the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, was confronted by a scene of bloody desolation as he struggled onto Omaha Beach: ‘There were dead men floating in the water and there were live men acting dead, letting the tide take them in. I was crouched down to chin-deep in the water when I saw mortar shells zeroing in at the water’s edge. Sand began to kick up from small arms fire from the bluffs.’4 Leading aircraftsman Norman Phillips, one of a small party of RAF personnel on Omaha, described the ‘shambles’ he saw on the beach: ‘burning tanks, jeeps, abandoned vehicles, a terrific crossfire.’5 Bernard Davies, a corporal with 4 commando, landing further up the coast on Sword Beach, was actually unable to get onto the shore until midnight because of the intensity of the fighting. Off the beach, four days later, he was convinced that the landings had failed because they had been almost overrun by the enemy: ‘we were down to 22 men, we’d had 80% casualties . . . they all got slaughtered . . . 80% casualties over the four days. We’d lost all our officers.’6 On Gold Beach, some of the soldiers could not get off the beachhead until six o’ clock that evening, and then found themselves camping where they could in nearby orchards. 7 On Juno Beach, as night fell, the men who had successfully landed dug in for the night. Captain Moore remembered the way in which the landscape was transformed: As the night grew darker, the beach and dunes created an unforgettable scene: small fires shone like so many stars as men made tea and heated up their soups . . . all around, as far as the eye could see, all along the dunes, in the woods beyond the lateral road, and in the gardens and houses in Graye-sur-Mer, the small fires still glowed.8 For those who landed on the beaches in the weeks after ‘D’ Day, the signs of recent battle were evident all around the area as well as on the shore. Private Gladman, on his first trip abroad, saw how Arromanches had been affected: ‘There were empty houses along the top of the beach

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with structural damage and doors and windows missing . . . Everyone assembled in a field surrounded by hedges and trees . . . Gunfire could be heard constantly.’9 Beyond the immediate vicinity of the landings, Normandy presented, however, a paradoxical picture to many of its new observers. The Times correspondent, for example, filed a lyrical account of his journey to Bayeux on 9 June: ‘I drove along a road running through sunny, smiling fields, bearing few marks of the fighting that had swayed over them a few hours earlier . . . the countryside could hardly have been more peaceful.’ Early reports from the Civil Affairs divisions of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) echoed, in a slightly surprised tone, the impression of a Norman hinterland which was relatively wealthy, undisturbed and agriculturally rich. Allied officers, who had clearly expected to find a ravaged country, suffering under the privations of Nazi oppression, were amazed to see that the population showed every sign of being well-fed, a stark contrast to people in many parts of Britain. 10 In some quarters, this surprise turned into a vehement denunciation of French wartime attitudes, as in Rex North’s infamous article in the Sunday Pictorial, in which he argued that six out of every ten French people in Normandy distrusted and detested the Allies, and

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half of them had collaborated with the Germans.11 The French Press Office in Canada was so concerned at this sort of Allied reporting that it issued a briefing communiqué on the Normandy situation, pointing out that if Allied correspondents were surprised at the apparent signs of prosperity in the region, they should be aware that Normandy had always been the provider of food for the rest of France – ‘a sort of French Denmark’ – and that the current dislocation in the communications system had led to relatively large stocks of food being stored there.12 For troops in the fighting, the contrast between peaceful countryside and raging war was particularly strange. A young soldier, straight from school, coming through his first experience of war, noted in his diary how surreal it was to be waking ‘in a field of standing corn’, only six days after the landings. 13 For British participants indeed, the countryside of Normandy looked very like their own landscapes at home, and their diaries abound with comparisons between the green fields of Normandy and the landscape they had just left in England: ‘the countryside is very like southern England’; ‘the countryside was so much like . . . Surrey’; ‘the countryside outside the villages looked very familiar’.14 For the North Americans too, Normandy seemed like a slightly less well-kept version of the England from which they had embarked. The famous American war reporter, Ernie Pyle, suggested that Normandy differs from English landscape mainly in that rural England is fastidiously trimmed and cropped like a Venetian garden, while in Normandy the grass needs cutting and the hedgerows are wild and everything is less of neatness and more of the way nature makes it . . . the average American finds the climate of Normandy abominable even in June. 15 The pastoral beauty of much of the Normandy countryside was marred for most of them, however, by the devastation which Liberation was bringing in its wake. A persistent theme in diaries and letters home is the sight of dead bodies and carcasses. Lt-Colonel Brownlie recalled that ‘Everywhere there were dead bodies – cows, horses or men. They swelled in the summer heat, and if pierced deflated with a hiss and a sweet, sickly smell.’16 Dead cows soon became one of the famous macabre sights in Normandy: ‘the fields full of dead cattle, mainly black and white . . . looking for all the world like balloons with wooden legs sticking straight out sideways’.17 For Sydney Jary, commanding a platoon of the 4th Battalion Somerset Light Infantry, Normandy became ‘a kind of surrealistic dream. Hot, dusty. Terrible smell of dead cattle.’ 18

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The problem with the bucolic landscape of Normandy was not primarily the unappealing visibility of its dead cattle, but rather the very real dangers that its topography presented to the fighter. The hedges and ditches that dotted the Norman countryside made fighting extremely difficult. First of all, troop movement became reduced to a dash from one hedge or ditch to another. Secondly, the scenery provided excellent cover for enemy snipers. American servicemen returning to England aboard a hospital ship were keen to warn their comrades of the hostility of the terrain: The whole French countryside is covered with hedgerows, and they’re murder . . . The French fields are smaller – smaller even than the fields in England. There are these hedgerows all over the place. They are tough on tanks, and there are booby traps in the gaps. They have hand grenades – potato mashers – with trip wires for us to go through.19 For the troops fighting in this early Liberation, none of the scenery of Normandy was quite as it appeared to be. Besides the booby traps in hedges and ditches, soldiers found that there were enemy mortar stations concealed in orchards; machine-gun nests and tanks lurked in apparently empty farms and outhouses. Even the ripening corn spelt danger for the fighters: The wide fields of ripening corn rolled away before us . . . There were periodic stabs of small-arms fire . . . Isolated elements of the Hitler Youth, having crawled to ground . . . were attempting to fight, often lying low to let the leading battalions pass over them in the corn, and then bobbing up in the rear. 20 The damp swampy ground added to all the difficulties. One American officer who had fought in the Pacific described it as ‘the nearest thing to Guadalcanal’ that he had seen. 21 The Illustrated London News had a more homely image to describe the terrain to its readers: ‘tricks are undoubtedly a clever use of the natural features of the battlegrounds, which resemble in many particulars the countryside of such counties as Devon, with its deep, narrow lanes, high hedgerows, and closed-in valleys’. 22 In Normandy, the topography itself had become the battleground. As the Battle of Normandy progressed, the natural landscape of northern France began to change its appearance very radically. The customary rural landmarks – churches, châteaux – were often badly damaged. SHAEF reported that a huge number of church towers had

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been destroyed by Allied shell-fire, whereas the rest of the building usually stood intact. The reason for this apparently was that soldiers suspected the towers of housing German snipers, although this was by no means always the case. As villages came into the path of battle, more and more châteaux and churches were anyway left unguarded, ‘open to all intruders: soldiers passing by, refugees on their way home’.23 Most of all, it was the small towns of Normandy which were terribly transformed in the days after ‘D’ Day. Over and over again, Allied servicemen noted the appalling damage suffered by the communes they passed through. Town after town, as the Allies drove on, seemed to have been destroyed: ‘all the houses are in ruins’,24 either by Allied bombing, fighting on the ground, or German scorched-earth tactics. The Canadian troop journal, Maple Leaf, admitted that the artillery had often been forced to pound buildings to dust in the course of the fierce battles: ‘one of the great tragedies of the War was the almost complete destruction of the towns and villages of Normandy’. 25 Caen presented probably the most harrowing of all these sights. In the long build-up to the taking of the city, Caen had been badly bombed, first by 600 US aircraft on ‘D’ Day itself, and then later, on 7 July, in a massive RAF raid: ‘Colossal raid on Caen. Marvellous and awe-inspiring sight. Terrible to watch. Dust obscured the sun’, observed a rifleman of 2nd King’s Royal Rifle.26 British and Canadian soldiers who finally entered the city found the destruction worse than anything they had experienced before. A soldier, getting to Caen a fortnight before it fell, gave a graphic description of what awaited them: ‘The utter destruction in Caen was terrible and the worst we had seen to date. There was not one house that was tenable; windows, doors, roofs all completely smashed. Shops, cafés, offices, etc. all had the remains of their stock littered all over the place.’ 27 Captain Lappin of the 7th Duke of Wellington’s wrote in his diary: ‘What devastation! Never have I seen such a mess. Much worse than Coventry. It had obviously been quite a pleasant town, about the size of Slough. To think that this mess was made by our RAF raid.’28 On the American front as well, the landscape the troops moved through was equally damaged and lifeless. Civil Affairs officers entering Carentan on 12 June were confronted by a ghost town: ‘The place was a mess – buildings on fire, dead Germans lying around, smashed equipment, streets blocked by rubble or with gaping shell holes, and the not-too-distant crackle of small arms to the south.’29 Cherbourg, the first sizeable French town to be liberated by the Americans, presented a sorry spectacle as the Washington Post journalist described it:

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Such inhabitants of Cherbourg as the Germans had allowed to remain there must have suffered cruelly during the battle. Many of the survivors no doubt are not only homeless but suffering from exhaustion, hunger and shock . . . It is a reminder that . . . the long ordeal of France has not yet ended.30 Major Rayner, who had lived in Le Havre before the war, was deeply shocked when he saw what had happened to it: ‘I was speechless. Liverpool, London, Bristol, Bizerta and even Caen had ruins, but nothing so brutal to human vision as this.’ 31 The bucolic landscape of northern France had been dramatically changed by the Allied advance, with houses standing smashed and broken: There was a villa, behind the lines near Isigny. The windows were broken, almost all of them, by the shells and the bombs of the first five days, and the fighting which had left dead gray bodies, and some khaki ones, on the web of trenches near the house. The slates of the roof had been torn away, and dust had settled through the broken floors onto the old furniture of the salon. 32 For many soldiers, early comparisons of the landscape with the sights of England soon faded before the sheer awfulness of what they were witnessing: ‘I’m never going to Normandy again’, one trooper wrote home, ‘all I shall remember is dust, slit trenches, bulldozers and dead cows.’33 For some indeed, the physical memory of the landscape, and the feelings it evoked, would be very difficult to shake off well after the war was over. Years later, Lt-Colonel Brownlie noted, for example, that he could still find himself transported back to those days: ‘If the wind is blowing quietly through the trees, and everything is still, I physically feel what it was like to be in a field in Normandy at the end of a day. Not mentally, just physically.’34 From the French perspective, the physical effect of the Liberation advance in Normandy was devastating. By the morning of 7 June 1944, a large number of towns had simply been wiped off the map in Allied bombing raids. Caen, Lisieux, Vire, Coutances, Saint-Lô, Flers, Condé-surNoireau were to be virtually reduced to dust. Estimates put the numbers of French civilians killed in these ‘D’ Day raids at about three thousand. This was by no means the end. Bombing continued through the weeks of June and July: raids on 14 June, for example, caused 200 deaths at Vimoutiers, 20 at Saint-Hilaire-du-Harcouët, 20 at Saint-Floxel,

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25 at Domfront, and 130 at Evrecy. As late as 26 July, twenty-two people were killed when bombs were dropped close to the station at Alençon.35 Even in those areas in Normandy that had escaped the bombs, inhabitants were keenly aware of what had been happening elsewhere through word of mouth, and via the streams of refugees who passed through the neighbouring countryside. A study of the ways in which older people in the region remembered the Normandy Landings more than forty years after the events suggested that the predominant memory for them was this suffering of French civilians. Allied bombing raids were central to the recollections of participants, and they could still recall in detail the noises and smells of what they had endured as children or young adults. In this context, the liberated landscape of France seemed to become synonymous with devastation: ‘In the collective memory of Normandy, “débarquement” rhymes with “bombardement”, rather than with “liberation”.’36 Four decades after the event, Jean Roger struggled to find words to express his memories of Saint-Lô’s total destruction: ‘I can’t find any appropriate way of describing it: dantesque, apocalyptic, a landscape from the end of the world.’37 For those French people who had eagerly awaited the Liberation and the coming of the Allies, the devastation visited on large parts of Normandy came as a bitter shock. Jacqueline Wurmlinger described taking cover in a trench in Saint-Lô, and finding a woman there who was crying aloud: ‘And all this time we’ve been wanting to see the Landings! My little girls have always supported the English.’38 It was often unclear to those on the receiving end of the bombing what the objectives actually were. At Evrecy, Robert Marie could not understand why the town had been bombed: ‘After anguish and despondency, we felt real anger and indignation. The Allies are destroying our villages, and killing us, although the German soldiers have long since gone.’ 39 At Périers, Jean Cachet was certain that his commune could never be bombed: ‘Périers isn’t a military objective: there’s no junction, no troops, no bridge . . . Why bomb? There are a lot of roads, but the Resistance instructions to destroy them have been followed to the letter.’ 40 Others, faced with the total destruction of a town like Caen, found it hard to contain their rage: ‘I felt very indignant when I saw this massacre which could not be justified in military terms.’41 One of the witnesses in the ‘L’Autre Mémoire’ video project undertaken by the Musée Mémorial in Caen42 recalled how she confronted a British officer after the event and asked him to explain the reasons for the sustained later bombing of the city. His reply, she remembered with pain, was: ‘Mademoiselle, the life

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Fig. 2.1 Normandy: Caen cathedral shelters homeless. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: B8086 (SF19F).

of one single English soldier is worth more than the lives of thousands of French civilians.’ In the ground war too, as the Allies advanced through Normandy, French civilians often had the feeling that the liberating armies were prepared to destroy large parts of the countryside for relatively insignificant military objectives. Gille Painel noted that at places like Colombières the Resistance had to go out and tell the Americans that all the German troops had gone in order to ensure that their villages would not be decimated:

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It was a stupefying method of contact as far as the people of Normandy were concerned: vast quantities of missiles used for often quite secondary objectives . . . you heard people say: ‘you could have occupied this bit of country with just one patrol . . . but we had thirty thousand missiles . . . completely razed the woods and the château’.43 Even for those French resisters who had been the keenest to see the arrival of the Allied forces, the Battle of Normandy left them with a mixture of emotions – gratitude for all the soldiers had achieved, but despair at the very considerable suffering which had been brought to France. In this context, their landscape of Liberation was necessarily honeycombed with the flattened towns and villages of northern France. One of the earliest post-Liberation newspapers appearing after the Allied advance described what it felt like to be in liberated Caen: ‘a great breath of fresh air has come to us. It has dried the tears we shed after our last terrible trial, the tragic spectacle of our grief and ruins. In spite of our hearts, heavy with grief, we have breathed, and breathed deeply, this breath of Liberty.’44 Freedom from Nazi Occupation had come at a visible price, and for many, the joy of Liberation was to be closely linked to bereavement.

Liberation as movement As the Battle of Normandy progressed, Allies and French men and women met each other ‘en passant’, in an essentially transitory context. The process of Liberation was one of movement through the towns and villages of northern France, and it was this that provided the perspective from which each side viewed the other. The Allies tended to see Frenchmen in a rush of blurred images as the army drove through the countryside, either viewing them from a distance, as French civilians vacated war areas, or from the top of a tank or armoured car, as columns of soldiers passed through communes on their way to engage the enemy. In these images, shared by both sides, the French were usually static, passively watching the activity and movement of the liberating forces; often looking up at their liberators from the ditches or ruined houses in which they had taken shelter, or from street level at the passing columns of tanks and vehicles. For Allied participants, the French often appeared to be peripheral to the main action of war, slightly eccentric when seeking to fight alongside them, and occasionally worrying in their on-the-spot settling of local scores. In French descriptions of the event, there was evidence

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that they too perceived their exclusion from the main business of the fighting, and in some cases resented this vicarious sort of Liberation. From the Allied point of view, the ‘D’ Day Landings and the Battle of Normandy were all about advancing forward, moving: ‘movement was our life blood’.45 As one of the participants put it in his war diary, ‘The front is on the move everywhere.’ 46 For the men on the ground involved in the fighting, this movement might be the painful groping over a Normandy field which characterized so much of the early phases of the battle. A wireless operator with the Nottinghamshire Yeomanry remembered it as: ‘A typical scene would be our infantry advancing slowly in arrow formation, across a field of corn . . . We would move slowly forward, eventually pass our burning tanks and find ourselves in the village, with the infantry and the dead.’47 ‘Yesterday we won back 500 yards of France’, recalled one tank commander.48 For those involved, the immense battle of Normandy was experienced at a frighteningly micro level. As Private Jack Stacey from Ottawa suggested, the contrast in perceptions was extreme: This was a big battle, but in this kind of country it doesn’t seem like much when you’re in it. All you see are a few men ahead of you and a few men behind you. Most of the time you’re too busy dodging mortars and shells to know what’s going on elsewhere.49 As the battle progressed, the slow trek over open countryside became a slightly faster entrance into liberated territory. ‘Through Caen, wide open to Montgomery’s men after bitter resistance by the Germans, passes a brisk file of British troops, marching the streets’, captioned a photograph in the Daily Mail50; and by early August, official descriptions favoured a picture of purposeful forward movement: ‘On the flat, straight road of battle leading to Falaise a fast-moving modern Army is pressing on. Armour, supply trucks, carriers in an endless torrent roll across open, dusty country, driving a steel fist through the German lines.’ 51 War correspondents closer to the action, however, noted that whilst the fighting was ‘strictly fluid’, it remained ‘a tough, uncertain process’.52 Of course, the pace at which the advance on all fronts was actually being effected had been a matter of some considerable internal Allied dispute. On the ground, troops were often aware of the perceived differences in Allied progress. Colonel Crawford noted in his diary on 4 July: ‘The Canadians have not gone nearly fast enough.’53 In particular, the Americans presented themselves as moving at high speed in implicit comparison with their British colleagues. The first French edition of the

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American troop paper Stars and Stripes described American fighters who were in a hurry: ‘Americans passing through might have been thirsty, but they didn’t have the time to pause.’54 As the American advance gained momentum, British participants often became irritated at the good publicity that their Allies were receiving. ‘Although the British forces were beginning to make steady progress,’ claimed a Lieutenant in the Signals, ‘the Americans were stealing all the headlines by their capture of Cherbourg and the beginning of their outflanking movement.’55 By mid-July, however, the progress through France became considerably more rapid, and Allied forces began to pass through towns which had been relatively unscathed by the battle. War diaries and letters home spoke more consistently of movement forward, as troops swept through villages and towns, often lined with cheering crowds of welcoming inhabitants: ‘These were indeed heady days of driving through undefended countryside and through cheering crowds in towns and villages, often seemingly untouched by war.’56 As the Canadian, Lt-Colonel Baker, expressed it: ‘This business of jumping ahead 35 or 40 miles a day is almost a fairy-book type of soldiering.’57 Accounts give a strong impression of an army in transit: ‘passing through’; ‘we pushed on through France’58; and even, ‘sweeping’ and ‘romping’, as in the Washington Post’s heady evocation of the progress of Eisenhower’s army in comparison with that of Pershing in the First World War: ‘This week many a World War I Father with a son in France read with amazement . . . how the Yanks were romping through towns and areas he and his buddies had won inch by inch back in 1918.’59 At some later points indeed, the Allies seemed to be behaving rather like tourists on the move, briefly holidaying abroad. Soldiers tried out their schoolboy French on the locals: ‘At least we make ourselves understood.’60 They bought postcards to send home to their families.61 Major Rex, organizing billets for his troops, found himself the recipient of tourist information, handed out by the mayor: ‘He gave me an illustrated brochure of pre-war holidays there, and I had to promise that I would visit the little spot après guerre.’62 In a sense, moving through France as the Allied invasion gathered momentum became for many troops a kaleidoscope of quick passing images, both of the landscape and of the French people themselves, not unlike those which a tourist might receive during a rather hectic holiday: ‘This war in the Normandy bridgehead was an academy of human pictures to do with the French, in age, in middle life, in youth and childhood.’63 As in a picture gallery, Allied troops appeared to pass by images of French men and women that were essentially static, people staring

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wordlessly back at them. In the north, where the war damage was most evident, the impression was of groups of silent, watching inhabitants. Captain Charters, a film projectionist who had arrived in France to set up cinema entertainment behind the lines, wrote letters home detailing how shocked he was by the first reactions he met from French people: ‘passing through a town, I was really taken aback by the sullen and unfriendly glares of the inhabitants’. 64 A private with the First Battalion Hampshires noted the same response as they passed through a partially destroyed town: ‘Stern faced civilians watched as we passed by in file.’ 65 The Canadian war correspondent, Gerald Clark, passing through Courseulles ten days after ‘D’ Day, saw that: ‘There was little cheering. These people had seen so much warfare that they could not cheer. But as you walked down the narrow streets, you got a warm smile and a bonjour.’66 Further south, where the fighting had been less intense, soldiers found the silent residents a good deal less hostile. Soldiers bathing in a local river could look up and find themselves surrounded by watchers: ‘the inhabitants of a nearby village turn out to watch us with a great deal of interest’, and troops showering in the open air would sometimes draw a line of spectators: ‘we strip – women and kids for audience, all laughing their heads off!’.67 Lieutenant Mason, waking up in camp, found he was, ‘an object of great interest to a group of small children who were wandering from tent to tent as if they were visiting a fair’.68 The Canadian journalist, George Blackburn, indicated how differently they seemed to be observed in the destroyed towns of the north, ‘where people, if seen at all, were grim refugees totally concerned with survival’, in comparison with the communes of the south where the crowds not only watched them, but cheered their arrival as well: ‘madly cheering French civilians lining the streets of villages gay with tricolours’. 69 As the Allies travelled on, passing by groups of French people who watched them with different degrees of engagement, their impression was of a static, passive population. As Major Rex suggestively described it: ‘We looked at French peasants – they stared at us – they had no feet under their thoughts’. 70 Certainly, the perspective of the two watchers, Allied and French, the position from which they were observing each other, seemed to be very different. The Allies often saw the French from a distance, running between the lines of fire. As one tank gunner described it: ‘We often see French civilians scurrying about in No Man’s Land, between us and Jerry.’71 As they reached parts of Normandy that had been untouched by the fighting, they rolled past them in tanks, armoured cars and jeeps, seeing the French from above, and generally

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from a moving vehicle. For the Canadian Lt-Colonel Baker, it was like a ‘triumphant tour as the roads were lined with cheering peasants who stepped in front of our vehicles’.72 ‘Everyone clamoured round the vehicles’; ‘driving . . . through cheering crowds in towns and villages’.73 Major Rayner, who had landed with a party of French Liaison Officers on 27 June, watched from his jeep as they passed through Bayeux: ‘women with armfuls of flowers running alongside the never-ending chain of lorries, trucks, ambulances, and jeeps’. 74 The Allies viewed the French, then, from a distance, or from a height, looking down at them, whilst generally on the move. The French viewed their Allies from a similar distance, or from the ground, looking up at them as they passed through. When the Landings took place, French civilians had necessarily watched the action from a distance, straining to see what was actually going on. Pierre Desprairies, a young member of the local Resistance near Bayeux, found himself up in the bedroom window with his father, looking over at the signs of battle lighting up the horizon: ‘towards the north, a huge red glow filled the sky, which was streaked with the flares of bombs’.75 Many of those closer to the beaches first saw the Allies from below, looking up at them from the protective trenches in which they had taken refuge. Madame de Vigneral, three miles from the invasion shores, noted in her diary that at a quarter past one on ‘D’ Day they looked out from their trench and saw uniforms they did not immediately recognize – Canadian soldiers. 76 On 10 June, Madame Guernier’s first sight of the Allies was from the bottom of the ditch in which she had hidden: ‘a soldier in khaki jumped at us . . . “We’re French civilians!” we all shouted, raising our arms.’77 Further inland, the French watched silently as Allied parachutists made their cautious way through their villages. At Grandcamp-les-Bains, a Parisian journalist described them crossing the village on 7 June, ‘very slowly . . . between groups of curious onlookers’.78 On 6 June, Simonne Rose, a refugee from Rouen, was amazed to see a line of Allied tanks and vehicles passing through Creully: ‘We stood there looking, as in a dream, at the procession of this formidable war machine.’79 As the battle progressed, and more parts of Normandy witnessed the arrival of the Allied forces, the French, in their own contemporary descriptions, stood at the side of their roads, watching as the streams of machines and men went past: ‘the American lorries went by continuously, one every eight seconds. The soldiers were cheered’; ‘there were about sixty vehicles, all armoured . . . This very powerful unit . . . drew a really enthusiastic response from the crowd.’ 80 In all these accounts, the French are below, looking up from street level at the troops passing

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by on their tanks and lorries: ‘From the top of their tanks, big slim lads grinned down at us.’81 In Lisieux, a French priest watched as the English parked some fifty vehicles at the side of the road and then, incongruously, set about making themselves at home in the ruins for which they had been largely responsible: ‘A house had just finished burning, and the Tommies, practical people, had put some big pans on the still flaming debris, and were boiling up tins of food.’ 82 The position of the French as observers of the main action, rather than agents or initiators of change, was common to many of the Allied descriptions of this moving Liberation in the north of France. Where the French appeared as fighting forces, they were generally pictured by the Allies as peripheral to the main action. They might have performed valuable services in the past, but they seemed to be unreliable and slightly eccentric as soldiers. Thus: ‘A word about the partisans. Their information was very valuable, but unfortunately they would get mixed up in the fighting. It was really incredible to see them going round our boys during the scrap, offering un peu de cidre . . . thank goodness they had no chance to fire.’83 For soldiers on the move, with specific military objectives, the activities of over-enthusiastic locals could sometimes be intensely irritating: ‘I persuaded a man wearing an FFI armlet to get everyone off the tank except himself and a few of his colleagues, and we chugged on.’84 Indeed, for some troops, the concept of a French underground army lay in the hazy area of doubtful veracity: ‘plenty of maquis . . . had come into the open and we wondered how many had jumped on the bandwagon . . . once the danger had receded’.85 Any understanding by the soldier on the ground of the vital part played by French resisters in the build-up to Liberation seemed to be largely limited to local anecdotes about barmen killing SS men, or chance meetings with individuals involved: ‘We met a French woman in the village who had done her bit in the Allied cause, during the Occupation.’86 The most frequent mention of French activity in contemporary Allied accounts concerned the punishing of female collaborators. In general, the Allies seemed to observe what was happening, rather than intervene. At times, soldiers came upon these situations right at the beginning of the process: The local authorities had rounded up the French women who had collaborated with the Huns and were giving them a sort of drum-head trial in the Town Hall. As each one was found guilty they sheared her head and then pushed her out of the front door into the street where the rest of the inhabitants were waiting.87

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At other times, troops witnessed the whole thing towards the end: ‘one of the less pleasant sights of the liberation. A group of young French women, who having been found guilty of consorting with the Bosch, had had their heads shaved and were being driven through the jeering crowds in an open cart.’88 Revenge-taking rather than fighting appeared to be where some French civilian activity at least was concentrated. French people themselves seemed to be well aware of their relative peripheralization in the Liberation of Normandy. Out of fifty-one contemporary witness statements, only ten mentioned activity in which the French Resistance or FFI were engaged. When such active participants did appear, French descriptions placed them in as much of a secondary role as did the diaries and letters home of the Allied soldiers. The French described themselves as helping and guiding: ‘The Allied troops found guides and information . . . from the FFI . . . What was their exact role? In this particular region, they did very little militarily.’ 89 The Abbé Cadel, talking about the Resistance in the Coutances region, argued that they were ‘particularly occupied in finding American airmen who had bailed out by parachute, and then in looking after them and finding safe houses’.90 One activity which recurred in several of these French accounts, and was seldom alluded to by Allied observers, was that of warning the Allies about the absence of Germans in their towns and villages in order to stop further bombardments. In the Suisse Normande, Abbé Delacotte, for example, described the way in which French people acted as mediators between the Allies and the local population – ‘The British went on firing after the enemy had disappeared, and it needed the courage of men of good will to go to them and tell them to stop firing.’ 91 In Balleroy, Gille Painel observed the same phenomenon, this time with American soldiers: ‘To stop the storm, some courageous French people went to meet the Americans . . . and stood as guarantors that the Germans had left, marching in at the head of the troops to save their village.’92 For many of the French participants in this Liberation on the move, what substituted for action and activity in their accounts was a discourse of regret – ‘I was really sorry not to have any armaments at my disposal’93 – sometimes mixed with rancour that the Allies had failed to arm the French properly beforehand. Some of them were made aware of the fact that the Allied soldiers treated them with ‘a certain reserve’. 94 At Domfront, a resister, arriving with what he judged as particularly precious information for the American colonel, found himself so doubted that he suggested he might do better, and be believed, if he were to be dressed as an Allied soldier: ‘I felt that they were suspicious, and that they were even doubting my sincerity . . . I had suggested that I might be

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given an American uniform.’95 The language of disappointment, of awareness of having been placed in the position of a non-active onlooker, wound its way through several contemporary French accounts, particularly those of younger observers: ‘Deep down, I am vaguely disappointed . . . by this Liberation to which we have not contributed . . . Our place should have been somewhere other than just standing on the pavement; a lot of my friends felt this as much as me.’ 96

Meeting each other In this context of a moving Liberation, Allies and French people met each other briefly in relationships that were marked by evident inequality. Soldiers were in a position to provide, if momentarily, some of the goods which had been denied to the civilian population in France during the Occupation. Notwithstanding the enormous generosity of many local people, the general pattern was that the Allies were givers in this relationship, and that French people were receivers. The ability of many French people to offer gifts back to their guests was inevitably restricted by the position in which they had been placed by the process of Liberation. On the whole, experiences of this unequal relationship seemed to be similar for the French whether they were dealing with Americans, British or Canadian troops, although there is certainly some evidence that French Canadian soldiers were particularly well received, as men who could communicate easily with their hosts. Within these brief Allied–French meetings, relationships were largely limited to economic exchange, exploited by both sides, and social encounters which were usually between groups – soldiers and refugees – who had to try and manage the often difficult situations arising from the ongoing fighting in Normandy. Many French people in the path of the advancing Allied forces found themselves the recipients of largesse from troops passing by. Close to the Landing beaches, for example, Madame Guernier saw military lorries pressing forward to the front, ‘throwing a profusion of packets of cigarettes, sweets and tins of food’97 as they travelled through the towns and communes in the area. The Americans in particular seemed to make a fine contrast with the previous German soldiers, better-fed themselves, and also keen to distribute all they could ‘to a population deprived for so long of what they had in abundance: cigarettes, chocolate, coffee, tins of food, shoes, soap’. 98 The Canadians, holding out biscuits and cigarettes, and shaking hands as they spoke French to their Allies, made a strong impression: ‘these

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Fig. 2.2 French refugees fed by Civil Affairs. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: B5305 (SF11).

brothers with whom we were reunited, descendants of Normans and Bretons’. 99 At Caen, Roger Meslin observed how welcome the French Canadians were: ‘like their Fathers in 1914, they were volunteers, and they got on straight away with the population, which was a bit surprised by their accent, with a slight Norman tinge’.100 One of the earliest postwar accounts of the Liberation of the city indeed stressed the joy that the inhabitants felt on seeing that their liberators were Canadian: ‘of all the Allies the closest to us; many of them speak French’.101 A not dissimilar theme incidentally had characterized the army recruitment drive in French Canadian newspapers, where readers were told France was the land of their ancestors: ‘People who speak our language and who

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are our distant cousins’. 102 The Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War noted that French people were often, ‘surprised and delighted to find themselves liberated by men who spoke their own tongue’, and regimental diaries of French Canadian troops bore witness to the warmth of their reception: ‘The French are quite welcoming and a lot of them cheer us in the middle of the ruins of their houses.’103 The Montreal press insisted that the troops’ ability to speak French was key in their battlefield deployment: ‘the Canadian troops are in the front line. Firstly because the Canadian soldier is an excellent fighter, and then because he speaks French, and this fact has an extraordinary importance for the success of future generations’. 104 Given the level of deprivation in some parts of northern France, the effect of gifts from Allied troops was often dramatic. At Evreux, the first packet of cigarettes thrown to the population by the passing Americans was caught by a fireman who promptly put it in his pocket without touching any: ‘That’s to have a smoke with my mates.’105 Most tellingly, so many French people had become used to black bread that their reaction to the white bread eaten by the Allied troops, and sometimes shared with the local population, could be highly excitable. Near Coutances, for example, Abbé Cadel described how one old man, given some white bread by a group of American soldiers, broke down and cried, embracing the Americans, ‘Then he ran home, to distribute this miraculous food, like the blessed wafer, to all the inhabitants of the house and the neighbours.’106 Whilst there were plenty of instances in which French people offered gifts in return – particularly local alcohol – it was evident that the ability to give was very different on both sides. Lieutenant Mason recalled how one Frenchman offered his colleague ‘a parting gift . . . a piece of black bread . . . James recoiled at the sight of it.’107 Captain Charters, the cinema projectionist, described in letters home how the inhabitants of one small village had turned up for the evening show, bearing vegetables as a means of paying for the entertainment that was being provided: ‘It took quite a lot of tact to gracefully refuse the gifts, but when they went after the show they took the greengrocer’s shop away with them.’108 The principal context for Allied–French meetings was that of economic exchange between the two sides. Soldiers ‘on the ground’ were often involved in quite complex bartering arrangements where fresh food from the Norman farms could be obtained in exchange for goods which were in short supply for the French. ‘From time to time we would barter tins of bully-beef or such items for fresh eggs from the local farmers’; ‘as much tobacco, cigarettes and soap (the latter seemed to be very

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scarce in France) as we could spare and in return received milk, some eggs and cream’; ‘We were friendly with some families; they gave us strawberries, lettuces and radishes from their gardens, a welcome change from our tinned rations. Our response to such kindness was sweets and cigarettes.’109 Beside the incessant begging of children for cigarettes, ‘Pour Papa!’,110 soldiers became used to seeing people who were often very short of food. A mine-clearer in Normandy recalled that the disparity in the material wealth of Allied soldier and French civilian provided for a classically unequal relationship: ‘It was not unusual to see hungry people begging for food . . . In the circumstances, a Tommy with a packet of “hard tack” biscuits or a tin of bully beef to spare was a lord and master.’111 Within the constraints of a Liberation moving across the country, there were often attempts to engineer more socially equal meetings between troops and local civilians. Colonel Crawford, for example, tried, not altogether successfully, to organize a football match between his troops and the local team at Vernon. It was clear in this case that social meetings required a flexible timetable: the French team did not appear, so had an eleven made up out of the spectators. Next day received letter: ‘To officers of Maddlesix. I am very sorry that my players are not came yesterday but they were very tired of their match of Wednesday and other players have worked to the manufacturing. If you want we will play on another day: but in the evening. I will be very happy to see you for that. I ask you to excuse me again. Shake hand’. 112 On the whole, however, the Allied–French relationship was one which at the best was distant, and at the worst could be highly predatory on the part of some of the invading army. Madame de Vigneral, living close to the Landing beaches, noted in her diary on 11 June that initial goodwill towards the Liberators was already wearing rather thin: ‘In the village, enthusiasm is waning. Soldiers are pillaging and breaking everything, entering everywhere under the pretext of searching for Germans.’ With some disgust she discovered that after entertaining officers to Calvados, she still found herself subject to an illicit search of her bedroom by one Allied soldier, who made off with her father’s wedding ring.113 Some soldiers admitted quite openly that one of their chief objectives was to try to find valuables among the rubble of war-torn houses: ‘the golden rule of making a strict search of each new billet, including continuously

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prodding the ground for hidden wealth and valuables . . . I never found anything myself, but that was simply because half the Army had been there before me.’114 Inevitably, the reaction of the local population to the depredations of the liberating army could often be extremely negative. Captain Lappin recorded in his diary one farmer’s explosive response to the discovery that the army had marched off with his tarpaulin: ‘I dislike the Germans but in 4 years the Germans stole nothing, in 4 days the English take everything.’ 115 The Canadian journalist, George Blackburn, had a not dissimilar experience when he and his colleagues uncovered a French farmer’s whole stock of Calvados and promptly drank it all. The farmer concerned, who had taken the trouble to bring the troops a pail of ersatz coffee the following morning, was understandably dismayed by the discovery: ‘My God! The Boches have been here for four years and they never found my Calvados. The Canadians arrive, and ten minutes later, they’ve found all my bottles!’116 On the whole, of course, meetings between individual French and Allied personnel were actually very limited. It was much more frequent for the troops and the French to perceive each other ‘en masse’, either as the army drove through the streets, or more frequently, as soldiers on the move encountered large numbers of civilian refugees on the roads and tracks in Normandy. Civil Affairs officers recognized that the ‘disposal of refugees’ presented some real difficulties, particularly in a town like Caen which had been under considerable pressure for several weeks.117 For the ordinary Allied soldiers, the sight of destitute civilians among the rubble was often a shock: ‘It seems queer to see civilians – a man and a woman pushing a perambulator over rough ground and over hedge banks.’118 Major Rex was struck by the waves of refugees streaming away from the city, ‘pulling handcarts with all sorts of domestic bits and pieces and pushing perambulators similarly loaded . . . Hands were gripping suitcases fit to burst, tied around with thick string, rope and belts’. 119 As the army pressed forward, it seemed as if the waves of refugees were displaced and moved to a slightly different part of the territory: ‘The bush telegraph seems to work effectively round here. They seem to know that the war has passed on. More and more civilians . . . Horse and cart, an occasional 1914 model Renault and barrows overloaded.’120 Faced with this mass of humanity, soldiers were sometimes caught between sympathy for the human plight, mixed with mounting irritation at the logistical problems they posed to an army desperately trying to move forward on a small, congested and damaged network of roads.

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Lt-Colonel Baker, with the 2nd Canadian Corps, was caught in the middle of these conflicting emotions: The refugees straggling back from the fighting area present a sorry picture indeed. You cannot help feeling sorry for the poor devils as you see them glumly trudging along with a few poor belongings strapped on their backs or being trundled along in some make-shift cart. At the same time they are a damned nuisance on the roads as they seriously interfere with our constantly moving traffic.121 From the Allied military point of view, the French were thus not only largely passive, but also often in the way of the continuing action and advance. This commonly held perception was not unrelated to an Allied perspective which recognized that the civilian population was almost entirely devoid of able-bodied men. Overwhelmingly, the French people they actually saw as they moved through Normandy were women, children and old men. In the villages north of Caen, Gunner White observed that there, ‘were a smattering of the original inhabitants, old and very young mostly’. 122 Major Rex from the Royal Engineers movement control section observed the preponderance of the very old and the very young among the refugees he saw: ‘There were old and young and mothers struggling along with babies.’ In ruined Caen, it was again the older women, stolidly remaining in the devastation, who caught his eye: ‘On the edge of the worst patch of ruins, was the remains of a house, which happened to have a floor room intact and in the window space was sat a woman, gazing into the lost. She waved a tiny Union Jack as we passed on our way.’ The comparison between the female and aged population, and the young macho fighters was not lost on many of the observers: ‘How these people stared at us British, at our tanned faces and healthy looks!’ 123 Certainly, the most frequent image of the French in Normandy mediated by the British press was of this suffering and largely female population. In photos printed between the Landings and the end of August, newspapers showed French people standing in clusters, looking numbly at their ruined town; refugees returning home, with women and children loading possessions into boxes and onto bicycles; women trying to cook outdoors in the ruins of Caen; a nun sitting beside an apparently deserted road, waiting for a lift to take her out of the area.124 For the Allies, the iconography of their relationship with the French through this first Liberation denoted a classically unequal male–female

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partnership. The male Allied soldier was shown time and time again protecting the female civilian population which was not able to look after itself. In one photograph, a British corporal stood at the head of a line of women and children, with their prams full of possessions, looking carefully at their identity papers.125 In another, troops handed out rations to a crowd of largely female French people crowding around their lorry.126 In another highly stylized photograph in the Daily Mail,127 two RAF men bathed a baby whilst his French parents looked on at the side of the photo, observing the foreigners with their child. In a sense, the inequity in the relationship was translated forward to future generations. The Allies were taking over the care of the young of France, explicitly demonstrating to the watching French the right way to bring up children. In many of the French contemporary accounts, there was a similar perception that the process of Liberation had brought foreign combatants into contact with a male-free civilian population which had few conventional fighters to help the Liberators do their job. Two doctors in Mortain, for example, watching Americans enter the liberated town, noted the incongruity of the situation: ‘What a funny war this is with soldiers living side by side with eighty year olds, women and young children!’128 In some situations, where soldiers were brought face to face with civilians, it was indeed the women who seemed called upon to take control of the situation, identifying the Liberators and then confronting them. In Grandcamp-les-Bains, faced with the advance of the English, it was Pierre Ferrary’s wife, rather than he, who became the leader of the group of trapped civilians: ‘With authority, my wife pushed me aside. “Quiet. We’re going to call, but it would be better if they only heard women’s voices . . . ” “Tommy, Tommy! We’re French women! French women! Don’t shoot!”’ 129 Near Bagnoles–de-l’Orne, Alfred Tirard was so overcome with tears at the prospect of his Liberation by the Allies that he started to cry with relief. It was his wife who reprimanded him sternly about the possibly negative effect that this might have on the soldiers: ‘I am weeping.” They’re going to think that you’re not pleased”, my wife said.’130 The Franco-Allied meeting in Normandy in the summer of 1944 was made up of brief and spasmodic sights of each other, the giving and receiving of gifts, the barter of economic exchange, and occasional social encounters. Largely, however, it was a fleeting experience in which groups of Allied soldiers and groups of French civilians viewed each other from a distance, and from rather different perspectives. Fundamentally, the relationship was seen by both French people and

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Allies as a clearly unequal one: the active, fighting soldiers, on the move through the country; the passive, peripheralized local population, standing still and watching. Given that this civilian population was largely female, it was unsurprising that its most frequent imagery in Allied presses took on the characteristics of a male–female relationship, a relationship between protector and protected. Two photos of the period suggest some of the terms of the relationship as it began to evolve in this first Liberation. In one, in the Sunday Pictorial131 a large armed British soldier stood in a village street in Normandy. Behind him, a smaller young French woman with a basket hurried past and smiled at him. The caption read: The night has passed. The village lives again. It’s a great day – the man who brings freedom and hope stands smiling in the village, for the first time in four years the streets free of the invader. But the day’s shopping must go on. With light heart this little French housewife hurries to the market and smiles good morning to the British paratrooper who stands guard. In another photograph,132 two soldiers in a jeep looked down at a tiny French girl who was holding a small bunch of flowers up to them. ‘For her, freedom’, ran the caption, ‘for them, flowers.’ The evident inequality of Liberated and Liberator could not be more classically imaged.

Conclusions The first Liberation in France was characterized by a massive Allied presence in Normandy, engaged in a pitched battle with the enemy, a battle which continued for some three months. Whilst the French Resistance had played an important part in the days leading up to the Landings – providing vital intelligence, and sabotaging key communication points – their role in the actual Liberation of the region was necessarily considerably smaller than that of the Allies.133 This was a national Liberation which depended on the armed activity of foreigners. The Liberators therefore played a visibly active role in what took place, in comparison with an equally visibly passive population. The population left in Normandy by ‘D’ Day had been largely denuded of its able-bodied men who had been forcibly removed from the area by the Occupiers, imprisoned and deported, or in some cases, had managed to escape to join the Maquis and those Resistance movements waiting expectantly for the Allies to arrive. In a very real sense, the

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Allies were faced with a largely non-combatant civilian population who were seeking to follow their normal lives in a situation which was clearly very far from normal. Above all, many of the towns and villages in the region became battlegrounds over which Allies and Germans fought, and in the process, destroyed houses, fields and crops. Massive aerial bombardments caused considerable French casualties and reduced towns like Caen and Saint-Lô to little more than rubble. For French men and women in the north of the area, a Liberation of this sort was bound to be tinged with feelings of bereavement as much as of relief. Further south, the region was less brutally damaged, but the reports of what had been happening, and the waves of frightened refugees passing through, spread the news of some of the costs of Liberation. The Liberation of Normandy was above all an ongoing process, a moving Liberation in which Allied troops crossed and re-crossed painfully small parts of French territory, and then drove forward, out of the bridgehead, towards the Seine. In effect, the Allies stayed for only relatively short periods in any one place in Normandy, so that their experience of the civilian population, and the French understanding of the Allies, were generally shaped by brief snapshot images. Whilst some soldiers were undoubtedly invited into French homes and made friends, the majority passed by their hosts, with only the briefest of encounters. Captain Jupp of the 6th Airborne Division, writing home in mid-June, explained to his family that: ‘I have few opportunities of meeting any French people beyond the country folk in my immediate neighbourhood. A pity: I should have liked to have learned so much more about them than I can.’134 In this situation, mutual perceptions were shaped by the relative positions of the two sides. The Allies saw themselves, and were largely seen by the French, as moving on through the country, passing by a static population which observed them with varying degrees of interest. Soldiers viewed French men and women from a distance as they battled over the land, or from the top of a tank as they streamed victoriously between lines of cheering people. French men and women watched the Allied troops from a distance, or looked up at them from the trenches in which they had taken refuge, or the street corners on which they stood. Whilst the French met Allied soldiers on the ground and exchanged gifts, the fundamental inequality of the relationship was evident. Person-to-person encounters were largely limited to economic exchanges, and occasional set-piece social meetings – cinema entertainments organized by the troops for a particular village, or laboriously arranged

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football matches between a local team and the passing troops. On the whole, the two groups tended to see each other en masse in brief transient moments – soldiers entering a locality, refugees appearing, civilians fleeing bombing, local people cheering liberating tanks. Allied diaries and letters home spoke of a kaleidoscope of images as they passed through Normandy: bucolic landscapes, shattered towns, dead people, rotting cattle, people celebrating, and homeless refugees. Above all, they perceived their French hosts as almost entirely peripheral to the main activity of Liberation – France was being liberated largely without the participation of the French. The Allies positioned themselves in the role of Liberator, protector, temporary dispenser of largesse. The French perceived the Allies in much the same way, but added to this an understanding that it was these same liberators who had caused massive destruction in some of the martyr towns of northern France. Bereavement came as an integral part of the Liberation experience for many of these people in northern France. Most importantly, the French also shared with the Allies the uncomfortable realization that they were largely passive, unable to act decisively to effect their own Liberation. Symbolically, when de Gaulle landed at Courseulles at 2.00 PM on 14 June, and headed to Bayeux to establish a French governmental presence as quickly as he could in liberated Normandy, he was still operating, albeit rebelliously, under the protection of the Allies, and, indeed, when he disappeared on a quick unauthorized visit to Isigny, in the American zone, the British feared he might have ‘bolted’ without permission into the rest of France and contemplated arresting him and bringing him back forcibly. 135 The context of this first Liberation established power positions for the mobile, active Allies and the static, passive French that were clearly unequal. Impressions of the ‘other’ in this relationship were mutually complementary. Just as some of the French contemporary accounts bear strong traces of disappointment as well as of bereavement, so some of the Allied soldiers expressed considerable misgivings at the enforced victim status of the people of Normandy. A tank gunner with the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry noted with distress: ‘We often see civilians scurrying about in No Man’s Land, between us and Jerry . . . . now and then a few men carrying a piece of white cloth (I would not like to be liberated this way!).’136 Within the mobile context of the first Liberation in France, there was little room for more than fleeting sensations of gratitude and regret, neither of which served to bolster French identity or develop Franco-Allied understanding on the ground. As

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Pieter Lagrou suggested, ‘“Being liberated” was too passive a mode to celebrate the recovery of national independence, and gratitude is a weak basis for national identity.’137 Later Liberation experiences in other places in France would provide very different types of Allied– French encounters.

3 Meeting Private Ryan: Cherbourg

Whilst the British 2nd Army, and the Canadian 1st Army continued slowing edging towards the Orne, the US 1st Army was fighting its way up to the port city of Cherbourg. Cherbourg was of key importance to the overall Allied strategy. The port had been designated in invasion logistics plans as the entry point for some 150,000 tons of stores which would need to be brought to France by 25 July if Allied battle plans were to be adequately supported. Here, as elsewhere in much of northern France, the Liberation of the town was effected by Allied troops, rather than Resistance forces, as a result of fierce and sustained military action. However, this was not to be a moving Liberation, with the Allies passing through, and leaving the port as they drove on to other objectives. In Cherbourg, American troops and army personnel stayed on in the port from the day of its Liberation (26 June 1944) until 14 October 1945, when the port area was formally handed back to the French authorities. As well as the first liberating troops, the town was to see an enormous influx of Americans in this period: engineers charged with rebuilding the port and making it operational, units organising and overseeing the landing of the war material needed to pursue the battle, and huge numbers of soldiers disembarking from Britain to be moved up to the front – on one single day in September, for example (7 September 1944), 23,000 Americans arrived in the port. Troops were moved to Cherbourg from the other direction as well, with wounded men being driven through the town to be taken away on hospital boats. The bald figures of material shipped through the port as the year wore on – over 433,301 tonnes unloaded in November alone1 – gave some idea of this continued American commitment. 66

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Cherbourg’s pre-war population had been around 38,000. By the time the Americans reached the port in late June 1944, it had shrunk through forcible German removal and civilian exodus to approximately 5,000. 2 Gradually, people started returning to the city: well over 10,000 were there the week after the Liberation, and in another three weeks, the population had risen once more to an estimated 30,000. By any standards, however, Cherbourg remained a relatively small town which would find itself swamped by foreign troops and army personnel at precisely the time when it was at its most fragile, emerging from a long period of Occupation and a Liberation battle which had affected both the infrastructure of the community and the viability of its principal raison d’être, the port. It was in this context that Americans and Cherbourgeois would meet each other and live together in the confined urban space of Cherbourg for a period of fifteen months.

The battle for Cherbourg The Americans reached Valognes, only thirteen miles outside Cherbourg, by 19 June. Sergeant John Scott described the town as deserted: ‘Not a sound. It was like a nightmare. On the walls of the ruined Gothic

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church, on the fragments of the capitals lying on the ground, you could see the trace of the ancient sculptors’ art. What a picture of sadness! What a terrible mess!’3 Hitler’s orders by this time had been for Cherbourg to be defended against the Americans at all cost. Between 25,000 and 40,000 Germans (including Todt Organization and naval personnel) were holed up in Cherbourg, as the US 7th Corps headed north for the port. The capture of Cherbourg had become more and more vital to the Allies because a heavy storm in the Channel on 19 June had seriously disrupted the continued movement of soldiers and supplies onto the original Landing beaches. Accordingly, the American Commander, Major-General (Lightening Joe) Collins ordered that the capture of the port was now a pressing priority. Fighting continued until 23 June, with the German commanding officer, General Schlieben, being refused permission to surrender by Rommel. On 25 June, Cherbourg, which had already been heavily bombed from the air on 22 June, was shelled from battleships and cruisers offshore. American soldiers, fighting street by street through the town, secured the vital Fort du Roule on 26 June. The next day, 27 June 1944, the Germans surrendered the city. According to Max Hastings, exhausted Americans fell upon the quantities of brandy, wine and champagne that they had captured from German stocks and celebrated their triumph in considerable style.4 The war correspondent for the Standard (Montreal) and the Chicago Sun reported that the luxury supplies that the Germans had built up in depots in Cherbourg were indeed vast: We traversed long corridors paralleling enormous rooms full of Cognac, Armagnac, Benedictine, Bordeaux and Burgundy, wine and flour, sugar, coffee, tea and spices . . . In the Fort du Roule we saw American quartermaster officers requisitioning stores of Cognac, Armagnac and Champagne, occupying subterranean warehouses 100 yards long, 30 yards wide, and 30 feet high.5 That day too, the A1A1 Civil Affairs Detachment, commanded by the American, Lt-Colonel Frank O. Howley, with Major Rupert L.H. Nunn, a British officer, as his deputy, arrived in Cherbourg. They found that the city was about 25% destroyed, and there was no water supply.6 The most significant amount of damage had been received by the port and arsenal where the Germans had done all they could to delay its future use by Allied forces. The combination of mayhem in the port, and the rotting remains of enemy supplies made a particularly curious spectacle. As Major Nunn said,

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Fig 3.1 French rebuild homes in Cherbourg. French civilians clear out the rubble to start rebuilding a home in Cherbourg after the Germans surrendered the city to American forces, 27 June 1944. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: EA 28019 (SF35C).

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Although the town itself was hardly damaged, the port was a complete shambles . . . Steamers had been sunk at the entrance to many of the docks, the quays themselves had been jettisoned into the water, the famous Gare Maritime was a twisted mass of ironwork and a heap of rubble . . . I paid a visit to the Arsenal . . . The scene when we arrived was extraordinary. The Bosch seemed to have provisioned themselves as for a siege and within its boundaries had collected an enormous quantity of stores and food. The immense warehouse contained quantities of bread which, when we arrived, had been lying there for days; the loaves were like slabs of concrete. There were tons of potatoes, much flour, coffee, sugar, meat and tobacco . . . There were about a hundred cattle grazing within the area. Many of them had not been milked, and had died; their corpses stank to heaven. There were several pigs, chickens and sheep, and the whole place . . . was in indescribable confusion.7 Given the urgent necessity to use Cherbourg as an embarkation port, the town soon found itself the focus of frenetic American activity. The 333rd Regiment of Engineers landed with a vast amount of machinery to clear the harbour. The Hotel Atlantique, which had formerly housed the Todt Organization, was taken over by the Fourth Major Port of Embarkation Group. 8 Their objective was to clear the port as speedily as possible, and then provide access for the huge deliveries of men and material needed. Almost immediately, the streets of Cherbourg were taken over by vehicles driving in both directions, to and from the port, in a frantic attempt to make its landing facilities operational. Meanwhile, the day after the Allied Liberation of the town, an official Franco-American ceremony took place at the Hôtel de Ville, Place de la République. At this Major-General Collins, the US Commander, presented the mayor of Cherbourg, Dr Renault, with a French tricolore flag. Major Nunn described the scene in detail: an impressive little ceremony took place . . . Two companies of troops were drawn up in formation in front of the Hôtel de Ville with their colours and Divisional band, and on the steps stood the Mayor and his adjoints and the Divisional Commanders who had taken part in the battle. General Collins, the Commanding General of the 7th Corps, arrived in his armoured car. The troops presented arms, and the General was presented to the Mayor and the other Officials. Speeches were made by the General and the Mayor, and Colonel Howley

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presented the Mayor with the tricolour flag which we had made out of the parachutes. 9 The local press was even more specific about the origin of the French flag which the Americans had presented at this Liberation ceremony: ‘a magnificent tricolour flag made out of silk from the first parachutes which landed in France a few hours before the Landings’.10 In this first formal meeting between the Liberated and the Liberators in Cherbourg, the Americans handed back to the French their flag, a symbol of France’s historic national identity, but significantly this was a symbol which had been constructed out of ‘D’ Day parachutes, in effect out of the bravery and sacrifices of those foreigners who were achieving the Liberation of France. In many ways, this first scene of formal Franco-American encounter encapsulated the complexities of a relationship which the two sides would be developing in forced proximity over the coming year.

The urban space Immediately after the Liberation ceremony, it was evident that the life of the community was going to be tightly regulated by the American authorities. The mayor was asked to sign proclamations prepared by the Allies that imposed a curfew (between 2200 hours and 0500 hours), and blackout; ordered the surrender of firearms and pigeons, and prohibited the carrying of cameras and binoculars. Travel for civilians was also officially restricted to no more than six kilometres outside Cherbourg. Six control points, manned jointly by military and civil police, were set up on the main roads, and there were additional spot check points in busy parts of the city. Cherbourgeois who needed to travel beyond these limits had to obtain travel permits from the French police which were vetted by the American authorities. Areas which were now particularly sensitive for the military, like the arsenal and port, were prohibited. The physical visibility of the Americans was difficult to ignore. Buildings which the German occupiers had used for administrative purposes – most of which were obtrusively concentrated along the central thoroughfares – were now taken over for very similar administrative purposes by the American Liberators. And, beside all this, there was the enormous and controlling presence of the Americans at the port and the Arsenal, as they began the rebuilding process, the shipment of goods and equipment, and the passage of wounded and recuperating soldiers. To carry the vast amount of traffic which would now be using the local road system, the Americans instituted a military traffic system. Civil

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Affairs officers noted, with some despair, that this was done without any prior consultation with Civil Affairs or with the French interim administration, with the result that One Way Street signs were erected in English only, and in many cases in the opposite direction to an existing French One Way sign.11 The streets of Cherbourg had evidently not been designed to carry the volume of traffic that they were now being asked to accommodate, so that the Americans modified the urban space still further by knocking down buildings at street corners which might delay or endanger the passing trucks and jeeps, and setting about widening some of the main arteries: the Avenue Carnot, and the Avenue Francois-Millet, for example.12 Notices in English and French warned cyclists of the danger they faced if they ventured into the path of this military traffic: ‘Avoid all main thoroughfares as much as possible.’13 The noise of all this war material moving through the town was loud and persistent, and outside Cherbourg, the departmental roads were commandeered by the American Army, renamed – the ‘Green Diamond Highway’ (Cherbourg – St-Lô, Cherbourg-Dol), and the ‘Red Ball Highway’ (St-Lô-Vire) – and plastered with huge posters in English setting out the penalties soldiers would incur for such misdemeanours as speeding, not saluting an officer, and so on. As well as the buildings that were taken over to accommodate major Allied offices, additional space had been occupied by American troops in the first few days of the Liberation, a fact which started to cause substantial problems as more and more Cherbourgeois returned to the city, only to find that their former homes were now being occupied by soldiers. As the Deputy Head of Civil Affairs pointed out: The requisitioning of buildings caused us a real headache. In the first few days American troops had entered the town and somewhat naturally in the heat of battle, without any formality, had seized what buildings they required. It was necessary to get all this regularised and furthermore to obtain additional accommodation for more troops and installations which were being set up. 14 Alain Brossat has noted the ways in which people all over France set store on reclaiming their space at the Liberation, tearing down physical traces of the Occupiers’ presence, like German street signs, for example, and acting on their environment to mark it again with their own identity: ‘an urban space to re-conquer’. 15 For the Cherbourgeois, such activity was quite impossible. The urban space was simply not theirs to reclaim.

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An interesting illustration of this is the discussion that took place between the American and French authorities about the fate of Cherbourg’s most prestigious shop, the centrally located department store, Rattis, which the Americans wished to take over as a Red Cross Club for their black troops. The American version of this described how: [we explained to the Mayor] that a great problem now existed, with 15,000 colored troops coming in and no place for recreation. We pointed out that they were well disciplined troops, not like the Senegalese, and that it was necessary that they be given the opportunity to play, as troops must of necessity after they have worked. The Ratti [Department Store] was desired. The Mayor sympathised with us, but the Ratti was the pride of Normandy, and Mrs. Ratti had been loyal to the Resistance and they were coming back to Normandy to reopen the store, and it was necessary that such a store be in operation for the people of Cherbourg. I told him he was entirely right, and proceeded to point out that the store had practically nothing on its shelves, and the scarcity was such that no store materials could come into Cherbourg for quite some time. And then we pointed out that the store had suffered a certain amount of damage and that had to be made right, and with the military holding priorities on repair materials, it would be practically impossible for Mrs. Ratti to have those repairs made. And then, the Army would pay Mrs. Ratti well for the use of the store and it would revert back to her on the collapse of Germany.16 At the heart of the town, the site of considerable local prestige and sense of communal identity, Rattis Store, there was a symbolic shell (nothing on its shelves, scarcity and damage). What the Mayor of Cherbourg described as ‘the pride of Normandy’ was first empty, then under the command of the Americans, and shortly to be occupied by troops whom the French might be likely to associate with some of the less wellregarded soldiers from their colonial empire. The context in which both sides in Cherbourg, French and American, developed their relationship in 1944 was clearly one in which the urban space was overwhelmingly occupied by the foreign Liberators. The American Civil Affairs Detachment in Cherbourg indeed explicitly used the term ‘occupation’ to describe their stay: ‘The Germans had occupied the city under peaceful conditions and our occupation was under quite different circumstances. The comparison . . . with the German occupation was an ever present fact.’ 17 Major Nunn reported a conversation with

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a senior French official who complained: ‘You are killing this town. We are being suffocated.’ It seemed impossible to disagree with this assessment: Unfortunately, this was true. As the days went by, more and more American troops poured into the port, more and more equipment was rolling through the streets, and it was inevitable that much of their city had to be taken over for the needs of the Army, little opportunity being given to them to get back to their peacetime pursuits. This was a fortune of War, but it was hard to get the point appreciated by men who, now that their liberation had arrived, hoped to make a fresh start. As a matter of fact, the life of Cherbourg was probably much more dislocated under our occupation than it had ever been under the Germans.18 In liberating Cherbourg, the Americans had come to stay, and to set up a very considerable Army base. Many of them recognized that this was not the type of Liberation that the people of Cherbourg had expected: some of the French [were] unable to understand why Americans who came in as liberators occasionally imposed more rigorous restrictions than had the German oppressors. Sometimes they failed to realize the difference between the relatively peaceful occupation by the Germans and the intensive work of the Americans necessary in establishing a huge supply base.19 Far from being liberated and left to rebuild their own lives, the Cherbourgeois would actually be faced with an occupation that was larger and in many ways even more visible than that of the Germans.

Coming back to Cherbourg With the Liberation of the town, the Cherbourgeois who had scattered outside the battle zone began to return. As early as July 1, observers reported that large numbers were on the move: ‘Roads leading to Cherbourg are congested by thousands of Frenchmen trudging back to their homes, all their worldly goods in wheelbarrows and baby carriages’.20 The town to which they returned had been sadly depleted by the effects of war, and it took several days to begin to restore the damaged physical infrastructure. As one of the British journalists explained: the town is dirty, almost indescribably dirty. Imagine a town of thirty or forty thousand inhabitants which was a battlefield for four

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days. Then, a beaten army, trying to escape, spreads more debris on top of the ruins created by the War itself. Then a victorious, but exhausted, army comes into the town, and there’s no water, for the civilians, the troops or the prisoners.21 In addition to the malfunctioning water supply, barely 30% of electric power was operating properly. By the end of July, the gas and electricity services had still not been fully reconnected. 22 The phone system, although in relatively good shape, had been taken over by the American Signal Corps. The eight banks in Cherbourg, mostly separated from their head offices in German-occupied territory, encountered some difficulty in resuming banking functions. Only two of them had remained open during the German Occupation and there was an overall shortage of assets and readily available currency. 100,000 francs were located in the local Banque de France, and a similar sum was discovered in the vaults of a Valognes bank that had been flattened during the recent battle: ‘a detail of German prisoners-of-war, guarded by French gendarmes, searched through the debris for three days and recovered this currency, which was brought back to Cherbourg’. 23 Although the destruction of housing had not been as extreme as in some other towns in northern France – Civil Affairs estimated about 25% of Cherbourg had been damaged by bombing – it took some time to repair houses and get them habitable again, because there was a shortage of mortar and roofing materials.24 Unexploded bombs were an ever-present danger in this situation, and there were worrying reports of the accidents they caused to children playing in the ruins, with six deaths occurring from one of the unexploded mines.25 Many of the buildings that were still standing were anyway far from safe. As late as the end of September, there were ongoing complaints about the parlous state of such housing that had not been attended to: ‘In several different quarters of the town, there are houses which were badly bombed and still have walls standing which are holding up bits of the roof, which are close to collapse.’26 The whole accommodation shortage was exacerbated by people returning to Cherbourg, only to find that the houses from which they had been evacuated had now been taken over by foreign soldiers, or by other Cherbourgeois who, in both cases, were not inclined to recognize prior rights of ownership. 27 As the Cherbourgeois came back to their town, many of them found that possessions that they had left in houses and yards had disappeared during the battle and Liberation. One woman, returning to Cherbourg after fleeing the port in 1940, found that her whole flat had been

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pillaged, and all the furniture removed. 28 Other houses had been cleared of their contents by illicit Allied and French activity during the early days of Liberation. As Civil Affairs reports admitted: One of the major problems was the removal of property, particularly furniture, by both French civilians and members of the Allied Forces. This occurred in respect of premises occupied by Germans and French alike. Large scale removals were carried out by units of the Allied Forces without requisition and it did cause unfavorable comment from the French. 29 A Secours National office rapidly opened to distribute clothes, sheets, blankets and cooking utensils to those returning, but equally rapidly, they found that supplies were running low, and had to appeal in the press for donations. 30 In these early days of Liberation, with chaos on the streets, it was clear that the concept of private property remained fairly fluid. Notices in the paper appealed for the recovery of goods pilfered – watches and jewellery stolen from private homes31; or ‘borrowed’ under the pressure of the recent events: ‘the person who was seen taking M. Durel’s bike from his yard, after the bombing raid of 15 June, is requested to return it as soon as possible’.32 Even more concerning, however, was the fact that many families had been split apart in the course of the fighting, so that people returned to the town, unsure where some of their relatives might have gone. Over the following months, the local paper was full of notices begging for information on loved ones who had gone missing: ‘M. le Menach . . . informs us that his son . . . Louis, aged 13 years has disappeared. After leaving his grandparents’ home, he should now be in Cherbourg’33; ‘Grateful for any information on my son, Frank, 33 months, in care with Mme. Jules Lefèvre at Dangy. Gone. Destination unknown’; ‘Mme. Pesnet . . . would be grateful for any information on her daughter, Marguerite . . . who left the bomb shelter at St-Lô, on the night of 6/7 June. She is 1m. 55, wearing a green coat with a fur collar, short white socks, and a signet ring on her right hand with the initials MP.’34 In these early chaotic days of Liberation, the vast food stocks that the Germans had accumulated in the Arsenal had been pillaged by celebrating Allied troops as well as by desperate French civilians. In mid-July, the new sub-prefect, M. Levandier, gave a public warning that the police would be following up people who had looted flour, sugar and tinned foodstuffs.35 After some discussion, it was agreed that the Allied Civil Affairs Detachment should take formal responsibility for distributing

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the food to the French authorities, but, as Major Nunn acknowledged, ‘Owing to the long delay . . . much of the perishable stuff, including fresh meat, was uneatable and had to be destroyed.’36 Even so, towards the end of July, it was apparent that illicit trading of plundered foodstuffs was still taking place between Allied troops and the civilian population. 37

Early meetings In the early weeks of Liberation, this key role of the Allied forces in providing some of the means to restore the community in the port was very evident. Lt-Colonel Howley, who was heading the Civil Affairs operation in Cherbourg, rapidly developed a public profile for his task that positioned it as working alongside the French local authorities to achieve common objectives. The first press communiqué on Civil Affairs described it thus: A group of Allied officers, under the orders of Lt. Colonel Howley of the US Army, are liaising between the Allied troops and the French authorities in liberated Cherbourg. These officers, all specialists in their own branches, have put themselves at the service of the sous-préfet and the mayor, and will collaborate with them in restoring local organisation, fighting fires, finding workers jobs, giving help to victims, tackling hygiene, transport, communications and so on. 38 From the perspective of a British observer working with him, it appeared as if Howley was spending an inordinate amount of time selling the idea of Civil Affairs to the French: Civil Affairs was, after all, in its present form, a comparatively new idea, and no man did more to convince the French authorities of its usefulness than Frank Howley. To use an American expression, he “sold it” to the French. There were times during those first few days when I was appalled by the amount of time he spent in interviewing Press correspondents.39 Pragmatically, Civil Affairs in Cherbourg sought to work through the French authorities which were there: some of these, the mayor, Dr Renault, and his assistant, M. Simon, had held their posts during the Occupation; others, like the Prefect of the region, had been nominated by the French Provisional Government. In addition, there was a Departmental Liberation Committee, formed from members of the Resistance, which

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issued a proclamation, welcoming the arrival of the Allies. 40 Whilst the Civil Affairs Detachment in Cherbourg was mindful of the political vacuum in which the Allied forces were operating in the early Liberation, it was clear that their modus operandi in Cherbourg was to support the establishment of French authority as quickly as possible. Symbolically, and in a ceremony widely reported in Cherbourg, Lt-Colonel Howley formally returned the Hôpital Pasteur to the Mayor and the town of Cherbourg with the words: ‘If you wish, we will continue to help you as much as possible. I am certain that this hospital will be very well managed by you for the people of Cherbourg.’41 Help, and passing responsibility to the local authorities, were to be the order of the day. Speedy efforts were made to re-establish a French legal system: An immediate search brought forth a temporary Juge de la Paix, the Procureur de la République and the Juge d’Instruction. Archives, furniture and lawbooks of the several courts were brought back from Valognes. The officers of the Tribunal Militaire were sworn in on 6 July, and two days later the first spy case in liberated France was heard . . . the Tribunal d’Arrondissement opened on 7 July and the Conseil de Prud’homme on 26 July, giving Cherbourg a full legal system.42 Before this, there had clearly been acts of wildcat justice and some settling of scores in Cherbourg which the Allies had observed from the sidelines: ‘Terming themselves members of the Resistance movement, teen-age young men have engaged in sporadic acts of personal reprisals against alleged collaborators . . . on a few occasions summary, if not drastic, punishment has been meted out by French on the spot.’43 The reopening of the courts seemed to put an end to much of this activity. The French judicial system that the Allied forces had rapidly re-established was one that appeared to be largely independent of Allied influence. Thus, for example, in the first spy case tried, only one Allied observer was permitted by the five French Army judges to remain in court for the whole trial.44 With the re-establishment of a press and communications system in Cherbourg, the role of the Allied authorities was arguably more directive. The army’s Psychological Warfare Department oversaw the publication of a local newspaper, La Presse Cherbourgeoise, to replace the former local paper, L’Eclair de Cherbourg, compromised in the Occupation. The new paper, proudly proclaiming itself, ‘The first newspaper of liberated France’, 45 appeared for the first time on 3 July 1944, initially using the same plant which was producing the European edition of the Stars and

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Fig 3.2 First edition of Cherbourg paper. David Yon, editor of La Presse Cherbourgeoise, and members of his staff proudly inspect a copy of the first newspaper published in Cherbourg after its Liberation. At left is Captain Fernand Auberjondois of the PW Division of the AEF in France, who started the press running. Holding the paper, at right, is Captain Patrick Dolan of New York City, Cherbourg head of the PW Division, which assisted the Frenchmen in publishing the paper. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: OWIL 29711 (SF35a).

Stripes for American troops in Europe.46 With the help of an expert from the BBC, a radio station, Radio Cherbourg, was set up on a hill above the town in a former German radar post, and broadcast from 4 July 1944 until 7 September 1944, by which time other French radio stations were back on the air waves. 47 During these early weeks of the Liberation, Radio Cherbourg operated under the overt authority of the Allies, carrying material which had always to be vetted by the American censor.48 The schedules were overseen by a tripartite group: an American journalist; a BBC reporter with a British officer; and a team of Cherbourgeois, and contained a mixture of local news and programmes, and extracts from Voice of America or BBC broadcasts. Thus, for example, the inaugural Radio Cherbourg transmission included: the bells of the parish church ringing to celebrate liberty; an opening segment from a British announcer; a speech from the Mayor of Cherbourg and from the parish priest; and an address from the head of the Resistance in the department of

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la Manche. This was followed by various notices for the population, a playing of the 1812 overture, and then a retransmission of the BBC French programme, Les Français parlent aux Français, rounded off with another peal of victory bells from the church. 49 The pattern of early Allied–French meetings in Cherbourg was that of a people returning to their town to find it taken over by American troops, and being dependent upon this foreign force to help them re-establish something approaching normal life. The first impression of Allied commentators was that they had been welcomed by civilians in Cherbourg and had made a positive impression by their general demeanour and behaviour: ‘On entering Cherbourg good order was maintained by the troops, which has created a good impression among the people. The accuracy of the Allied bombing and shelling, avoiding much unnecessary damage, has done much to further good relations.’ 50 The following week, Civil Affairs repeated that relations between the Army and civilian population continue good. Reports from hospitals and first aid stations indicate that the morale of French civilians injured by Allied action is very high. Hospital staffs are impressed by the fact that these people seem to bear no rancour whatever against the Allies for the suffering imposed by military operations. 51 On the whole, it seemed as if the population was responding to the efforts to re-establish normalcy: ‘The inhabitants have, with characteristic French rationalization, settled down to the fact of Liberation and seem to be going about their business in an orderly manner.’52 On the French side, the local press pointed out that the persistent anti-Allied propaganda of the Occupation period, with its tales of ‘machiavellian plans’, had not stopped the local population from holding out the hand of friendship to the British and American troops in their town. 53 In a fascinating comparison of the attitude which the locals had taken towards the German Occupation and that which it was adopting towards the newcomers, the newspaper suggested that in the one case, the Cherbourgeois had sought to treat the foreigners as invisible – ‘In our streets, you went past the Occupation soldiers, but you didn’t see them: you looked away’ – whereas with the Allies, French inhabitants looked up, recognized the troops, and smiled. This, the paper argued, would make an excellent foundation from which the two ‘races’ could get to know each other better, leaving a legacy of mutual understanding between France and the USA.54

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In this early stage of the post-Liberation period, difficulties that might arise between the two groups tended to be reflected outwards – to a third party, or a past situation – rather than placed directly at the door of liberated or liberator. Thus, for example, Civil Affairs noted that there was concern on the part of the French authorities about the possibility of bad behaviour and ‘unfriendly acts’ from the foreign Todt workers who had been employed by the Germans and were still based in the Cherbourg area.55 In addition, a population which was experiencing food shortages56 had very little patience with what some saw as excessive American generosity to German prisoners of war: ‘A mild criticism of the American troops is that German prisoners are being treated with too great lenience – some would prefer to see a little of what they regard as the “Russian” technique.’ 57 Similarly, there were complaints that Americans were treating women who had slept with the German Occupiers with sometimes culpable complaisance, a point rather casually dismissed by Civil Affairs: One heard plenty of expressions by the French people that some sort of punishment should be given to the large number of women who lived on intimate terms with the Germans, and they were quick to note that the same women were seen on intimate terms with the Allied services. On the whole, however, this situation was accepted philosophically, the French summing it up with the expression ‘La femme est internationale’.58 At the end of July, the always moderate Civil Affairs reporting was alluding to ‘some slight incidents, but these have been effectively smoothed out’. 59 The French were apparently now voicing criticism about the level of destruction inflicted by the Allies on their area of the country, a point which was to be taken up again by Civil Affairs at the beginning of August: ‘Rumours regarding civilian casualties in Cherbourg have been effectively scotched. At one time rumour gave a figure of 8,000 fatal casualties, this has now been reduced to 75 definitely known to have been killed.’60 In a sense, any distrust at the way the Americans might deal with foreign workers, German POWs, and suspected women collaborators still directed local animosity away from the Liberators themselves, since they were neither the agents nor the cause of the underlying problem. Similarly, shock at seeing the extent of devastation in some of the towns neighbouring Cherbourg related to the recent past rather than

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the present circumstances of cheek-by-jowl living in the port, American beside Frenchman. More significant for longer-term relationships, however, was the continuing food problem in the port. La Presse Cherbourgeoise reported in mid-July that the bread ration had now been reduced to 150 grams per person per day because of the difficulties of getting supplies by rail, aggravated by low wheat stocks. This level of rationing was only the equivalent of, or in some cases less than, what it had been under the Occupation. It was inevitable that the local population would begin at some point to question why the Allies were not able to address this situation more speedily. Civil Affairs admitted that it was likely ‘to cause a certain disappointment to people who, it has been reported, expected increased rations, if not a return to the pre-war standard of living, within a few weeks of the Allies’ arrival’.61 On 9 August 1944, Lt-Colonel Howley’s Civil Affairs Detachment formally took its leave of Cherbourg, officially handing over the running of the town to the French civilian authorities. Howley thanked the assembled dignitaries for all their help and told them he was certain that they were more than capable of organizing the life of their town. The sub-prefect, in responding, thanked the Detachment for all it had done, and wished them well as they moved on from Cherbourg: ‘it’s as friends that you leave . . . already called to do the same job in other liberated towns that you have done here’.62 If the A1A1 Civil Affairs Detachment was moving on from Cherbourg, however, this did not noticeably reduce the considerable American presence in the town. From then on until 14 October 1945, the Cherbourgeois were in theory independent, and in control of their town, but in practice living in the same space as a large and powerful foreign army whose objectives in being in the port were clear and specific.

Working and living together American efforts and energy were directed towards clearing the damaged port, making it usable, and transporting the material and men which were needed to continue prosecuting the war. Through the months following the Liberation, a vast operation was mounted to deliver these goals. In August 1944 more and more ships docked at the port bringing locomotives and tenders. In September, 23,000 men landed from the USA and a hospital ship arrived, the first of many which would bring wounded soldiers back home via Cherbourg. In October, the port was readied to receive transatlantic cargo boats, and Liberty ships. By

83

Fig 3.3 Allied supplies in Cherbourg. US soldiers transfer supplies and material to trucks which will carry them to a depot for shipment to the AEF. Loaded from ships lying in Cherbourg harbour, the cargo comes ashore by rolling up a ramp to the docks. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: PNA OWIL 4605A (SF 35F).

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November, over a million tons of material had been landed, and the objective of unloading 20,000 tons of goods per day had been reached. In effect, from one of the most badly destroyed ports of the war, Cherbourg had become the premier port used by the American Army. 63 To achieve these ambitious goals, the Americans were partly dependent on French labour – by early August 1944 they were already employing some 850 men daily, and estimated that they actually needed around 1,500 to service all their requirements.64 Inevitably, there were problems in this relationship, with initial hiccups in ensuring that the family allowances and benefits expected by French workers were duly paid. 65 The American authorities noted that French unions were likely to argue for a minimum increase of 80% in their wages. By mid-August, it was clear that those French people working for the Americans in the docks were only too aware of the considerable disparity between the expensive war material coming into Cherbourg and the relatively low level of their own take-home pay: ‘A minor source of dissatisfaction arose when the population made a mental contrast between the wealth of American material pouring in and the low wages paid to workmen by the American forces.’66 As with any large concentration of troops, some of the major problems outside the dock area related to matters of army and civilian discipline. Looting by both soldiers and Cherbourgeois was reported to be widespread, with the captured German stocks in the port providing potentially rich pickings. 67 Often the looted material was exchanged for alcohol by American personnel frustrated at the rules imposed by the military to prevent excessive purchasing on the part of the troops – alcohol was supposed to be bought in French bars and cafés only between 6 PM and 9.30 PM. By the middle of August, the wary Civil Affairs officers were noting that the local population was becoming increasingly critical of American behaviour: Critical observance of the behavior of Allied troops is evident. It is encouraging to note that the population is adopting the attitude that the famous ‘correctness’ displayed by German occupying forces was ‘correct’ only with respect to the manner in which they indulged themselves at French expense. But this attitude is enthusiastic rather than realistic; behavior of German troops in this area has been authoritatively reported as excellent. 68 Problems with alcohol and looting steadily worsened, and by the end of August the American authorities were recognizing that there were

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real difficulties between them and the local population. For many on both sides, the perception was that the major incidents between the two groups were being caused by those American troops who were most visibly different from the local population, the black soldiers. The Army noted that ‘In Cherbourg, there was a growing cleavage between the population and negro troops who are considered to drink too freely. Shoes and military equipment are said to have been bartered by these troops for alcohol.’69 US censorship of civil communications in France during the early autumn of 1944 picked up a number of discontented comments about American behaviour in Cherbourg, particularly in relation to women. By far and away the largest number of these concerned indiscipline of soldiers, especially black soldiers, with the civilian population. Thus, at the end of September 1944, one correspondent claimed there had been an incident in which a black American had stabbed a French soldier who was strolling in the town with his wife, and then made off with the woman.70 By October, letters from people in Cherbourg were full of details about a particularly serious incident that had taken place near the town, at La Pernelle. The accounts given were lurid: Last week at La Pernelle they stuck a knife in a father who was trying to save his daughter. Listen: they carried off the girl and just when they were getting her into the truck, the father arrived and pulled on the girls’ legs to get her down. At the moment a negro took his knife and cut open the unfortunate father who almost immediately died. The girl did not see her father because the negroes had bandaged her eyes in order to get her into the truck. They finished the job of putting her in, and carried her off till the next day when they sent her back absolutely naked.71 The incident at La Pernelle, however exaggerated in these letters, undoubtedly caused major concern in the community. An American phone tap of a conversation between the sub-prefect and the police at Cherbourg illustrates the seriousness with which local people, and indeed the American military, were forced to take the consequences of the affair: The 3 negroes of La Pernelle have been caught. It seems that the hanging might be given publicly . . . Public feeling is very high against the troop and they wish to show the population the measures they are taking against it, but in order to have the hanging public, they will have to have Eisenhower’s permission. 72

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Other complaints about the behaviour of the Americans generally centred on their public rowdiness: in Cherbourg it is shameful at times. They break everything. They beat men and women . . .The other day I was in a café where there was an orchestre. Well, after half an hour, in the evening, a chair broke the big mirror three feet away from me. They fired revolvers into the lights and there was a complete panic.73 For some correspondents whose letters were recorded by US censorship, the Americans had become much too relaxed in their approach to the local population. Early criticisms which had been directed outwards to prisoners of war and women collaborators were now recycled into more specific anti-American comments: Here in Cherbourg the Americans are rather unpopular with the civil population. Firstly because of the extremely free behavior they have toward the women, and secondly by the exceptionally gentle treatment they accord the German prisoners – these two reasons justify the displeasure of the people of Cherbourg.74 What is evident in letters that American censors were using to gauge the local mood is a clear sense that the population felt swamped by the presence of the Liberators. In the country, it seemed as if the soldiers were everywhere. On one day in October six separate complaints about the American occupation outside Cherbourg were recorded: We have more and more Americans in this region and it is a catastrophe for the country because they occupy the pastures, thus there is no more grass for the animals; the farmers are obliged to sell everything. Moreover the soldiers pillage everything, steal wood and even the potatoes in our field.75 In the small towns near Cherbourg, there was a similar feeling of being overwhelmed by foreign troops – thus at Isigny-sur-Mer: ‘We are over . . . run by negroes . . . The whites are continually drunk; there is no discipline at all.’76 In Cherbourg itself, the town appeared to be bursting with American troops, especially after dark: ‘it is not interesting to go out nights in Cherbourg, with all the Americans, black and white, Englishmen, etc. . . . there are fights ever so often’.77 As one correspondent expressed it: ‘Everything is going from bad to worse with the

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Americans. Every day brings a worse situation, going so far as . . . a certain antagonism.’78

American time, French time The impression given is of two communities that were meeting in a considerably overcrowded urban space. Whilst at the beginning of the relationship it had been possible to represent this meeting as the Liberators assisting the Liberated in their re-establishment of an independent post-Liberation community, the longer the relationship continued the more difficult it became to ignore the fact that the urban space was inevitably being contested by two groups, one of which had the entitlement to control the space, and the other of which possessed the actual power. Interestingly enough, the Americans in the port of Cherbourg operated on a different clock from the French clock outside the base, one hour behind: ‘American time’ and ‘French time’, as the slightly mystified local press described it. 79 To some extent, the ways in which the two groups, American and French, came to represent each other over the long months of their encounter in Cherbourg were closely related to this notion of two different time zones. One of the most immediate concerns of the Americans in Cherbourg was clearly that of rebuilding the desperately damaged infrastructure of the town, in particular, of course, the port. The Americans themselves recognized that there was something of a difference between the urgency with which they wished to tackle these problems, and the slightly less accelerated time-scale of the Cherbourgeois. As they began to sort out the telephone and mail services, the Americans noted that there was a fundamental difference in viewpoint between French civilians and American service personnel. The former had had four years of experience in doing without various facilities and services. They had found life possible under those conditions and therefore saw no necessity to remedy the situation overnight. On the other hand, the Americans, through inherent conviction and military necessity, wished immediate results.80 In a sense it was not at all surprising that the Americans should operate on, and be represented as being in, a different time zone from that of the Cherbourgeois (‘American time’). The Americans in Cherbourg were clearly a community in transition. The record-breaking clearing

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of Cherbourg Harbour81 was fundamentally to help an army passing through, in transit. At a personal level, the American community in Cherbourg was made up of men who were understandably likely to be fixated on the present. Thus, for example, the young American GI who had first arrived at the Hôtel de Ville in Cherbourg (and is commemorated in a plaque there to this day) was killed as the army advanced into Germany, and the lieutenant pictured in one of the most famous pictures of the Liberation of Cherbourg was to die two weeks later.82 In this time zone, it was unlikely that the American community as a whole would behave other than as a community passing through. Their representation of Cherbourg speaks strongly of a voyeuristic collecting of images, much like a present-day tourist. Thus, for example, the famous American war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, filed a report from liberated Cherbourg in the language of image-making: ‘In Cherbourg it looks so much like the Hollywood sets of old European cities that you get your perspective reversed and feel that Cherbourg has just been copied from a movie set.’83 This collecting of images was also, for the French, an indication of a culture more related to the instantaneous than the traditional. At the 14 July celebrations in Cherbourg indeed, the local paper noted the tendency of their American friends to seize the images they saw: ‘Photographers and camera men were in their element; we know how Americans love beautiful images.’84 Symbolically, a week after the Americans had liberated Cherbourg, there was a ceremony at the Omnia Cinema, in which the cinema, formerly reserved for the Germans during the Occupation, was officially handed back to the French people. The ceremony, which coincided with Independence Day in the USA, was introduced by the mayor of Cherbourg who spoke warmly of the gift which the Americans were making to the town: ‘In the name of the town of Cherbourg . . . I want to express my gratitude to the American army whose heroism has enabled us to resume that life of liberty which we had taken from us for so long.’85 The event, organized by the army’s Psychological Warfare Department, marked the opening of the very first cinema in Free France. After the speeches, the audience sat down to watch a newsreel, the Lambeth walk and then Victory in the Desert. The cinema that was being returned to the people of Cherbourg would, of course, be largely dependent on the cinematic products of the Allies, particularly the Americans, for some time to come. In a very real sense, the culture that was being offered to the French by the Americans was the culture of transient images, with a sophisticated communications system strongly geared to understanding, and getting pictures of the present moment.

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The French in Cherbourg, on the other hand, were inhabiting a time zone which was arguably crucial to the reconstruction of their identity. Unable to reclaim their own present urban space, the French moved to the space which was available to them – the essentially lost past community. Many of the concerns of the Cherbourgeois from late June 1944 to the time of the American departure in 1945 were fixed on recovering what had been lost in order to rebuild a permanent community. To begin with, they worked to rebuild the physical infrastructure of their town, and as the patterns of material ownership pre-Liberation were reasserted, so they began to recover the community networks existing before the conflagration. Calls went out for people to come forward and resume their pre-Liberation jobs particularly, as in the case of key needs like transport, when they were vital to feeding the community and rebuilding it. 86 The mayor begged the ‘present occupiers’ of school buildings to vacate them as quickly as possible so that the school year could start in time. 87 Parents were called upon in early September 1944 to register their children for school,88 although as one mother complained, the possibility of kitting her children out as normal for the new school year was virtually impossible: ‘After five long months of holidays . . . evacuation, nights spent in shelters, mending and patching, the only clothes we’ve got left are ones fit for the rag and bone man.’89 Boarding schools which no longer had accommodation to house their pupils requested local people to take in young students as lodgers.90 With the restoration of community networks of employment and schools went the reconstitution of some of the shared cultural identity of the city. The local music group in Cherbourg, the Union Lyrique Musicale, called for its former musicians to come in for rehearsals so that the group could play, as indeed they did, at the 14 July celebrations. 91 People who had been music teachers before the Liberation advertised the fact that they had returned and were now able to take over where they had left off.92 ‘French time’ in this context was a recovery of the lost past. It was, as the American officer Major-General Collins rightly described it during the 14 July festivities, a case of ‘the town coming back to them’. 93 Arguably, the images of ‘Private Ryan’ which the French developed through this experience were related to their need to inhabit a different time zone from that of the Americans, in order to reclaim the space of their national identity. In comparison with their own time as a community reconstituting itself from the past, the Cherbourgeois represented the Americans as living in ‘American time’, a transitional community, one that was (hopefully) passing through, but which, importantly, could not aspire to occupy the space of the past which the Cherbourgeois

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would inhabit. Increasingly, the Americans in Cherbourg were described as transitional people, fixated on the present or the immediate future – a community without cultural roots in the past or strong traditions. At a basic level, French people sometimes found the ways in which the US authorities set about their rebuilding tasks in Cherbourg indicated essentially short-term perspectives. The management of the railways, for example, seemed to be bizarre to some Cherbourgeois: Between Caen and Cherbourg the railroad is operated by the Americans in a lamentable manner; they park trains for days on the main track although huge parking tracks have been set up there. They draft French railroad workers days on end and keep them idle. They destroyed safety installations and run their trains without discrimination on left or right tracks.94 On the whole, there was very considerable admiration for the logistical organizing ability of the Americans, admirably shown in the ‘Système D’ approach they had taken to the monumental task of clearing and rebuilding the port of Cherbourg. This quality could also, however, be constructed as the attribute of a country without tradition, fixated on the values of competition – being the biggest, being the best, etc. When the port of Cherbourg was finally handed back to the French on 14 October 1945, the mayor, M. Schmidt, expressed his admiration for all the Americans had achieved with the words: ‘It’s that desire to beat the record which characterises the young American nation.’95 Earlier in the relationship, when the American Red Cross had opened its first Club for American servicemen in France, the correspondent from the local paper, permitted a pre-opening tour, described it as notable for the grand scale on which it had been conceived – a little corner of America, with a well-stocked bar, a library, a games room, two pianos and showers: ‘As always, our American friends did things in a big way.’ 96 In a sense, the image of the Americans constructed by the French was of a group with relatively little cultural sophistication, slightly at the outer rims of civilized behaviour, outside the cultural space which the Cherbourgeois had developed for themselves. The more positive rendering of this was that of the American as childlike in his behaviour. Much was made of the way in which the Americans seemed to relate very freely to children – ‘We’ve all seen, haven’t we, American soldiers surrounded by children?’,97 and indeed this was an image sedulously cultivated by the American propaganda machine in its L’Amérique en Guerre which had been dropped over Normandy: ‘the very deep love for kids which

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almost all Americans have. Right now you can see groups of French children, pressing round khaki uniforms, shamelessly ripping off all their insignia.’98 More perturbingly, this naïveté and lack of sophistication of the Americans could be rendered as close to animal-like behaviour. Thus at the particularly tense time around the la Pernelle rape incidents, Americans were described as perpetrating: ‘Scenes of savagery and bestiality . . . There’s looting, rape, killing. There’s no security at home or on the roads.’99 Letters from Cherbourgeois, recorded by the American censors, frequently made this linkage between US soldiers (especially black troops) and animals: ‘As I told you, invasion troops abound here . . . Negroes especially, and when they’ve had something to drink, they behave worse than beasts. All are not the same, but alas the numerous cases when they used force and threatened people with weapons attests how little civilized they are.’100 When the Americans sought to gain the cultural high ground by positioning themselves in a more traditional cultural relationship with the French in Cherbourg, the public representation in the press tended to emphasise the naïveté of the rendering, rather than its intrinsic merit. Hence the concert given by the First American Army in Place de la République in mid-July was described as: ‘Obviously, the repertoire isn’t like ours, and the tones of some of the instruments are a bit disconcerting for French ears.’101 An American identity was constructed by the French in an entirely different space from their own, closely related to the instantaneous, rather than the traditional. The Cherbourgeois appeared to feel most comfortable when constructing an image of the Americans counterposed to the space that they had constructed for themselves. The Americans were a people who lived in the present and immediate future, compared with themselves for whom the past was actually the present space they occupied. In Cherbourg, the Americans were presented as collectors of images, little interested in a sustained engagement with the traditional culture of France. A French cultural exchange circle in Cherbourg tried to bridge the growing gap between the two sides by inviting US officers to come and learn something about France, but it recognized that the task was immense: In a few months time you may be back in the States. What do you know of France and the French people? What are you going to take home with you? The taste of Calvados? The photos of a couple of French girls? The memory of a few ragged urchins begging

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shamelessly . . . of drab, dull looking houses, muddy streets, a wet climate and sad, ill-dressed, grumbling, discontented people? 102 At the beginning of November 1944, some four months after the Liberation, the French authorities invited the Americans to an official reception at the Hôtel de Ville, hosted by the municipality. The local paper was intensely critical of the time it had taken the municipality to get round to hosting such a reception for the Americans, arguing that there had been, ‘an atmosphere of torpor which was paralysing any initiative’. 103 The reception was inaugurated by the entry of three young girls dressed in traditional Norman costumes. The mayor, M. Schmidt, then made a long and impassioned speech which sought to ‘explain’ the Cherbourgeois to the American military: ‘so, with complete frankness, we are presenting ourselves to you, with our faults, and a few of our qualities’.104 First of all, he established a picture of France as a traditional, historic and rooted community: ‘A complaint that I’ve often heard is that you’re not seeing France in her true light, the France of History, two thousand years old, immortal in her future, the France of gentle family life’. He recognized that there had been some difficulties in the local relationships between the French and the Americans: Are we not here to speak frankly, to put up a bridge between our two sides which should not be inaccessible to each other, to cut across the frontiers? And when we have sorted out through mutual concessions the thousand and one difficulties which await us, when we will have got to know each other better, you’ll be in a position to find the secret of the French soul and, practical people that you are, you’ll be able to revise a number of your current notions on the French and France. Then, the mayor formulated a classic expression of the time zone in which the French (and by implication the Americans) were rightfully living: The Frenchman lives with his past, a past of which he is justly proud and which he endeavours to preserve from the hand of modernism. He refuses any idea of over organisation . . . he is capable of the best and the worst, disappointing his friends one day, and then showing the day after that he has unquenched vitality. General Clay, in replying, first recognized that relationships in Cherbourg were not easy: ‘The situation in which American troops, coming from

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far away, were called upon to cooperate in the overall action has clearly caused difficulties.’ Clay argued that his soldiers might know little about France, but they were still eager to get to know more French people. Finally, he seemed to accept the time zone implicitly offered to him by the mayor. The Americans were a new nation, and a community in transition in France: ‘Our army is young, and when it goes back home after the Liberation of Europe, it will take back with it the spirit of France.’ On 14 October 1945, fourteen months after the Liberation of Cherbourg, the Americans handed the port back to the town in another official ceremony. General Lee, on behalf of the American military, recalled that the period that they had lived through together had been one of enormous difficulty. ‘[The figures] cannot give an understanding of the worries and uncertainties that we shared together during those summer days of the Liberation of France. You have to live through things like that in order to understand them, as the population of Cherbourg understands them.’ 105

Living with the liberators What the population of Cherbourg had come to understand over the previous months was undoubtedly some of the pressures of living in a confined urban space with a friendly, but over-large, foreign army. Cherbourg, a relatively small town, had been taken over and swamped by American troops who stayed on in the port until well after the end of the war. Rather than a mobile liberating army, the Cherbourgeois had to deal with a force that in effect occupied the town at a time of considerable physical fragility for the home population. The Liberation did not give the people of Cherbourg an opportunity to reclaim their space, and hence their identity, since the space had been immediately reoccupied, this time by the Americans. Buildings that had previously been used by the Germans were taken over by US personnel who set about altering the look of the already vastly changed urban environment, with widened roads, signs in English, and new restrictions. Returning to Cherbourg, for many of its inhabitants, was coming back to a town that was controlled by the Americans and would depend on the USA for its early restoration and survival. Even when local administration had passed back into the hands of the French, it was evident that this formal entitlement to power could not alter the realities of the situation on the ground. American traffic continued to pound through the streets of Cherbourg, and Americans continued to occupy a huge number of buildings, as well as the port and the Arsenal.

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Inevitably, the longer the presence of the US military went on in Cherbourg, the more likely it was that aspects of the arrangements would begin to trouble the native population. Physical concerns about the billeting of the army in civilian homes, and about the safety of local inhabitants in the face of sometimes drunk and violent soldiers on the streets, acted as a springboard for bad memories of Allied bombing action in the locality, and continued fears that the Americans were too ‘laid back’ in their approach to enemies (German prisoners of war), and culpably ill-disciplined in their behaviour to friends. Unable to reclaim their own national space, the Cherbourgeois moved to occupy a space which was available to them – the permanent past – and set about rebuilding their physical and cultural community. This space of the permanent past was necessarily contrasted with the young, apparently rootless community in transition in their midst. Beyond the traditional currency of cultural exchange between occupying army and occupied civilians, two different and necessary identities were constructed to ease the difficulties of these national communities, living together. The ways that the French and the Americans perceived and represented each other were radically dependent on the geographies of the space they shared. Meeting Private Ryan in Cherbourg between 1944 and 1945 involved the construction of a national identity that had to be elsewhere, independent of the physical space that was not available to the Cherbourgeois. The understanding of the ‘other’ which the French and Americans developed was helpfully complementary – two different time clocks were set, French and American time, and these enabled the two communities to survive together in the overcrowded and contested space of liberated Cherbourg.

4 The politics of disappointment: Liberation in the South

A different débarquement Whilst more and more American material poured through Cherbourg, and the Allied armies arrived within sight of the Seine, the Landings in the south of France started on 15 August 1944. This débarquement was different from the one that had taken place in Normandy in several important ways. First, the Landing forces in the South were considerably smaller than those which had crossed the Channel for the ‘D’ Day assault, and they contained a sizeable contribution from the French Army. The Allied land forces were grouped into the 7th Army, commanded by the American, General Patch. This comprised eleven divisions, including the Armée B of General de Lattre. In manpower, the balance of forces was around 230,000 French and 120,000 American,1 although the first landings on French soil were largely the responsibility of the Americans. In the French Army, the Army of Africa, there was a preponderance of troops from the French Empire: Algeria and Morroco, and Central or West Africa. 2 Pamphlets which the Allies dropped over the southern zones in preparation for the Liberation made much of the active participation of French forces in the Landings: ‘French forces are participating in this operation, beside their Allied brothers in arms, on the sea, the land and the air. The French Army is once more a reality. It is fighting on its own soil to liberate the Mother country, with all its traditions of victory. Remember 1918!’ 3 Secondly, and unlike the first uncertain days of the Normandy Landings, the emphasis of Allied planners in the south had been on passing administrative power to the French as quickly as they possibly could. The Allied planning team was clear from the beginning that they did not want an Allied military government, like that in Italy, to operate in 95

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southern France. As early as 8 January 1944 the 7th Army received an interim directive for Civil Affairs that declared that ‘military government will not be established in France. Civil administration in all areas will normally be conducted and controlled by the French authorities.’ 4 As a proof of this ‘hands-off’ approach, the Civil Affairs contingent which landed in France in August was laughably small in comparison with the northern operation: in the north, 3,600 men had been detailed to administer 18 departments, in comparison with only 594 for a projected 31 departments in the south. 5 Whilst Civil Affairs planning for the south was by no means finished by the time of the Landings, there was a basic structure and an overall policy which differed markedly from those in the north. The commanding General of the 7th Army had been given complete responsibility for Civil Affairs in the south, and the 7th Army in turn was prepared to give the French a great deal more authority than SHAEF had been willing to do in the north.6 Thirdly, Allied attitudes to the fighting capability and potential of the French Resistance were a good deal more positive than those which had informed the ‘D’ Day Landings. Allied planners were well-informed

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about Resistance activities, and expected to work closely with resisters on the ground. The respective intelligence units of the British and Americans – Special Operations Executive (SOE), Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS) – had all been established in Algiers by February 1943, and had begun active work straight away. Between January and July 1944, hundreds of agents were sent into southern France and thousands of reports came back. All the Allied groups sent into France before the Landings were told to explain to their French colleagues that, whilst they were Allied special operations units, they were under the general aegis of the French Military High Command.7 By the time of the Landings, therefore, Allied forces were in touch with local Resistance groups, with Liberation committees and with representatives of the proto-government, the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (CFLN). As they landed, there was a real sense among the Allies that the French Resistance and French administrative structures were ready in the wings to assist in the actual fighting and take over the running of liberated towns and villages. Finally, the Landings themselves scored some remarkable early successes: by the evening of 15 August, most of the Allies’ major objectives had been taken, and some indeed exceeded. The weakness of German forces in the south, the surprise of the Allied attack and the poor initial German response, all favoured a very fast Allied advance in the first days of the operation. One Canadian pilot taking part in the operation observed that ‘The most dangerous thing about the show wasn’t the enemy fighters. It was the danger of running into our planes’.8 Civil Affairs officers reported on 15 August that ‘The division is moving so fast we cannot set up all towns falling into our hands.’9 By ‘D’ Day plus one, progress was such that General Patch could move his shore-based command post into the Hotel Latitude 43 at Saint Tropez.10 In addition, the local Resistance liberated many towns even before the Allies had arrived. Draguignan, Saint-Raphaël, Fréjus and Saint-Tropez were liberated by the Resistance in advance of the Allies’ entry. When the troops arrived they were highly impressed by the way in which the Resistance had taken over and installed a new and effective regime: ‘In each town the FFI was completely organized and was prepared to take over the government, install a maire and care for the civilian needs . . . These towns, under their new maires and the FFI are well organized and it is believed that they will be efficiently run.’ 11 As Civil Affairs officers arrived in each small town or village, they admired the efficiency of the Resistance. At Montferrat: ‘Local authorities have situation in complete control . . . Resistance actively organized under a local

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chief’; at Digne: ‘Local authorities in complete control of situation’; at Sisteron: ‘Everything under control. Resistance group small, well organized.’12 All this early success was not, however, without loss of life. Reviewing the whole experience after the war, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean pointed both to the speed of the initial advance, and the losses which the troops, largely American, had suffered during the Landings: By noon of D plus 1 our forces had captured more than 1,000 enemy prisoners, and by D plus 2 1,500 prisoners. After the landings, resistance was stiffer and casualties were heavier than we had at first realised. Our own losses for the first two days were 1,221 Americans killed and missing, and 1,754 hospitalised; 314 British killed and missing and 54 hospitalised. The French, only recently disembarked, had not yet suffered appreciable casualties.13 Despite the casualties, it was evident that the operation was a considerable success and that, unlike the campaign in Normandy, the French had played a key role – as Army and Resistance fighters – in the Liberation of their own territory. Most importantly of all, they had speedily taken charge of the administration of their towns and communes, much to the relief of the advancing Allies. As one Civil Affairs officer put it: ‘If the French had failed to take over their responsibilities, we would have been in the soup. As it was, they proved capable and we encountered no unsurmountable difficulties.’14 This was a Liberation in which the Allies often observed and confirmed the activity of the French themselves.

French Liberation The major part that the French were playing in their own Liberation, and the rather subordinate role accorded to the Allies, is illustrated by some of the first meetings ‘on the ground’. In Marseille, for example, Colonel Parkman, heading up the Civil Affairs organization, arrived on 24 August. Fighting was still going on in the streets, with French partisans clearing out the remaining German redoubts. Parkman reached the Prefecture and presented himself to ‘M. Aubrac, Commissaire Régional de la République, who had himself just reached Marseille. A brief conference was held with him and the various leaders of the Resistance on the general situation among the civilian population of the city.’ 15

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Fig. 4.1 Marseille in victory parade. Marseille residents burn German propaganda in victory parade. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: NYP 39433 (SFA8).

Not only was the Resistance clearly fighting in the streets, but the seat of government had already been taken over by the Provisional Government’s nominee. In those places, like Cannes, where Government officials had yet to arrive, Allied observers found that satisfactory temporary replacements had been speedily found: ‘In general government machinery in most localities is operating well. In many cases it is temporary only, and permanent officials will take office later.’16 A measure of the relative importance given to their own, as opposed to Allied contributions, to the Liberation is provided by French press descriptions of the victorious entry into Marseille on 23 August 1944: ‘French troops leading the way, the Allied armies came into our city . . . It was the FFI shock troops who had cleared a path for the armoured cars.’ 17 Whereas in Cherbourg it had been almost impossible for the inhabitants to reconquer their urban space, contemporary photographs of Marseille showed crowds assembled at the Prefecture, pulling down German signs and emblems on the building.18 Photographs in the local press depicted the French nature of this Liberation: ‘The first French soldier who took up a position on La Canebière’; ‘The taking of the

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Préfecture of Marseille by FTP/patriots’; ‘French tanks on the Avenue Foch’.19 By 30 August indeed, Americans had disappeared from some of the public presentations of the Liberation. The military review on the Quai des Belges, for example, was described as a type of French apotheosis, the meeting of ‘the army of the people, and the people in arms’ – the French Army and the French Resistance – together in a shared sense of purpose which, the newspaper argued, was reminiscent of 1789.20 Rather than Allied armies liberating towns, and Allied Civil Affairs officers passing power to French authorities after several weeks, as had happened in Cherbourg, events in the South gave a key role to French fighting forces – the French Army of Africa, and Resistance fighters – and provided a context in which power was speedily acquired by FFI partisans, French Resistance movements and nominees of the Provisional Government. The Allies soon discovered that the local administrations with which they had to deal in the south of France were in most cases very different from those which were established in the north.

Political context To begin with, the Resistance in the South was strongly politicized. In some areas this was a reflection of deeply entrenched pre-war political affiliations. Marseille, for example, had been a traditional bastion of socialism. As the Occupation administration reported to the Ministry of the Interior at the end of 1942/early 1943: Marseille has long been the greatest socialist fiefdom in France. As everywhere in the Midi, the bourgeoisie of the towns is rather conservative, often violently reactionary, whilst the worker and peasant element follows the progressive parties. The farmers, even those who own their own land, are largely socialist, or else belong to a form of radicalism which is always very ready to make common cause with the socialists.21 In the 1936 legislative elections, the Right had had only four députés elected in Provence, as against 19 from the left. The political complexion of Marseille doubtless contributed to the incidence of mass demonstrations there throughout the Occupation years. To celebrate the national day on 14 July 1943, 50,000 people were said to have taken to the streets of the city. In the spring of 1944, a wave of strikes had broken out. The immediate provocation for these was the appalling food situation. On 25 May there was a demonstration

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involving some 300 to 400 young people who shouted: ‘We want bread! We want bread!’ The precise demand was for 500 grams of bread per day as opposed to the then current 175.22 Ironically, these mass demonstrations were halted in the wake of an Allied bombing offensive which clearly surprised and angered much of the population. The general expectation had been that Marseille would continue to be largely spared from Allied attacks because of the strategic importance of its port, and the need to maintain its vital communications with Algeria. Some Marseillais were evidently incensed at what they took to be an American attitude to bombing: ‘A sort of anti-Americanism started. The British by comparison tried to take account of civilians, whereas the Americans sprayed the town with bombs from a height of 6000 metres.’23 Collaborationist elements in the town sought to exploit the unease caused by these raids, putting up placards in the windows of damaged buildings which taunted: ‘You were waiting for them to liberate you. They’ve liberated you in death.’24 Despite this continued anti-Allied propaganda, Resistance in Marseille had been, and remained, active. After Jean Moulin’s unification of southern Resistance groups in March 1943, Marseille became the Headquarters of Region 2 for Resistance planning, a Region which included seven Departments – Hautes-Alpes, Basses-Alpes, Alpes-Maritimes, Var, Vaucluse, Bouches-du-Rhône, and Marseille itself, which was configured for this purpose as a department on its own. By February 1944, the Communists, whose Front National group was separate from other fighting organizations, had grown in importance as a Resistance entity. Their Milices Patriotiques, for example, had established a southern sectoral organization which included three sectors in Marseille alone. 25 Resistance guerrilla activity in Marseille, as counted in sabotage operations, and in attacks on property and people, numbered 218 separate incidents in the town from January 1943 until August 1944.26 If the numbers of Resistance partisans were a relatively low percentage of the city’s population, it was nonetheless clear that the Resistance was active, and generally committed to the Left. Even in those parts of the South that were not normally associated with radical political activity, the Resistance developed a markedly political complexion. Allied observers noted that the contrast in wealth between the rich and poor was a good deal more evident in the coastal regions of the south than elsewhere in France, and surmised that this had doubtless contributed to the politicization process.27 The BBC’s correspondent, Vaughan Thomas, pointed out that Saint-Tropez had lost its millionaires during the Occupation, leaving local people to organize

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resistance and liberate the town for themselves on 20 August.28 In Nice, the newly appointed Liberation mayor was rapidly dismissed by local Resistance leaders when he showed signs of being anti-Communist: ‘The culminating episode . . . appears to have been an order he gave to take down the Soviet flag which was hanging alongside the other flags of the United Nations at the Prefecture.’29 In addition to active and politicized Resistance movements, the Landing areas of the South had a far more cosmopolitan population than much of the rest of France. Marseille in particular had given asylum to a large number of anti-Fascist exiles in the 1930s, people fleeing persecution and death in Germany, Italy and Poland. The Italian population in the city, for instance, numbered around 125,000, out of an estimated total of 500,000 to 600,000 at the Liberation.30 Before the Landings, Allied agencies had viewed this highly diverse population with some trepidation. A complicating factor in perceptions was undoubtedly the popular association of Marseille with criminality, the Chicago of the south of France, an image which had long been current within France and beyond. 31 Civil Affairs therefore anticipated that the Liberation of the city could bring some major repercussions: ‘Marseilles, with a population which included the dregs of six continents, the flotsam of many races – provided the first real test of CAHQ’s effectiveness.’32 Marseille would be the largest town thus far liberated, the first Mediterranean port of France, and one with well-developed industries and important shipbuilding yards close by at La Ciotat.

The Liberation of Marseille Even after the Normandy Landings, the German garrison at Marseille still comprised some four to five thousand well-armed troops. The defeat of this contingent, and the final Liberation of the town, were totally French victories: a combination of the French Army of Africa, and the internal Resistance. Unlike so much that had happened in the north of France, Anglo-American forces played little more than a walk-on subsidiary role. On 18 August, the Resistance had called a general strike in Marseille, and young men and women wearing FFI/FTP (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur/Francs-Tireurs et Partisans) armbands appeared openly in the streets. On 21 August, partisans marched to the Prefecture and arrested the Occupation regional Prefect. The Departmental Liberation Committee then issued its first public proclamation to the people of Marseille: ‘The Departmental Liberation Committee has just arrested

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the regional prefect. The FFI has been given the order to go on the offensive from this morning, The general insurrectional strike is total. The power of Vichy is no more: the Departmental Liberation Committee has all the power.’33 Despite this, the German garrison was still holed up in its fortified positions above the city. On 23 August, the invading French Army of Africa, under Colonel Chappuis, arrived at within 20–25 minutes distance from Marseille’s famous main street, La Canebière. Here they met up with the town’s Resistance chiefs. These men were very much emerging from clandestinity for the first time, and were largely unknown quantities as far as the general public was concerned. Gaston Defferre, for example, who was to have a well-publicized post-war career, was then so little known by the public that days after the Liberation, newspapers were still spelling his name wrongly – ‘Deffert’.34 One observer described the joy with which a French liberating army was greeted: ‘At dawn the first French tanks, from the Army of Africa, arrived, preceded by the FTPF, who were preparing the ground for them everywhere. They were cheered by a delirious crowd who gave them flowers, and went on shouting and cheering.’35 Four days later, after heavy fighting, the Germans capitulated and the town was truly liberated. To those entering Marseille, it was evident that the cost of Liberation, in terms of buildings damaged, had been considerable. On the day of the German capitulation, one of the local papers, Le Provençal, painted a sombre picture of the main arteries of the city: La Canebière . . . offers a lamentable spectacle . . . There is hardly any building which has not been damaged. Some of the facades are wide open, and all of them have been riddled with grenade holes. The windows of shops and cafés have been thrown on the ground . . . [which] is covered with stones, broken glass and electricity wires. 36 Unlike the events in Normandy, Anglo-American forces had played a much more passive role. The Civil Affairs Unit which entered the city on 24 August reported that the French were fully engaged in fighting, and that the Resistance had established an operational administration: Heavy fighting was going on in certain sections of the city and the detachment . . . had to proceed under small arms fire. A brief reconnaissance of the military situation at that time showed that there was much artillery fire under way in the advanced elements of the

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French 3rd DIA as they sought to smash remaining German resistance centred in the Port areas . . . The Resistance elements seem to be in control of the departmental and municipal governments and appear to be working well with M. Aubrac (Commissaire régional de la République) . . . As far as can be seen the government is functioning with these officials ‘meeting first problems first’. 37 Again, unlike much of the north of France, the local press resumed publication even before the town was completely liberated. Allied Civil Affairs reported that two papers came out in Marseille within hours of its partial Liberation. 38 From then on the press was lively, and strongly influenced by Communist and Socialist members of the Resistance. Thus, for example, La Marseillaise, which had appeared clandestinely with twelve issues from 1 December 1943 to 23 August 1944, was run in its post-Liberation form by the Communist-supported Front National. Rouge-Midi reappeared as the Communist weekly it had been before its suspension after the Germano-Soviet Pact, and Le Provençal was to be largely run by a team drawn from the Socialist party. For the first few weeks, a ‘temporary system of censorship’ operated, with Allied censors checking for security implications, and French censors looking to see that articles were not likely to ‘stir up controversy’. 39 By the end of August 1944 then, it appeared that Marseille had been liberated by the French themselves, had installed its own local administration, and was developing a lively and politically committed local press. The Americans, however, did not leave Marseille once its Liberation was complete. In Allied planning, Marseille had been positioned as the southern port urgently required for the delivery of men and supplies for the rest of the campaign. As the Civil Affairs history noted: ‘The biggest job of all, of course, both during the early days and even later after the cessation of hostilities in the south, was at Marseille. The city was destined to be a great port of entry for American supplies and troops.’40 As with Cherbourg, the Germans had done their best to render the port inoperable before their capitulation, and it was jammed with the wrecks of sunken vessels. To begin with the Americans were forced to bring supplies ashore in amphibious boats which navigated through the damage, but it was evident that a massive clearing up operation would be necessary. Inevitably, as the days wore on, the Marseillais were to encounter a considerable American population which grew rapidly immediately after the Liberation of the town, and continued to grow as the Americans established their largest base in Europe, the Continental Base Section (CBS), at Marseille.

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Comparisons between the contexts in which the Americans operated in Cherbourg and in Marseille are instructive. In Cherbourg, a relatively small town had been liberated by the Americans themselves who then occupied much of the urban space as they set about clearing the port and preparing it urgently for Allied operations in Normandy. In Marseille, one of the largest towns of France, the urban space had been liberated by the French themselves, in a combination of local Resistance activity, which had freed large parts of the city, and the action of the French Army of Africa, which had forced the Germans to capitulate. The Americans therefore arrived in a situation in which the town had seen itself rapidly ‘re-become’ French through its own efforts, and in which a strong and articulate left-wing Resistance had taken over key positions of power and already brought out a committed and opinionated press.

Host and guests Early relationships between the French and the Americans were marked by a general desire to behave in a courteous and mutually supportive way. On an official level, public demonstrations of French support for the USA were frequent and apparently enthusiastic. When General de Gaulle visited Marseille in mid-September, for example, Civil Affairs reported that there was a gratifying display of Franco-American unity: ‘The playing of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the De Gaulle ceremonies in Marseille brought hearty applause and shouts of “Vive l’Amérique” from sections of the crowd.’41 The American Head of Civil Affairs in Marseille, Colonel Parkman, took care to behave as a model guest, impressing his hosts with his excellent spoken French and his general knowledge of France. Midi-Soir described Parkman’s first press conference with considerable enthusiasm, pointing out that he knew the country already both because he had fought in France during the First World War, and because he and his wife had honeymooned in Provence in 1936. In addition, Parkman was extremely complimentary about the way in which the Marseillais had conducted themselves throughout the recent trauma of Liberation: The Colonel told us how much he admired the courage shown by the French armed forces and the FFI in the battle. He was also very favourably impressed by the ‘rapid organisation of the town’ . . . as soon as it was liberated. He had also noticed the calm way in which the population had conducted itself.42

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On a less official level, it was evident that many ordinary American soldiers had gained a very positive impression of the Resistance partisans they had met in the course of the Landings. One remembered an encounter with French resisters in a tense battle situation: One of the men moved forward and removed his jacket. On his left sleeve he wore an armband with an American flag. It was identical to our own. ‘Vos amis’, he said. ‘FFI’. Later . . . we shared our cigarettes with our newfound French friends and tried to visit. But my high school French was sadly lacking.43 This linguistic problem between the two sides was one which the French made initial efforts to bridge. Intensive classes in French were advertised in the press,44 and there was even some suggestion that local people who could speak English might be encouraged to identify themselves with badges, so that American troops would know to whom they could turn for help. 45 Until the American troop newspaper, Stars and Stripes, was able to start local production in mid-October 1944, a French newspaper (Midi-Soir) provided news in English in a column headed, ‘World news in a nutshell’. The idea, as its valedictory article suggested, had been to bring the two potential readerships together: We have been privileged so far to publish . . . a short English summary of the latest news. It has been for us an honour to count members of the British and American forces among our readers . . . We do hope that many among our former British and American readers will go on reading Midi-Soir for the sake of the news . . . in French. Why not?46 On the French side, English words, particularly those which were connected to food and eating habits, became rapidly entrenched in everyday parlance: ‘The real word of the day, which you see on the thousands of empty cans left on the pavements, is “meat and beans”.’47 Friendly cartoons, depicting the soldier–civilian relationship, were common in September and early October in the press. Thus, for example, a cartoon showed two Frenchmen asking Americans in a jeep for a lift to Aix, and then finding themselves arriving at Aix-la-Chapelle. 48 The relationship was portrayed iconographically at this stage as one of equal partners, working together: ‘Real “collaboraton”’ as Midi-Soir expressed it, illustrating the idea with a picture of an American policeman, side by side with a French policeman, directing traffic on the Cours Saint Louis.49

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Whereas public representation of the Americans in Cherbourg gradually moved towards stressing their cultural rootlessness and strangeness, early interest in the Americans in Marseille centred on their apparently dynamic and modern approach to the business of war, attributes which were implicitly viewed as highly desirable for the resurrected French nation. La Marseillaise, for example, in a series of articles about the landing beaches, emphasized the hugely impressive amount of material that was coming ashore in great waves of men and machines: ‘“geeps”, “geeps” and “geeps”’, and the extraordinary amphibious landing ships which brought in equipment without interruption for two weeks: ‘in a half hour, a landing ship brings in fifty vehicles, and two thousand men with their equipment and munitions for the campaign’.50 The comments of French soldiers on the beaches attested not only to the quantity, but also to the technical quality of the American war machinery: ‘“This American equipment is absolutely superb”, they told us’.51 Similar articles noted the ingenuity of the Americans in erecting temporary bridges. 52 This technical expertise was largely represented as positive, symbolizing a post-war modernity which was exciting and worthy of emulation. One of the first photos that the newly published Midi-Soir carried, for example, showed a large American military policeman on an impressive motorbike, under the heading: ‘Goodbye German police and bon voyage! You’ve been magnificently replaced by these menmachines, so much more sympathetic.’53 The newly imported examples of American cinema, so strongly decried by the Vichy regime, were greeted with frank enthusiasm: ‘Hollywood has reconquered Marseille.’54 In comparison with the heavy German comedies to which they had been subjected, American films, with their dynamism and vitality, seemed to many to typify a style of life that was much in tune with Liberation and new beginnings: ‘American films were so much a symbol of a happy life that we were certain that their return would coincide for us with a return to sunny days and happiness.’ 55

Governing independently In reconquering their own space so effectively, the host community, the French, set about implementing policies which they considered to be vital to the post-Liberation world they would now be building. A key early element in this new future was the purge of those who were considered to be responsible for some of the trauma of Occupation through which the inhabitants of the South had lived. In the immediate aftermath of Liberation, it was evident that local police control in several

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areas was extremely weak, with the result that waves of summary executions and wildcat settling of scores were allowed to go unchecked. In Nice, Allied observers reported 100 executions and 1,000 arrests in the ten days following Liberation.56 In Marseille, the regional commissaire de la République, Aubrac, informed Civil Affairs in early September that ‘an orderly procedure is immediately being instituted for the disposition of charges against collaborators. He added that there are 800 in Marseille prisons now, and that in the whole region 200–300 were killed without trial, which he apparently considers a small amount’.57 By mid-September, decrees from the Marseille authorities were ordering the dismissal, and sometimes arrests, of men who had formerly managed large public utilities and manufacturing enterprises.58 For the Allies based in the area, there was absolutely no desire to interfere in what was understood to be the business of the new French Government. Their only concern was that French local authorities should gain sufficient control of the situation to ensure that military operations and lines of communication would not be endangered by public disorder. The French were equally keen to reassure the Americans that there was no pretext for foreign military intervention. Civil Affairs noted that ‘The French are anxious for the Allies to understand that execution of milice members does not indicate any sort of civil war but is purely evidence of the administration of justice to traitors in France.’59 By early October 1944, Civil Affairs had come to the view that, given the specific local situation in Provence, the new French administration had handled the purge quite well: Summary executions, which occurred in some numbers during the first few days, have apparently ceased, and the number of arrests has not been excessive in view of the inordinate percentage of collaborationists in the Department. Everywhere, political prisoners are now being held for trial in accordance with the orders of the Algiers government.60 The same implicit agreement on both sides not to interfere was strained more obviously by the continued presence of large numbers of armed partisans, members of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). The Americans were concerned to see that the ranks of these armed resisters seemed to grow inordinately in the weeks after Liberation: ‘When Marseille fell, the FFI there numbered about 1,600. Within two weeks this number had grown to 4,500, as all the hoodlums and grudgeholders flocked to the colors after the fighting was over.’61 Inevitably,

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Fig. 4.2 French patriots decorated by US Commander in Southern France. Lt-General Patch, Commander of the Allied 7th Army in southern France, decorates members of the FFI for their courage in the battle for St Tropez. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: NYF 38946 (SFA7).

young people roaming the streets with guns could cause all sorts of difficulties to the newly established French authorities. One local mayor, for example, was so incensed at the disturbances being caused to his inhabitants that he threw out all the members of the FFI who did not actually live in the commune, and then set about disarming those that remained.62 The issue was a particularly delicate one for the French authorities. Whilst the Americans urged them to disarm the activists as fast as possible, French officials understood that any hasty action on this front might bring highly undesirable political consequences: The danger of civilian disorders has been brought officially to the attention of Colonel Lavilleon and it has been considered proper to suggest that members of the FFI, who have no military purpose to perform, should be disarmed. Colonel Lavilleon has taken the position that any precipitate action in requiring the FFI to disarm would be unfortunate, but he recognizes that the situation requires attention.63

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On the ground, there were a number of clashes, in the first month after Liberation, between armed members of the FFI and Allied soldiers. In Marseille, tensions rose in mid-September when troops were fired upon by partisans. In Toulon, an American lieutenant was critically wounded and three other soldiers shot when FFI were attempting to check vehicles at one of the town’s roadblocks. The French argued that all this had occurred at night when the FFI had been searching for suspected collaborators, and when the enlisted men had been riding in an unmarked civilian car without lights. 64 In any event, it was agreed that in future the FFI would not be permitted to stop Allied vehicles or check Allied personnel, and that the American military would have the power to arrest anyone disobeying these orders and hand them over to the French authorities for punishment. It was clear, however, that such incidents caused considerable ‘bad feeling’ towards the FFI among American troops stationed nearby.65 A shared problem for both American and French authorities in the early days was the growing number of displaced people, refugees who had fled in the wake of fighting in their area, and now needed to be fed and rehoused. In the immediate aftermath of the Landings, some of the small communes in the area had seen their populations increase dramatically: Bormes, with 1,350 inhabitants had 450 refugees; Collobrières had 500 to add to a population of 1,200; Confaron had 1,000 incomers to its 2,000 population.66 By the middle of September, the estimate of the total number of refugees in ten Departments in the south of France was 274,500 out of a total population of 3,795,000.67 All this exacerbated an already very difficult situation as regards food supply. In Marseille, for example, the Allies estimated that the city had around 650,000 mouths to feed by the time it was liberated: 564,000 ration card holders, 35,000 so called ‘floaters’, and a possible 50,000 more who would have evacuated the town and would be likely to return. The Secours National was providing one meal a day for some 70,000 people at twelve feeding points, but it was evident that there was ‘malnutrition among children and actual starvation among some old people’. 68 However able the new French administration was – and Civil Affairs reports were uniformly positive about their efforts in such adverse conditions69 – it was clearly facing overwhelming odds in the first weeks of Liberation. In these circumstances, the American Army accepted that it had certain immediate responsibilities to the civilian population. By 2 September 1944, the first Liberty ship with civilian supplies unloaded at St-Tropez: ‘It was a difficult undertaking to unload these 4,000 tons by small craft

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so early in the operation . . . Distribution by the French has begun as far west as Marseille.’ 70

Franco-American relations A framework in which any ongoing problems in Franco-Allied relations could be discussed, and hopefully sorted out, had been established very soon after the Liberation, with regular meetings between the American Civil Affairs headquarters and that of General Cochet, the French military delegate in the south, in order to discuss ‘the difficulties which might have arisen between the American troops and the population’.71 In one of these initial discussions, the agenda included requisitioning arrangements, methods by which the Americans might pay any French labour they would be employing, and the thornier issue of the direct visits which Civil Affairs officers had been making to Departmental Prefects, without necessary prior clearance from French liaison officers: ‘With the exception of the labor question, which requires clarification by higher authority, the other matters were settled on the spot.’ 72 By early September, however, disagreements were beginning to surface. The Americans apparently complained at one of these meetings about a recent article in one of the local papers, La Marseillaise, which they had found profoundly offensive. According to the report presented to Cochet by his French colleague, the Americans had been angered by the description of themselves as ‘foreigners’. The article in question, which had actually been referring to the need for the people of France to pursue and try collaborators, argued that: ‘The foreigner must recognise that the People of France who have been able to liberate themselves are equally capable of solving on their own painful problems which are theirs alone.’73 The American authorities had been greatly annoyed by this: ‘Our Allies expressed some regret that the aid they had given France for her Liberation should have been ignored so completely. The term “foreigner” which seemed to be directed at them suggested a sort of hostility that they found difficult to understand and which they regretted.’74 The host–guest relationship, and the early cooperation between independent equals, was suddenly becoming a more fractious encounter between locals and visiting foreigners. Looking in retrospect at what had happened, Civil Affairs concluded that initial enthusiasm for the Americans had not lasted much beyond the first two months of Liberation in the South:

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‘At the conclusion of eleven weeks of AFHQ (Allied Forces Headquarter) control in Southern France, the population knew something of the Allied contributions to their welfare, but not as much as they might have. Their early enthusiastic liking for the American Army and the American soldier was beginning to wane. Criticisms and rumors were becoming endemic. Misconceptions of American ideas and policies were starting to cascade. 75 As time went on, some of the bones of contention which arose between the two groups resembled those which had surfaced in Cherbourg: the inevitable consequences of large concentrations of troops in a civilian area: traffic; black market activities; requisitioning. Marseille was a much larger conurbation than Cherbourg, so that the American presence was a good deal less overwhelming and intrusive, but the problem of American vehicles streaming through the town began to attract more and more unfavourable attention in the early winter of 1944. The local press pointed out that the citizens of Marseille potentially risked a great deal more in these encounters than the Americans themselves: ‘Every day, many of our citizens are paying the price for the carelessness of drivers, above all those who, perched on top of heavy lorries, are well protected from the consequences of the accidents they cause.’76 The Franco-American bilateral meeting in early November 1944 discussed the need for a speed limit for military vehicles driving in the town.77 The effect of the heavy lorry traffic on the tram system in Marseille had been disastrous according to the French authorities, who reported to their American colleagues that there had been 294 collisions involving 150 trams in the month of September 1944 alone.78 Black market activities flourished both in cigarettes and in food supplies and rations. 79 The Civil Affairs History claimed that: ‘An estimated 20% of supplies landed at Marseille was stolen and sold by members of the armed forces and their followers.’80 By mid-October, sixteen serious cases of theft of Allied material had already been tried in the Tribunal Correctionnel of Marseille, with sentences ranging from hefty fines to six months’ imprisonment. 81 The local authorities in the area strove to take back property that had been requisitioned at the Liberation by the Army: ‘unjust requisitioning’ as they called it. On 23 September 1944, the President of the Departmental Liberation Committee wrote to the Commissaire de la République, demanding that the Americans should stop requisitioning enterprises and garages which were operational, and providing the local population with employment. 82 By mid-October, the military started

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handing back a number of schools that they had taken over earlier in the fighting. 83 The requisitioning issue, however, took on much broader dimensions in late 1944 when it became apparent that the Allied authorities were intending to install a major rest and recreation zone in the coastal resort area, and that this would effectively double their presence in the South. The plan was for around 100,000 men to be accommodated. The Americans informed the French that they would be building three new hospitals, and were also expecting to have a club and three basket-ball pitches. 84 Such an enterprise required the French to displace one of their own army camps. Even more seriously, these American demands for space came at precisely the time when the local authorities were dealing with returning French prisoners of war and deportees who were arriving in Marseille by train, often without any adequate system of transfer and referral.85 As the Allied military developed rest and recreation plans, their French interlocutors explained that they also would be needing to set up three camps to house an estimated 9,000 returning deportees. 86 One of the main arenas in which the two communities met and confronted each other was that of employment. As in Cherbourg, the Americans had needed to clear the port of its very considerable damage, so that speedy use could be made of the docking facilities in order to land much needed Army supplies and personnel. To achieve this rapidly, and then run the port effectively, the military needed to recruit civilian personnel. Initial discussions with the French authorities at the Liberation registered local concern that the requirements of the army might end up by effectively monopolizing all the skilled labour in the city to the detriment of civilian enterprises that desperately needed to start up again. Either way, the French were clear that any methods of payment which the army adopted would have to enable workers to get the social security benefits allowed them by French law. 87 The Americans initially asked for 12,000 labourers to help them with the clearing of the port, and the unloading of material at the docks. 88 Discussion on the actual wage rates to be used in employing these workers was fraught with difficulty, and the American position was not helped by the fact that its Army Directive setting out details of pay and conditions was not issued, even in its provisional state, until 13 September 1944: ‘Several successive crises occurred in this field. Controversial questions involving US Army jurisdiction, wage policies, recruiting methods, union recognition, etc., had to be solved.’ 89

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The encounter between the French and the Americans in the field of labour relations in Marseille gave rise to a number of major misunderstandings. At the root of these lay profound cultural differences between the ways in which French people, particularly those with a strong political background, perceived their rights as workers, and the ways in which Americans, particularly in a time of war, understood the responsibilities of those who worked for them. Whilst the situation was not helped by delays in actually paying the workers because of bureaucratic payroll problems, there was no doubt that very different worker cultures were brought into sharp relief. The French workforce in the docks was rapidly unionized, as the major French trade union, the Confedération Générale du Travail (CGT), and a score of other unions – dock workers, truck drivers, etc. – began to re-establish themselves after the Liberation.90 The failure to pay workers the money they were owed on the day promised soon provoked widespread unrest and several spontaneous stoppages in the docks. When workers employed by the Americans to unload ships went on strike in protest in September 1944, it seemed to French observers that the Americans were totally amazed at this behaviour.91 By early October, with salaries still one month late, there was said to be, ‘a general malaise between the workers and the Allied Armies’. 92 At the end of October, an incident in which American military policemen shot and wounded a French docker caused even more antagonism in union circles. 93 By the turn of the year, the situation had not improved. The Union was demanding that they should be allowed to have delegates actually operating within the shipyards, and French reports warned of ‘numerous conflicts with the American authorities’. 94 The depth of the cultural misunderstanding that was now developing was evident in one of the last Franco-American bilateral meetings of 1944. At this an American major sought to explain, as tactfully as possible, why US personnel found the French position on trade unions so difficult to understand: Major Martin . . . noted that America was also a country where trade unions are recognised and encouraged, but union delegates are never tolerated actually in the yards, which is probably different from the French system. He would not want to give the impression that the Americans were opposed to unions or to their delegates . . . It was clear that some misunderstandings are caused by the difficulties the Americans and the French workers have in understanding each other

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and by the fact that an interpreter can easily mistranslate certain words or letters, causing a malaise on either side. 95 When the history of American Civil Affairs in the south of France came to be written, however, it was clear that American judgements on working practices in Marseille were still very harsh: Delays in the preparation of the payrolls, plus misunderstandings of the rates followed by the Army (the French had changed the wage levels just at this time) contributed to worker unrest and resulted in several spontaneous stoppages. These, combined with the notorious laziness of Marseille workers, their reluctance to work on Sundays and often on Mondays, too, their refusal to work in the rain (due in part to a lack of raincoats and boots), their demands for two-hour lunch periods, infuriated . . . officers who had to get ships unloaded and supplies moving.96

The politics of disappointment At the Liberation there had been a general sense that living conditions were now likely to improve quite dramatically in the South, particularly as far as the supply of food was concerned. The local French press was optimistic in the first days of Liberation that the Allies would be able to provide adequate food in a matter of weeks. All that was needed was to hang in there and wait: ‘In a few weeks the French/Allied help will be seen, but don’t let’s see this period of waiting and hope in tragic terms.’ 97 By the end of the next month, however, widespread discontent about the food situation was apparent in Marseille and Nice.98 Although American Liberty ships with supplies had docked on the coast, the food had not reached the cities in anywhere near the needed quantities, so that by the beginning of October special rations had to be introduced in Marseille to protect the most vulnerable.99 The press ran a number of critical articles, noting ironically that whilst the Americans insisted that they had landed large amounts of food, the inhabitants in the south of France had yet to see any of it: ‘It seems more difficult to make lorries move on the roads of France than it is to send ships over the Mediterranean.’ 100 By mid-October, overt criticism of the Americans’ failure to deliver food to the civilian population appeared in several papers, including non-Communist journals, like Combat in the Nice– Cannes area. The US military, stunned by the criticisms, sought to get more positive messages printed in the media: ‘Steps were taken to have

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the Editor’s attention called to the manner in which the American army is moving civilian supplies by military train and to the delivery of Allied trucks to the French authorities.’ 101 It was difficult, however, to convince French people that the Americans were doing everything possible to help them when they compared their own living standards with what they knew to be the norm in the USA. The restrictions which the American consumer was said to be labouring under were more likely to ‘raise a smile’ if mentioned to the Marseillais, 102 particularly when more and more American troops poured into the Riviera area, and took over the luxury hotels which dotted its coast. By 1945 the American Centre de Repos de la Riviera had swollen to 3,000 officers and 12,000 men, and they were planning to requisition 80 hotels in Nice and Cannes, as well as villas, apartments and bars.103 The sight of Americans destroying some of the fields in communes in the south of France infuriated locals. As one mayor complained: ‘We’re hungry and thirsty. The Americans, whose bellies are full, devastate . . . our barley, corn and vines . . . we keep protesting verbally and in writing . . . but . . . it’s the law of the strongest which rules.’104 This impression of the Americans as leading a separate, and much richer life, right under the noses of the suffering French, was reinforced by the fact that soldiers were able to shop at specially designated stores, so that French people who were still very short of food were forced to watch Americans: ‘coming out of the special shops created for them, their arms stuffed full of various products and foodstuffs’.105 The growing disillusionment with the American failure to provide adequate food for southern France from what was widely perceived to be the huge store of their plenty soon became mixed up with the Provisional Government’s sometimes thwarted attempts to reassert French national identity. Popular resentment had been caused by the Allies’ delay in officially recognizing the Government of France – recognition was not formally accorded until 23 October 1944, some two months after the Liberation of Provence. In comparison, the impression given by large sections of the French press was that the USSR was content to treat France as an independent and important power of the future, whereas the USA was bent on excluding the French from the major world debates taking place.106 This broader international context, combined with the continued food shortages, produced a general climate of some negativity towards the Americans in the early months of 1945. SHAEF Mission (France), reviewing the development of Allied-French relations in the year since the Liberation, noted that all these factors had contributed to a marked deterioration:

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it must be concluded that there has been some increase in popular misgivings about the Allies, and, to a lesser extent, in actual unfriendliness. This is largely attributable to the current state of international affairs. The nationalistic foreign policy of De Gaulle is very popular, and the repeated checks it has met at the hands of the Allies cannot but result in an unfavourable public impression, especially when taken with the normal discomfort a nation undergoes while large bodies of foreign troops are within its territory, and with widespread, if uninformed, popular opinions of what the Allies are, or are not, doing to alleviate France’s economic suffering.107 When SHAEF produced a communiqué claiming that their record on aid was in fact extremely good, the French press showed little interest in reporting it, although an Agence France Presse statement retorted that the list of supplies delivered had been presented in a deliberately ambiguous way. 108 To some extent the reassertion of national identity to which SHAEF alluded, and which appeared to be contributing to the general deterioration in relationships, also manifested itself at a local level. Popular feelings towards some of the cosmopolitan population in the region were increasingly tinged with a type of defensiveness towards the re-emerging French identity. This manifested itself particularly sharply in relation to nationals from the belligerent countries. Faced with labour shortages in Marseille, and a simmering discontent about the attitudes of the local unionized workforce, the American military had resolved to bring over Italian prisoners of war in large numbers to fill the gaps: some 27,000 were scheduled to arrive for work service. 109 This provoked considerable agitation from the French authorities who insisted that the Italians should only work within the port, and should never be allowed into the town. Most crucially, it was vital that they should not be better fed than French civilians. 110 Similarly, there were clear sensitivities about the use of German prisoners of war in any capacity which might give them jurisdiction over French workers, or provide them with more rations than the French. At one of the regular bilateral meetings in November 1944, the French authorities argued that they had heard that German officers were supervising French workers in Toulon, and that they were being much too well fed. The American officer present, Major Bowyer, denied both of these charges and suggested that it was time that the local population realized that the war was still going on. He agreed, however, that the Americans would try to head off these popular criticisms of their dealings with

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POWs by ‘applying the international conventions in a less ostentatious way’. 111 Towards other nationals, however, who had in some cases fought alongside the Resistance and the Allies, attitudes were equally firm. In November 1944, for instance, the French discussed with their American colleagues what they might do about the groups of Vietnamese, Russians, Madagascans and Senegalese who were currently in the region. The Russians, they argued, had been anyway wrongly represented as victims by the local press when they had actually fought for the Germans, and should be evacuated as rapidly as possible, despite their apparent fear of reprisals. The Vietnamese would progressively fall sick as winter approached and so should be removed as soon as boats were available, as should the Africans. Given that lots of American ships were arriving in Marseille from North Africa, it was vital to, ‘take advantage of this unexpected opportunity to clear the region of Marseille of everything which is uselessly in the way’. 112 A resurgent national identity which sought to position itself in the vanguard of a new world order took care to develop, at least in administrative terms, definitions of other nationalities as ‘outside’ the French community in Marseille, and superfluous to many of its future concerns, a definition of ‘Frenchness’ by what it was not. When French officials wished, however, to position France in more positive terms as a forwardlooking modern post-war power, they evidently came up against the severe economic restrictions which were being felt so acutely in Marseille, and which they had relatively little possibility of alleviating. The Allied Command, viewing these difficulties, surmised that blaming the Americans might well be the only tactic which the French authorities could easily use to get out of the dilemma facing them. A confidential SHAEF paper argued that: ‘There is a growing breach between France and the United States . . . One of the main troubles is that de Gaulle is under pressure for action of all kinds and he does not hesitate to shift shortcomings to Allied shoulders. What he says gets French press space. What we do does not.’113 To many observers in Marseille, however, the USA was by no means an innocent ‘piggy in the middle’, caught in this wider assertion of French identity. The popularly perceived American failure to support the future revival of France was, for some at least, a deliberate failure, a policy to exploit what there was in France, and then move on. This contention incidentally fitted in well with the class analysis of some of the leading press commentators: ‘You’re not just fighting for the dividends of Dupont . . . or of VS Steel.’114 The extreme disparity between

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the wealth of the USA and that of France began to thread its way into local press articles, to begin with in a light and humorous way – one Buick would buy seventy-five really high-quality dinners 115 – but later, in much more pointed and bitter tones. On 2 November 1944, Daniel Georges, the Front National Regional Secretary for Provence, addressed a long article to ‘Our American Friends’ in the columns of La Marseillaise.116 Early relationships ‘on the ground’ between the two nationalities, he claimed, had been exceptionally good. Then, as the war advanced, and the soldiers moved on, life for the people of Provence began to calm down: Gradually, we got used to seeing the jeeps going by . . . that’s when we would have very much wanted to get to know you better, and we were disappointed that we didn’t understand each other. That you took our joy at being liberated as carelessness, our desire to fight as romanticism. We would have liked to form divisions . . . to fight beside you. Our FFI enrolled and the arms never came. We were profoundly humiliated to see that you did not recognise the Government that we had chosen for ourselves. The burden of much of Georges’s complaint was that the Americans were simply not interested in helping France to develop a bright and independent future of her own. They could not be bothered to get to know the local people, and find out something about France’s true aspirations. Running through the open letter was a strong current of disappointment: ‘are you going to respond with this profound disillusion?’ Seven days later the paper printed a reaction from the Americans, signed by a Lieutenant Richard H. Henry.117 The letter betrayed a growing impatience with the French position. Henry argued that these French criticisms were all very well, but that the war was still being fought. American priorities (and uniforms and armaments) had to go to continuing the war effort. If the civilian population of Marseille had not yet received all the food it needed, this was not because the Americans had forgotten them. It was a question of ‘the exigencies of the times. There are lots of other countries which have suffered just as much, and they mustn’t be forgotten either.’ As for the American failure to socialize with the Marseillais, and get to know the local community, Henry explained that there was simply not enough time to do everything: We landed on your shores to help you. For the moment we have to work night and day. Because of this we all haven’t had a chance yet

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to enter into the social life of your great town. Don’t think that we don’t want to . . . at the moment we will get to know each other through our common work, work which will bring us victory.’ In a sense, Georges’s complaints and Henry’s response are excellent illustrations of what had happened between the two communities after the Landings in the South. In this area, the French had liberated themselves, and welcomed the Allies as ancillary, but still important contributors to this Liberation. With the confidence born of reoccupying their own space, French relationships with the Americans at the outset appeared affectionate, with real admiration on the part of the hosts for the modern equipment and working methods of their guests. The USA represented much that was highly desirable for an aggressively resurgent national identity like that of France. Gradually, however, relationships cooled, with misunderstandings and misconceptions on both sides. Whilst some of these were the inevitable minor frustrations of an army– civilian interface, more surfaced in relation to a political context which increasingly placed the Americans as thwarting the legitimate national demands of a sovereign French state. In effect, the Marseillais had expected the Americans to support their development as a new and reinvigorated country, by supplying food, and uniforms, and continuing to respect their independence. The difficulties of delivering all this ‘on the ground’ were particularly strongly felt in the highly politicized city of Marseille, and the frustrations on both sides (the French asserting national independence, and the Americans doing the job for which they believed they had come) were played out in such culturally contentious areas as labour relations. As more and more Americans came into the coastal area for rest and recreation, their separateness from the native community became glaringly apparent. Later well-intentioned attempts to inform the Americans about France and her Empire – as in the Franco-American ‘Pacifique’ Festival in 1945 – were unlikely to bridge the widening gap between the two communities in the area. 118 The Americans and the French increasingly lived, shopped and ate in separate communities, and the disparity in wealth and opportunity between the two was clearly visible. For the host French community, the failure of the Americans to ‘get to know them’ was really a failure to appreciate the rich potential future which the French understood themselves to have. To know them in this context would therefore have been to support their reassertion of national identity. For the Americans, ‘getting to know’ the French suggested a purely pragmatic set of relationships designed to deliver certain

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services – reopening the port, pursuing the war – which they considered to be vital. In this, the American approach – a separate community which required services from the host country – was not unlike that of luxury tourists who arrive in the country with a particular agenda which may or may not correspond to the wishes of the national community. The careful host–guest relationship gradually came to resemble a tourist–reluctant host country relationship, with the hosts more and more bitter that they were not receiving adequate reward and recognition for what they were offering. In the Landings in the South, the French had regained their space and their independence in a way that had not been possible for those in the Liberation of Normandy and Cherbourg. A highly politicized and articulate political class had engaged with the Americans on what they considered to be equal terms. Re-establishing national identity in such testing times, however, was inevitably fraught with difficulties and obstacles which the French had expected their Allies to help them remove. Re-establishing French national identity was evidently not the major priority of the fighting Americans. The context was thus set for a relationship played out within the increasingly bitter politics of disappointment. As Georges suggested in his open letter to the Americans: ‘we can’t hide the fact that we expected more’.119

5 Removing Inflammable Material: The Pyrénées-Orientales

A Frontier Liberation Whereas Marseille had been liberated by the joint action of the Resistance in the streets, and the French Army of Africa, in pitched battle against a German garrison, the Liberation of the Eastern Pyrenees (the Department of the Pyrénées-Orientales) was more a case of repossessing an area which was largely being vacated by the enemy in the late summer of 1944. With the growing success of Allied efforts in Normandy, and the Landings in the South, German troops in the region had been thrown into some disarray. By mid-August, they had started leaving their bases on the Mediterranean coast. Perpignan, Béziers, Sète and Toulouse were all evacuated. In the Pyrénées-Orientales, German troops retreated, often in considerable disorder. On 20 August, a trainload of soldiers, leaving the frontier town of Cerbère, set off to reach Perpignan. En route, the commanding officer on the train heard that the Germans had already abandoned Perpignan and that the station was now in the hands of the Resistance. Accordingly, the train stopped in open country, and the troops were ordered to disperse as best they could, over the vineyards. In the event, some tried to get into Spain through the Col de Perthus. Others made their way towards the outskirts of Perpignan. Most were eventually captured by local Resistance forces. 1 On the same day, the Germans bade farewell to the Spanish authorities at the main border posts, and men from the FFI assumed command. 2 By late August, most of the Department was free of effective German resistance, and there were victory parades in many of the local communes. At Céret, members of the Resistance, and the newly nominated town delegates, marched through the town. At Arles-sur-Tech, there was a joyous Liberation celebration with some 4,000 people.3 122

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capital may take anything up to three days as the trains run irregularly from one bridge to another, in many cases the passengers having to be ferried across the rivers in boats. The postal system is not yet reorganised, and the only direct communication which the Prefect has with his superior authorities is by radio via Toulouse. 4 When French border guards took over former German frontier posts at the main crossing points from Spain, they seemed to sense that they were at the outermost points of liberated territory, and were likely to ‘feel themselves isolated from the rest of France’. 5 At this time, the Allied military was fully engaged elsewhere in France, driving its way through to northern Europe and Germany. Much of the information which British and American commentators therefore received about the post-Liberation situation in the PyrénéesOrientales came from their observers just over the border in Spain, in consulates and offices which were only a matter of kilometres from the area. The Pyrénées-Orientales at the Liberation was a multinational frontier community, with a highly permeable border. Britons and Americans crossed over from northern Spain to meet newly appointed French officials immediately after the Liberation of the area. 6 French and Spanish administrations on either side of the frontier met and discussed how they might work together. Spanish ex-Republicans, who had fled Franquist Spain in 1939 and subsequently fought in the French Resistance, organized sorties and a proto-invasion back across the border into Spain. The Pyrénées-Orientales in 1944, and the early months of 1945, was a frontier community in imaginative as well as in geographic terms. Its component parts – Anglo-Americans across the border, Franquist officials, ex-Republican Spanish resisters, and representatives of the local French government and the Resistance – struggled to establish the limits and borders of identity in a newly liberated community. The mixed internal nature of this community was visible from the moment of Liberation. The celebratory parades in August 1944 were a sign not only that the French had victoriously resumed possession of their territory, but that they had achieved this with the conspicuous help of groups of foreigners. Among the resisters marching through the towns and villages of the Pyrénées-Orientales, celebrating Liberation, there was a significant and highly visible number of ex-Republican Spanish fighters, who marched under their own distinct flags, and with their own separate groups: ‘maquisards from Céret and their Spanish colleagues, under the Republican flag’; ‘children, French and Allied

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flags, the French maquis from the arrondissement, the Spanish maquis . . . the Spanish delegation of the Resistance’. 7 Spaniards, ex-Republican troops, had joined the French Resistance in many places in France, 8 but their participation was particularly large in the Pyrénées-Orientales, the region closest to the Spanish frontier, and the place where so many fleeing Spanish combatants had been exiled in camps in 1939. Four battalions of Spanish guerrilleros had operated during the war in Coustouges, St-Marsal, Céret and Perpignan. Where there had been mixed French/Spanish Maquis groups, the Spanish contribution was normally very marked. In June 1944 for instance, the St-Marsal Maquis had twenty-five French maquisards as against sixty Spanish. The Maquis Henri Barbusse which went into Prades on 29 July 1944 included 150 Spanish participants, and only 50 French. As communes awoke from the nightmare of Occupation, the image of Spanish soldiers, battle-hardened by their experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and proud of their signal contribution to the Liberation of the region, had wide currency: ‘Together, we have fought in France to chase out the Boche invader, together, our anonymous heroes have shed their blood in the maquis and before the execution squads . . . You’ve all met them these guerrilleros . . . strong after their experience of thirty-two months savage fighting in . . . Spain.’9 These foreign internal resisters did not, however, melt away at the Liberation. Given the continued existence of Franco’s government in Spain, the guerrilleros had very little immediate choice but to stay on in the Pyrénées-Orientales. Here, they established themselves as important and visible members of the new community. In Perpignan, at least twenty-four separate ex-Republican Spanish organizations set up their offices in the post-Liberation days. The numbers attested both to the new social and political confidence that they had, and to the still profoundly divided nature of the exiled Spanish community. There were four trade unions, and twenty political party/group headquarters, from the Communist, Socialist and Anarchist Parties, through to multiple Catalonian movements, and organizations designed ostensibly to provide aid and support, like the League of the Wounded of the Spanish Civil War, and the Franco-Spanish Committee. 10 The irony of this new visibility and status of Spanish Republicans at the Liberation was that they had previously been a group particularly marked out for separation from both the local and national communities. The Spanish guerrilleros had become Liberation heroes in a Department which had formerly treated them with very considerable suspicion.

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Foreigners in the Pyrénées-Orientales In the pre-war period, this border territory of the Pyrénées-Orientales had operated as a sort of corridor through which broader political struggles symbolically passed. During those years, movements across the border in either direction often became part of a frequently vitriolic argument about the nature of nationality and foreignness. During the Spanish Civil War, International Brigade volunteers wanting to fight with the Republicans had crossed over the frontier. After the nonintervention pact had been signed and generally disrespected, arms and men continued to pass clandestinely over these border paths. For those on the Right in France, the area was represented as a maze of secret trails by which illegal aid was flooding out of France to support anti-Franquist troops. Pierre Héricourt, a correspondent on the extreme monarchist daily, the Action Française, went so far as to produce a detailed map of the routes by which he believed such secret aid was passing over the border.11 With Franco’s victory in early 1939, the same area became the scene of a vast wave of people passing in the opposite direction: Spanish Republicans fleeing Barcelona and Catalonia as they fell to the Franquist troops at the end of January 1939. In the space of eighteen days in that period, 450,000 refugees crossed the border into the Department of the Pyrénées-Orientales. 12 Whilst it is difficult to arrive at precise figures of the numbers which eventually reached France throughout the whole exodus, most estimates put the total at around half a million.13 Even after the following months of repatriation, when civilians who had fled the fighting decided to return to Spain, and some Republican fighters succeeded in emigrating to friendly Latin American countries, there were still around 250,000 Spanish refugees left in the region by August 1939. Indeed the whole balance of the Spanish immigrant community in France had shifted towards the South, and towards the newly arrived Spanish Republicans, who came to represent approximately 40 per cent of the Spanish colony in France by the beginning of the Second World War. 14 Undoubtedly, the greatest receiver of this huge refugee population was the Department of the Pyrénées-Orientales. The local paper, L’Indépendant, argued in April 1939, that the total in the Department, if clandestine immigrants as well as refugees were included, was of the order of 229,000.15 Given that the population of the Pyrénées-Orientales at that stage was 223,000, it was evident that the Spanish refugee influx had been enormous. As the Government hastily established camps in the region, the Departmental Council protested vehemently about the

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fact that they had in effect been landed with an enormous problem not of their making: ‘the creation of concentration camps at Argelès, Saint-Cyprien, and Barcarès was decided by the Government, entirely without the representatives of the department, whose views, right from the outset, were utterly discounted’.16 At Argelès-sur-Mer, well over 70,000 Spanish refugees were crowded together in a space of some 65 hectares. The President of the local Syndicat d’Initiative complained to the Government that: ‘100,000 people have been installed on a beach . . . meaning that the local services cannot possibly provide drainage for the water that’s being used, or for the toilets if there had been any.’17 A map of the disposition of the camps which were set up to accommodate Spanish Republican refugees shows the Department seaboard and its frontier with Spain criss-crossed by a network of holding areas and concentration camps: at Barcarès, Saint-Cyprien and Argelès on the coast; at Amélie-les-Bains, Arles-sur-Tech, and Prats-de-Mollo close to the frontier. 18 The reaction of the local centre-right French press was generally deeply hostile to this influx of foreign refugees. The keywords in descriptions of the Spanish Republicans from l’Indépendant des Pyrénées-Orientales and La Croix des Pyrénées-Orientales in January to March 1939 termed them ‘beasts’, armies of Attila’, ‘criminals’, ‘brigands’, a vocabulary which, as Emmanuelle Salgas suggested, unproblematically repeated the terms used about them during the Spanish Civil War itself.19 Some of this negative portrayal of the foreigner in their midst took the form of enraged disappointment that the refugees were not more demonstrably grateful for the French charity that had been extended to them. Thus L’Indépendant of 3 February 1939 raged: ‘There are abundant examples in the last six days, of the haughtiness, insolence and ingratitude with which the Spanish Republican refugees have responded to the charity of the local population, and the benevolence of the authorities.’ 20 This was followed by a catalogue of examples in which the refugees were shown to have acted with discourtesy towards French people trying to help them – the Spaniard dying of hunger, for instance, who was said to have spat out the plate of French rice he was given because it was not cooked in the Spanish way. It should be said that in such a traumatic and overcrowded situation, examples of gracelessness were undoubtedly to be found on both sides. Refugees, talking about the experience in later years, recalled French officials treating them as if they were ‘curious animals’, to be herded along as rapidly as possible.21 The separation of the refugees from the native population in holding camps, often nothing more than tents on the beach, did not noticeably

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reduce the tension between the Spanish exiles and the French living in the Department. Whilst some of the Paris-based left-wing press denounced the appallingly inadequate conditions in many of the camps – ‘A lamentable and moving spectacle: insufficient shelters, hunger, cold’22 – other sections of the media, and in particular the regional papers, continued to be very angry about the foreigners who were crowding into their Department, and whose activities would inevitably affect the life of French people, no matter how separately they were accommodated. The inadequate sanitation in the camps would, it was argued, spill out to affect the surrounding area. L’Indépendant reported that the keeping of livestock in the camps made the whole environment unhealthy: ‘In Cerdagne, the presence of the refugee camps is causing grave problems . . . there are some 5,000 animals . . . virtually without food.’23 The paper carried occasional articles on what it claimed was the mindless violence of some of the inmates of the camps, a violence which could also, they implied, spill out into the innocent surrounding countryside: ‘A frightful crime in the camp at Argelès-sur-Mer. A militia man, with nine wounds in his head, half-strangled, is buried alive in the sand.’24 The 1939 Spanish refugees were thus popularly represented in the Pyrénées-Orientales as parasites who, even when separated from the native population in concentration camps, were likely to infect the French in the surrounding areas with their violence and banditry. At the very least, the establishment of large-scale camps was seen as dealing out fatal damage to the reputation of the area as a jewel of French native landscape and beauty. Whilst landowners sought to get adequate compensation for their losses, the president of the Department’s tourist board raged against the desecration of the region’s countryside: ‘The cataclysm represented by the coming of the refugees and their stay in the camp of Argelès, has destroyed in a few minutes, like a vast tidal wave, one of our most valuable tourist projects.’ 25 As Denis Peschanski suggested, the camps established for Spanish refugees became part of a broader French internment history that appeared to develop pragmatically in relation to the pressure of wartime and Occupation events.26 Thus camps like those at Barcarès, Saint-Cyprien, and Argelès were pressed into service by the Vichy Government, with the addition of the gloomy ex-military camp at Rivesaltes, the ‘Sahara of the Midi’, some 40 kilometres from the Spanish border. Rivesaltes, first accommodating ex-Spanish Republicans, soon became the forced home to those people described by the Vichy Government as ‘foreigners superfluous to the economy’, that is to say the families of Spanish

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refugees, and anyone of gypsy or Jewish origin,27 many of whom would never survive the experience. Even before the declaration of war in 1939, the French Government had decreed that all foreigners (men between the ages of 20 and 48) who were considered as refugees, without French nationality, were obliged to offer service to the French state of the same duration as military national service. Some 40,000 Spaniards had been recruited directly from the camps in the south to work in industry or agriculture. 28 With the Fall of France in June 1940, the Vichy regime created what were called Groupes de Travail Etranger (GTE), and the largest foreign component of these (31,000 out of 37,000 in August 1943) was Spanish. The GTE would provide a ready-made labour reservoir for the later Todt organization: some 26,000 Spaniards were recruited for Todt employment between 1942 and 1944. Even in French territory which was independent of Vichy and the Germans, in North Africa, Spanish ex-Republicans were largely considered as marginal to the community and to France’s continued war effort. When, under Communist pressure, General Giraud finally decreed, in April 1943, that the internment camps in Algeria which still contained Spanish refugees should be shut, he followed this up with an Allied circular ordering the newly released exiles to choose between fixed options: emigrating to Mexico, working in the national production effort, joining the British pioneers or the American forces, or enrolling in the Foreign Legion. The alternatives on offer ensured that even Spanish Republicans in unoccupied French territory were still essentially positioned as outsiders, rather than as equal participants with the French in an ongoing war effort. 29 Within metropolitan France itself, the position of ex-Republican refugees became progressively more dangerous as the Occupation continued. For many, the only option left to them was to join the Resistance, to take to the Maquis. As one Spanish maquisard said: ‘We knew that we would be the first to be shot by the Germans if we were taken. We had lost everything, we had nothing left to lose. We were all between 20 and 25 years old, and already had experience of war.’30 As they marched in Liberation parades in the Pyrénées-Orientales, and proudly established their offices in Perpignan, many of these ex-Republican Spanish resisters were thus experiencing something of a double revenge. A revenge over German Fascism certainly, but also a revenge against those French people, including the inhabitants of the Department, who had separated them out, and scorned them as foreigners. The Liberation was an opportunity for the formerly despised

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foreigners to see themselves as national French role models, as Pierre Laborie suggested, ‘in the hispanic figure of the guerrilleros, present in the heart of the Resistance battles . . . a model for the French maquisards’.31

The War goes on For all of the members of this frontier community, the war was continuing after August 1944, but the war in which they were engaged, and the territory over which they were fighting, was by no means the same. Several of the component parts of the community had entirely different views on the ways in which this frontier area should fit into future definitions of nationality. Most obviously, for the Spanish ex-Republicans in the PyrénéesOrientales, the war did not finish with the Liberation of local territory. Any Liberation here was a staging-post on the way towards the liberation of their own country. They were, in a very real sense, ‘passing through France’. 32 From their viewpoint, Franco’s government was illegitimate, so that the border between France and Spain was an essentially fraudulent line. With the Liberation of France from Fascism, an ideological imaginary was constructed which crossed borders – a Europe imagined as an entity totally freed from Fascism. The Departmental Liberation Committee in the Pyrénées-Orientales, and the emerging post-Liberation press in the area, both strongly influenced by the Communist Party, argued that the war with Franco was indeed the same war as that with Hitler: ‘United in the pillage and destruction of Europe, they must receive the same punishment . . . France cannot live free and independent as long as Franco’s abject government is still in power.’33 Much was made of the insecurity of France’s national borders as long as a Franquist regime was tolerated: ‘Spain is a refuge for bandits and French and international 5th columnists.’34 The case for understanding the war in this broader context was also presented as a matter of repaying some of the debt owed to fellow resisters from Spain. The war was an ideological one which knew no frontiers: ‘French patriots who took part in the great battles against the accursed boche beside the brave guerrilleros already know about their patriotism . . . . We too, as French patriots, should help our neighbours and friends to reconquer their native land.’35 Significantly, the first tranche of land reconquered by the Spanish resisters was actually territory within the Pyrénées-Orientales itself. On 27 August, a matter of days after the Liberation of the Department, Spanish maquisards marched to the Spanish Consulate building in

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Perpignan and demanded to take it over. American observers reported that the Prefect had been convinced that there would have been bloodshed if anyone had tried to stop them: ‘Prefect after some difficulty . . . effected compromise agreement that the premises should be guarded by armed representatives of the Spanish Maquis and that the Spanish Republican flag should be hoisted on the premises.’36 To add to the heroic prestige gained in the eyes of many locals, Spanish guerrilleros now had their own official and visible status within the region. Spanish cultural and social centres elsewhere in the Department were also being taken over. Police reported that: ‘At St-Laurent-de-la-Salanque, the Spanish Republican flag has been hoisted over the café de la loge, which is the base for the Spanish Centre.’37 In the weeks immediately following the Liberation, Spanish ex-Republican troops also began to assemble in the mountain villages on the French side of the border. By early September 1944, it was estimated that some 3,500 to 4,000 Spaniards had gathered close to the frontier. 38 After numerous incursions into Franquist Spain, a full-blown military expedition was mounted between 19 October and 29 October 1944, into the Val d’ Aran. It was clear quite quickly, however, that this invasion had failed, and Spanish resisters retreated back over the border to France, taking with them around 300 Spanish prisoners who were subsequently repatriated home, back again across the mountains to Spain. Whilst plans for invading Spain were radically modified after this disastrous episode, the essential continuity between the war being waged by the Allies, and the struggle to regain Spain, was a constant in the thinking of Spanish resisters. Symbolically indeed, several of the Divisions that prepared for the Val d’Aran invasion kept the military numbers they had used during their Resistance days in France. For Spanish maquisards, this frontier area remained a type of free zone, a passage which permitted ideological affinities and continuities across borders, and over time. As one Spanish resister expressed it: ‘We knew that the liberation of France opened up the largest perspectives possible for our own liberation.’39

Making bridges across the border For the Anglo-Americans, the war that was being fought was a very considerable distance from the Pyrenees. Their chief concern in relation to the situation further south was that the border with Spain should not become so permeable and free-flowing that it allowed German troops to escape, regroup, and then come back over to attack Allied units. Reports

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suggested that at least 1,000 enemy soldiers had fled into Spain in early September, and that an equivalent number of Spaniards had gone the other way, and arrived in France. The Allied military, for obvious reasons, desperately needed to see ‘more settled conditions on the frontier’. 40 Any disturbances in the rear of the armies fighting Germany could obviously threaten communication lines and damage combat effectiveness. A draft SHAEF report in October 1944 put these pragmatic considerations firmly on the agenda: A comparatively stable political situation in France will be of the greatest importance to us when engaged in Germany either under Overlord or Talisman. We should not have to look over our shoulders, our lines of communication would be more secure, and less French troops would have to be permanently diverted to internal security.41 Both British and American understanding of developments in the Pyrénées-Orientales was informed by the observations of those closer to the situation than SHAEF, in particular diplomatic representatives across the border in Spain. In the first three months following the Liberation of the Pyrénées-Orientales, Anglo-American observers in Catalonia discussed the situation with Franquist officials on the border, and reported back their concerns. They were apparently extremely worried about the ex-Republicans massing on the French side of the border, particularly in the mountain region of Canigou. The Civil Governor of Gerona sought to make common cause with the Allies immediately after the Liberation by enquiring whether it might not be possible for them to deploy one of their own Allied military units in order to keep control, rather than waiting to rely on what would doubtless be ineffective action from the French authorities.42 It was clear that Spaniards on Franco’s side of the frontier were as convinced as their Spanish enemies on the other side that ideology could subvert the borders of French national integrity in the Pyrenees. In practice, they rapidly realized that the physical threat posed to Spain was relatively slight, agreeing by late September 1944 that ‘the Spanish elements enrolled in the French maquis presented no real problem for Spain; they would in all probability remain on the French side of the frontier where they could continue their disorderly life with impunity’.43 Undoubtedly, however, the possible permeability of the frontier would allow Franco to argue, for domestic purposes, that there was a real danger to Spanish interests from the Pyrenees. As the Foreign Office suggested, ‘Once again he will be able to pose as sole bulwark in Spain against

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recurring peril.’44 The apparent massing of troops on both sides of the border seemed like a piece of slightly surreal shadow-boxing, a miniature and unconvincing replica of the real war still being fought further north: ‘a modern Francoist variation of Don Quijote tilting at windmills’. 45 After the abortive Val d’Aran attack in mid-October 1944, the British Embassy in Madrid reported wryly that ‘the toy-soldier battles between Spanish regular troops and Spanish irregular maquisards in the Pyrenees were announced as gloriously terminated in favour of the former’. 46 For the British, these incidents on the Pyrenean frontier began to seem vaguely ridiculous: misinformed Spanish Republicans crossing the frontier in the misplaced belief that people on the other side were waiting to receive them with revolutionary zeal, and an exaggeratedly large number of Franquist soldiers and weaponry drafted to the border to deal with a very minor menace: ‘The present outcome of all these frontier incidents is that both sides have been made to look rather foolish.’47 American commentators largely shared the British view that the dangers actually presented at the frontier were relatively minor. American observers visiting the Pyrenean border at this period generally returned with the perception that the numbers of men involved were too small to be of significance, and that the real danger presented was a political one, connected to the apparent hegemony of the Communist Party, and the likely influence that this ‘industrious minority’ might come to wield on the Franco-Spanish border.48 Americans charged with assessing the situation consistently argued that the dangers of violence were probably being exaggerated by those very French people in the area who potentially had the most to lose: ‘great uneasiness, especially among the well-to-do . . . no indication that disorder prevails or is imminent’.49 As Crane Brinton suggested in letters back to the Analysis Branch of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in the autumn of 1944, it was a case of ‘the wildest rumors’, which were hardly borne out by the actual situation when viewed close-to.50 On the whole, the Allies were keen to try and downplay, and if possible forget, what was happening on the frontier. It was felt that the BBC should be told to moderate positive reports of the role that the Spanish maquisards had played in the Liberation of the area.51 The contentious matter of where the real borders between France and Spain would be drawn should be left to local squabbles, and any attempt to get embroiled in these Franco-Spanish disputes should be firmly resisted. The invitation from the Franquist authorities for the Allies to intervene did not ‘spring from any particular love of ourselves or the Americans’, the British Consul-General explained; ‘it is more probably prompted by the feeling

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that we might be able to pull some awkward chestnuts out of the fire for them’.52 On all counts, it seemed to be sensible to ensure that Allied troops did not get involved in the region, and that the French were left to sort out the problems by themselves. 53 At a local level, however, it was clear that the Allies were still playing a part in the frontier community. Allied observers in Catalonia often found themselves acting in effect as middle men, mediating messages from the French Government in Paris which could not easily deliver material or messages itself, because of the continued isolation of the area. In early October 1944, the press attaché at the British consulate in Barcelona went to Perpignan. With him, he took 6 Liberation newsreels, 200 copies of France Libre, and a large selection of books which had been sent to him by the French Government for delivery, along with 500 postcard-sized pictures of Churchill and de Gaulle. He reported that his French colleague in Perpignan, ‘with the fourteen odd political parties . . . has his hands full with censorship and naturally welcomes any apolitical matter . . . which provides him with solid material calling for unity amongst all French’. 54 He was enormously impressed by the positive welcome he was given. At the first official cinema showing of some of the newsreels he had brought, the Prefect of the PyrénéesOrientales made a speech thanking Britain for its help in the war, and this was followed by an apparently spontaneous public rendering of what the press attaché later understood to have been ‘Tipperary’. It was soon evident that the Allies based in Spain could mediate in other ways, acting as a vital cross-frontier bridge between French and Spanish local officials on either side. In Spain, the Civil Governor of Gerona asked the British to arrange a face-to-face meeting with the new Prefect of the Pyrénées-Orientales at which they could talk about their concerns together. Over a discussion at dinner, it rapidly became clear that both men agreed that it was imperative to remove Spanish guerrilleros from the frontier as quickly as possible. The French Prefect said that he was awaiting detailed guidance from his government. He would need them to send French troops with sufficient arms to control the frontier, and had hopes that the Senegalese Regiment, currently stationed in Perpignan, would do the job, if they were given sufficient equipment.55 The Spanish Governor and the French Prefect apparently skirted round the issue of how to provide food for people in the Pyrénées-Orientales who were now running very short of vital supplies. Because of ongoing communications problems there was little likelihood that food could reach the Pyrénées-Orientales from elsewhere in France as quickly as it might from across the border in Spain. Until the guerrilleros were removed

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from the French side of the border, it was evident, however, that the Prefect would not be able to get the much-needed supplies of food transported over the frontier. Provisioning the Department was at least partly dependent on acceding to Franquist Government demands to remove the ex-Republicans: ‘the food situation . . . is becoming acute . . . . the French Red Cross and other French organisations in Spain will not be able to count to any extent on the good will of the Spanish authorities until the Spanish maquis on the French side of the frontier have been rendered innocuous’.56

Removing inflammable material From both the local French viewpoint and that of the Allies in the border lands, the Spanish Republicans were potentially dangerous material which needed to be removed. Two days after the Liberation, British observers had described the Spanish maquisards as: ‘inflammable material that a spark may turn into a blaze’.57 The same expression was soon being repeated by Foreign Office interlocutors in Paris, arguing that many people would now ‘like this inflammable material removed from the frontier’.58 Within the Department itself, the newly won reputation of the Spanish Republicans did not last long. By early September 1944, reports were coming in of French concern about the presence of still-armed Spanish maquisards in their midst. At Saint-Laurent-de-la-Salanque, where the Spanish Republicans had hoisted their flag over a local café, the police reported that feelings were highly negative: The population is very troubled by this state of affairs as well as by the attitude which Spanish nationals have been taking over the last few days. The inhabitants of this locality want immediate steps taken to put an end to this foreign activity which could very well disturb good order and peace in the area. 59 The Commissaire Spécial at Mont-Louis reported that thirty guerrilleros had got over the frontier on the night of 19/20 September, and that they had been followed by a second group, camouflaged in a lorry, the following afternoon.60 Although the Departmental Liberation Committee of the PyrénéesOrientales was strongly supportive of the guerrillero presence, some of the local Liberation committees in the Department had always been a good deal more circumspect. The Liberation committee in Saint-Cyprien,

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for instance, sought advice in mid-September 1944 as to what it should do about passing on tracts to the Spanish community residing in the area. The Committee had apparently received a bundle of these tracts from the Unión Nacional Española which wanted them to be distributed among the Spanish residents of the commune. Local representatives argued that they could not do this in the absence of official guidance from the French authorities. 61 In some parts of the Department, early signs of tension developed between members of the French Resistance, particularly non-Communist elements, and the Spanish maquisards. The Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR), for example, complained to the Prefect that there seemed to be different rules operating for them and for the Spaniards as regards keeping stocks of weapons after the Liberation. Whilst their guns and armament, they claimed, had been removed, no one had bothered to disarm the Spanish. They demanded that there should be one law for all on this, so that their own safety could be protected: ‘No Spaniards with weapons in this area . . . put them all together in a vast field so that they can’t carry on trying to control the French.’ 62 From gratitude and admiration for the help of the Spanish maquisards in the Liberation, local attitudes moved back to a position only slightly removed from the deeply hostile representation of Spanish exiles which had been current in the Department in 1939. The Spanish were disorderly, getting special treatment, taking over space belonging to the French, and dangerously divided among themselves. Three months after the Liberation, the sympathetic Travailleur Catalan was bemoaning the general negativity with which the Spanish were then being portrayed: ‘we regret that there are still highly ambivalent attitudes’. 63 The Prefect was aware of the growing tension with Spanish Republicans, but hesitated to act too decisively because of the size of the Spanish population in the Department: ‘it should not be forgotten that Perpignan had always been headquarters of anti-Spanish activities and that he had 45,000 Spanish residing in his Department’.64 In addition, at least some of the Spanish refugee factions in the Pyrénées-Orientales were supported by the Communist Party which had sought to provide the only political voice for the exiled Republicans by creating the Unión Nacional Española (UNE) in 1942. With the Liberation, however, many other political currents among the Spanish refugees, often bitterly opposed to the Communists, reappeared highly visibly in the landscape of the PyrénéesOrientales. In the months after Liberation, relationships locally between the UNE and several of these other organisations reached such a low point that a Communist weekly like Le Travailleur Catalan could claim that:

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Some people have too much of a tendency to forget the role played by the Unión Nacional Espanola and its valiant Guerrilleros in the Liberation of our country, preferring to support the position of some uncontrolled groups that will be likely to harm the work we’ve done to liberate Spain . . . it is urgent for us to totally suppress organisations which, in our country, and especially in our department, are acting outside the control of the officially recognised organisation, because they are in effect nothing other than the agents of Franco, working for the Fifth column.’65 Viewed from Paris, the whole situation of this frontier region with Spain seemed fraught with difficulties. Before its arrival in Paris, the administration in Algiers, then called the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (CFLN), had received representatives from General Franco’s Government, and had sent an official CFLN delegate back to Madrid during the period preceding the Liberation of France. The new Foreign Minister in the Provisional Government was apparently very ready to continue this relationship with the Franquist regime. He professed himself willing to ‘let sleeping dogs lie and to maintain correct relations with Spain . . . relations had in fact been quite satisfactory in North Africa’.66 The actual circumstances of Liberation in the frontier area, however, had complicated this position for the Government. The authorities in Paris were first beholden to the Spanish Republican troops for the positive role they had played in the battle against the enemy. Secondly, in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, they were quite unable to despatch enough troops to provide adequate security along the length of the Pyrenean border with Spain, so that any thought of disarming or disciplining the Spanish Maquis was completely out of the question. In addition, attempts by the Government to interfere in too heavy-handed a way could have provoked retaliation by the still well-armed, and largely Communist forces of the local Resistance. As a senior official at the Quai d’Orsay expressed it to British Embassy staff in mid-September 1944: It was all very deplorable, but there was little that the French could do about it at present. The Spanish Republicans had played an active part in the Liberation of the area. Pending the arrival of French regular troops and new Gendarmerie forces, the French had to rely on the FFI for maintaining order in the region. This made it exceedingly difficult for them to eject the Spanish Republicans.67

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Although powerless to do much about it, the French Government was keen to ensure that proper French control points were set up on the border with Spain. Initial measures instructed the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI) to provide personnel for the frontier posts and to check that those crossing into Spain were not enemy troops or French collaborators fleeing to escape justice. Given the parlous nature of food supplies, the FFI had also been told to look out for people trying to smuggle food into France.68 It rapidly became clear to Paris, however, that the security situation on the frontier was poor and deteriorating. The root of the problem, they judged, was the continued presence of Spanish Republican troops, planning incursions over the border. General Koenig was categoric in his belief that there could be no restoration of order until the ex-Republicans were completely removed. In a conversation with British officials in October 1944, he suggested three ways in which they could be rid of Spanish activity in the area. The best solution, he argued, would be for the Spanish maquisards to be granted an amnesty or a guarantee of safety that would induce them to go home to Spain. Those who could not return to Spain should be made to join the French Foreign Legion and continue the war in a properly constituted fighting force: ‘He had no use for the Volunteer Battalions, whatever their nationality.’ Finally, for the dependants of those Spaniards who were not being sent back across the border, he recognized that the French would need to provide accommodation: ‘It would be necessary to establish, of course, or to continue with the camps for women and children in France.’69 As the weeks passed, pressure built up within Government circles to move the Spanish combattants away from the frontier zone. One of the potent arguments in this discussion concerned the still sensitive issue of France’s national sovereignty. Members of the Secret Service, for example, apparently argued that if the Government failed to do something as basic as defend France’s national borders, it would find that American or British forces would step in to do so, thereby totally undermining France’s case for international recognition as a sovereign state. The link between France’s defence of her own frontiers, and the perceived threat from Allied groups which might seek to take over the job was quite explicit in the minds of some: If France wants to retain the full sovereignty of her frontiers, she must be in a position to show that in every case she is capable of maintaining order in every situation, and if necessary by force. Just at the time that certain Allied missions are being established in France,

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in order to monitor our activities, it seems even more necessary to set up an absolute control in the vicinity of the frontier.70 The solution finally accepted was the establishment of a cordon sanitaire at the Pyrenean frontier, a 20 kilometre exclusion zone which would be a no-go area for Spanish refugees. The suggested compromise between necessary gratitude to the guerrilleros who had helped to liberate France, and the reestablishment of good order was set out in as positive a way as possible at the end of October 1944: the French Government, in keeping with international law, has tried hard to prevent trouble in Spain emanating from the bases installed in France. But the Spanish Republican refugees, enrolled in the FFI, have taken an active part in the liberation of our territory. This makes the actual situation we are in rather complicated. Our Government has therefore been working on a statute which will reconcile our gratitude to the Spanish maquisards and our desire to maintain friendly relations with Spain. It has thus created, on its side, all along the Pyrenees, a 20 kilometre zone in which Spanish refugees in France will no longer be able to stay.71 In effect, the French had redrawn national borders by creating a second internal border from which all Spaniards would be excluded. The French Army, with a sizeable contingent of colonial troops, was despatched to control the no-go area on the frontier. Their orders were clear. No foreign presence was to be permitted anywhere within the 20 km zone, and any Spanish nationals at the frontier were to be removed and quartered in special camps: 1. No foreign unit, even one constituted within the framework of the FFI, must participate in the guarding of the frontier; 2. No foreign department must take part in the operations of control, verification of identity, or guard-duties, nor exercise any authority in the zone . . . those contravening this regulation will be expelled or placed under arrest; 3. No foreign grouping is allowed to be stationed in the frontier zone; the Spanish groups must be removed from the frontier, and put into camps, or special zones where they will be unable to cause trouble.72 The physical redrawing of national boundaries on the border with Spain, with the introduction of an internal frontier from which foreigners

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(particularly Spaniards) would be excluded, was a spatial representation of the way in which French perceptions of their foreign Liberator had evolved over the brief two-month period since the Liberation. From co-Liberators and Resistance heroes, the Spanish maquisards had become foreign elements which needed to be removed from the limits of national borders, and separated off from the native population. The removal of Spanish maquisards from French border territory with the establishment of the 20 km no-go area was the prelude to a more extensive expropriation. One of the most potent symbols of the postLiberation confidence and self-assertion of the Spanish Resistance community had been the hoisting of the Spanish Republican flag over Spanish Consulates and offices in the Pyrénées-Orientales. In taking over official Spanish Government buildings in France, the guerrilleros were tangibly demonstrating their claim to represent the real and legitimate government of Spain. Most importantly, they were also showing French people in the Pyrénées-Orientales that they had an official status which would need to be recognized. They were no longer unwanted victims and immigrants, but rather heroic soldiers who had reconquered an honoured and respected position in France. As Allied observers noted: ‘The power and programme of the Spanish maquis are indicated by the fact that Spanish Republican flag now flies over Spanish consulate at Perpignan, which is guarded by Spanish maquis.’ 73 In the spring of 1945, however, the Spanish Republicans were removed from this symbolic piece of recognized Spanish territory in Perpignan, and forced to make way for a new Consul, sent from the Franquist Government, who arrived to take up residence. In many ways, the removal of the Spanish Republicans from the Departmental Consulate in March 1945 was symbolic of a much greater dispossession than the mere physical vacation of Franquist Government space. The initial reaction to this, particularly in sympathetic French Communist circles, was strident. The Departmental Liberation Committee unanimously voted a resolution condemning the presence of ‘a representative of the assassin Franco . . . in the Spanish Consulate at Perpignan’,74 and was joined in this by a number of local Liberation Committees, who sent supportive letters deploring the changes in Spanish representation. 75 Despite the reaction, it was clear, however, that nothing was going to be done to prevent the symbolic expulsion of Spanish Republicans. The Spanish exiles in the Pyrénées-Orientales now found themselves in a particularly difficult position. The Centro Espagnol of Perpignan, together with the Fédération de résidants espagnols, spoke on behalf of the approximately 30 thousand permanent Spanish residents in the

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Department. Not only had they suffered a major humiliation with the closure of the Republican Consulate, but they might also find themselves, as Spaniards, subject to the jurisdiction of a Franquist Consul within France. In effect dispossessed of their own nationality, they would be dependent on the French Government and the Departmental authorities to ensure that they did not fall under the jurisdiction of Franco’s new local representative in France. From heroic fighters and liberators, they found themselves in a highly ambiguous position, not dissimilar from the one they had occupied in France in early 1939, dependent on the goodwill and political support of their hosts: ‘we beg the Departmental Liberation Committee of the Pyrénées-Orientales to do their utmost to ensure that the declarations of the [French] Foreign Minister are fully applied, “taking us, as Spanish Republicans, out of the jurisdiction of the franquist Consulates”’. In this difficult and ambiguous position, loyalty to the French Government would have to be as important as loyalty to the Spanish cause, and they pledged their fidelity to both: ‘assuring the Departmental Liberation Committee of the PyrénéesOrientales of their resolve to put all their energies in the service of France in the battle for production . . . affirming their faith in the destinies of the French and Spanish republics’. 76 A further step in the removal of autonomous status from the Spanish Republican community in the Pyrénées-Orientales came as part of nationwide moves to disarm those Resistance groups which had continued to operate independently, outside officially constituted army forces. The Spanish D Battalion at Prades, for example, laid down their weapons in March 1945. As they did so, the Spanish resisters publicly underlined the key part they had played in the Liberation: ‘as we give back to the French Authorities the weapons with which we have helped the People of France to defeat our common Hitlerian enemies, we feel proud that we have gained the affection and sympathy of this fine and dear Nation which welcomed us in the sad days of our exodus’. 77 In fact the status of Spanish Republicans in France was by no means secure, as the exiles themselves fully realized. Meetings of Spanish Republicans in the region called on the Government to consider them as ‘children of France’, and resolve any problems that might prevent them from accessing French nationality.78 A government decree of 15 March 1945 officially accorded refugee status to those Spaniards who had been in France at the outbreak of war, but there were still major uncertainties about the extent to which non-resident Spaniards who had been deported as political prisoners by the Germans, and who were now being repatriated to France, would obtain the right to stay in the

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country and acquire a proper legal status.79 In the eyes of many sympathetic to the Republicans, this was deeply unjust: ‘the victims of this iniquitous measure are precisely those sincere Republicans, those honest workers, those courageous guerrilleros who suffered and fought at our sides, who mixed their blood with that of our maquisards . . . and who saw 25,000 of their number deported to the death camps of Hitler’s Germany’.80 In this uncertain situation, Spanish Republicans, as with many immigrant groups, sought to earn their place in the local community through work. Former maquisards argued that they would now turn from wielding weapons of war to manufacturing them so that the soldiers of France could continue the struggle against Hitler. 81 From active participants, and indeed leaders in the Liberation, the Spanish ex-Republicans in the Pyrénées-Orientales became passive spectators, dependent on the continued goodwill of the host community, a community which had already demonstrated considerable hostility to them in the pre-war and Occupation years. The vulnerability of the immigrant minority became more and more obvious. In mid-June 1945, for example, there was an argument among several of the Spanish groups in the Department about the wisdom of supporting anti-Franquist motions that the Departmental Liberation Committee had just passed. To some extent, this reflected the enduringly bitter conflicts within the exile community, but the reservations were now formally expressed in terms of the need to behave properly towards the French authorities: ‘They feel that by acting like this they will not be seen as interfering in the affairs of the French Government.’ 82 Locally, Communists argued that any further guerrillero activity at the border might result in numbers of them being banished from France altogether. Le Travailleur Catalan reported that continued incidents at the frontier would increase French reservations about the Spanish and were: ‘sowing confusion and doubt, and discrediting the Spanish patriots in the eyes of the French’. The danger was that such actions would act as excuses to those in the Department who were keen to ‘take measures against our Spanish friends. They are actually considering throwing them out.’83 The change in the status of the Spaniards, as far as French residents in the Department were concerned, was obvious. As Antonio Bechelloni suggested, French perceptions of the Spanish Republicans in their midst changed back to the negative pre-war representations. The brave Spanish participation in the Liberation became an episode which largely disappeared from local memory:

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The guerrillero gave way to the refugee of 1939, to the defeated civil war Republican, to whom the tragic defeat which befell his country was followed by the dreadful welcome by the French in 1939, the persecutions of Vichy, the vicious repression by the Germans, and now the bitterly disappointed hopes of the future for Spain.84 By the end of the war with Germany in May 1945, it indeed seemed as if the proud Spanish contribution to the Liberation of the PyrénéesOrientales was being represented as an essentially supportive and secondary role to that of the French themselves. A victory parade in Céret, where the guerrilleros had paraded at the head of the column only nine months before, now positioned the Spanish Republicans well behind ‘the anonymous crowd’, and suggested that, in the struggle for Liberation, they had’ been associated . . . with their brothers on this side of the Pyrenees’. 85 In every way, they had moved to the back of the Liberation parade. The most positive representation of Spanish Republicans in the Department was that of exile and refugee for whom the native population had some responsibility. Sympathetic newspapers indeed phrased their support for the Spanish specifically in these terms of moral debts: ‘we must fulfil our responsibilities’. The distinction between the guerrilleros who had fought beside the French ‘like lions’ in the Liberation, and their current state as undesirable foreigners was presented as depressingly paradoxical: ‘every day they gave us the most vital help in the Liberation of France, and [now] they’re on the point of being thrown out of our Department where they are considered to be undesirable’. The case to be made on their behalf was said to rest on the courage they had exhibited in fighting for the Liberation of France, which should surely give them the right to remain in the region, and the fact that all they now desired was to be integrated into a productive French workforce. 86 The victim status of the Spanish in the Pyrénées-Orientales community was underlined by frantic calls to establish support networks for them, and provide donations of aid and money: ‘We must set up everywhere French Friends of Spain Committees, and affirm the solidarity of the People of France with these brave fighters who, in our maquis, took up arms at our side to liberate our land . . . we must help morally and materially.’ 87 It soon became clear that the duration of the Spanish exile in France would be longer than originally expected. As more information became available in France about the relative solidity of the Franco regime in Spain, there was a general implicit acceptance in the French press that

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the Liberation of Spain would not follow seamlessly from the Liberation of France, and that the Franco Government was likely to be there for some considerable time to come. In 1946, the American, British and French Governments issued a tripartite note (4 March 1946), expressing the hope that patriotic Spaniards would manage to get rid of Franco by peaceful means, but it was evident that none of these governments intended to interfere in the internal affairs of Spain in order to expedite a change of regime. Only four years later indeed, they sent their ambassadors back to the Spanish capital, and subsequently allowed Franquist Spain to join international organizations like UNESCO (1952), and the UN (1955). Former Spanish maquisards in the Pyrénées-Orientales were thus left in the difficult position of a foreign minority, dependent on the goodwill of the majority host community, forever ‘foreign’, and at the margins of a national identity which the French had reasserted for themselves. In some cases, Spanish Republicans who had been naturalized and then lost their French status under the Vichy regime found that they and their children were still officially considered to be foreign, no matter what their war records had been. At Osseja-Palau-de-Cerdagne, near Prades, for instance, one such Spanish resister reported that he had had his French nationality taken away by Vichy as a punishment for Resistance activities, but was still officially designated ‘foreign’ as late as March 1945. Even worse, his sons were also classified as foreign, although one had been deported in the war and was currently fighting in Alsace, and the other one had just been called up to fight in the French Army. 88 Even Spanish Resistance fighters who had married into the local community, and had fathered children in France, found their status was not French enough for public employment. Thus, for example, the case of one Céret resident, Antoine Robles, who had left his job in La Société frigidaire to join the Maquis with his French comrades from the town, only to find that there was no more employment when he returned. When the Departmental Liberation Committee suggested that Robles might be a suitable candidate to be employed by the local police, their request was speedily turned down. The response from the Commissaire Central was a classic refusal to allow a record of active Resistance service, and intermarriage in the community, to compensate for the essential non-Frenchness of the applicant: ‘As the person in question is of Spanish nationality, it is not possible to employ him in my administration.’ 89 Faced with the massive uncertainties of their situation, the Spanish in the Pyrénées-Orientales appeared to move back into the memorialization of their own shared exile history, which the French might observe, and

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occasionally participate in, but which would always mark them out as a distinct and separate foreign community. Thus, for example, in late July 1945, the Spanish Republicans in the Céret area organized a ceremony to mark the 9th anniversary of the Spanish Republic. They marched solemnly to the war memorial where they left a wreath. Then the mayor of Céret spoke to the exiles, finding the words, the local paper reported, ‘to sum up the meaning of the ceremony, and rekindle the hope in everyone’s heart that there would soon be a favourable outcome.’90 The borders of French and Spanish identity at the Liberation had shifted in a remarkably short space of time. For the French, the Spanish Republicans living locally had originally been seen as unwanted and dangerous foreigners who had been foisted on them in 1939. They had served from then on as the extraneous foreigner, used for work details, or separated from the native population with other non-nationals who would be excluded from the national life of the Vichy/Germandominated regime. With the Liberation, the formerly excluded and often despised Spanish became integrated into the national community of Liberation heroes, positioned as fighters who were passing through France in a continuing struggle against fascism, soon to be finished for all time in Spain. Not only were the Spanish Republicans now recognized and respected in France, but they also symbolically took possession of their own piece of national territory (the Spanish consulates and official buildings) in liberated France, and prepared to continue the war on the Franco-Spanish border. The Allies too continued their war, but this was a conflict that was being fought far away from the Pyrénées-Orientales and from the ideological concerns of the guerrilleros. As the weeks passed, it was clear that there was a broad identity of view between the British, American, Spanish and French Governments about the desirability of removing the Spanish Republicans, this ‘inflammable material’, from the frontier. Even more significantly, given the relative isolation of the region from Paris, local officials on both sides of the border agreed that they would need to rid themselves of the Spanish Republicans as quickly as possible, particularly if the French were to have any chance of obtaining much needed food supplies brought in from Spain. For the French Government, the securing of their southern border with Spain was an integral part of restoring the sovereignty and independence of France. In order to do this, it was ultimately necessary to establish a no-go area for Spanish Republicans the length of the FrancoSpanish Pyrenean border. The exclusion of Spaniards from this zone, and their subsequent eviction from the symbolic Spanish territory which

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they had claimed in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, made it clear that national priorities, and the re-establishment of territorial integrity, were a good deal more important to the French than apparently shared ideological concerns. Within a few months it was evident that the local French population was becoming wary about the military activities of Spanish Republicans, and realized that the Spanish presence in their Department was likely to continue for some time. In response to this, the French representation of their Spanish guests moved away from that of independent co-Liberator and hero, and reverted back to what it had formerly been, that of victim community, dependent on the hosts for aid and support. The Republicans were once more seen as refugees whose status within the French nation was ambivalent and uncertain. From highly visible guerrillero heros, leading the local Liberation parades, the Spanish Republicans moved to dependants, without their own identifiable territory, seeking to merge into the labour-force and not challenge the sensitivities of their hosts. From a group that looked forward to the continuing fight across the border, they became an exile group, waiting for an ever more distant return to their own country, marooned in the Pyrénées-Orientales with their own separate and clearly foreign identity and memorialization rituals. In April 1945, Perpignan town council started taking steps to flatten land that adjoined the cemetery to the west of their city. This area was precisely the land in which some 980 Spanish Republicans lay buried. The Departmental Liberation Committee, arguing that this was quite unacceptable behaviour, pointed out that the Spanish families concerned were in no position to take legal action themselves to oppose the desecration of their loved ones’ bones. 91 Symbolically, less than one year after the Liberation, the heroes and co-Liberators of the Department had become so invisible to some of the French authorities that the graves of their dead could be disturbed with apparent impunity. The ‘inflammable material’ had been removed completely from the frontier Liberation community.

6 The Long Goodbye: Reims

Military Liberation Whilst the French were securing their frontier region in the Eastern Pyrenees, Patton’s 3rd Army marched on towards the German border. The first American troops entered Châlons on 29 August, and reached the city of Reims on 31 August. By this time, the Germans had largely disappeared from the immediate area, with the exception of troops who had been instructed to blow up bridges and access points behind their retreat. The Department of the Marne, which the Allies were now liberating, had experienced an intense German military Occupation. In 1940, it had been situated in Occupied France, just on the border of the north-western ‘Zone interdite’. Three large German Army bases, at Suippes, Mourmelon and Mailly, were positioned close to the principal towns of the region, making the Occupation highly visible in military terms. The population of the Marne was already strongly marked by war and military occupation before the Fall of France. Memories of the travails of the Department in the First World War had always been close to the surface – the city of Reims suffered so grievously in this period that it had earned the post-war award of the Légion d’Honneur, the only town in France beside Verdun to be thus honoured. From the trauma of 1914–18, a strong pacifism had developed in this region during the interwar years, expressed politically in the dominant Republican Radical Party which maintained its popularity throughout the period. With the French defeat in 1940, the predominantly rural population of the Marne experienced a second close encounter with German military might. The arrival of the American Army in the Department in 1944 did not, however, spell the immediate end of war or of military occupation. 147

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Fig. 6.1 Reims cathedral in Liberation. Reims residents throng in front of the city’s famous cathedral, as they welcome US troops who liberated the town, 31 August 1944. Children and adults may be seen swarming over an American jeep in the foreground. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: EA 36202 (SF11 A).

Fighting continued in the near vicinity of the Marne, where the Allies were meeting strong and persistent German resistance. Nancy was not taken until 15 September, Metz and Strasbourg not until mid-November, and the border pockets continued in German hands until February/ March 1945. In effect, therefore, Reims found itself very close to the front line of fighting from the day of its Liberation in late August 1944 until the Germans signed the surrender document in the city on 7 May the following year. Reims’s status as the headquarters of the Allied military front line in Europe was confirmed when General Eisenhower moved the Forward Mission of SHAEF (the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) into the city in September 1944. Reims and its Department were simultaneously liberated and transformed into the Allied Command’s military forward base.

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From the moment of its Liberation, Reims and the Department of the Marne became the centre of an enormous concentration of Allied – almost entirely American – troops and equipment. From one Occupation by enemy troops, the Marnais passed almost directly to another by the Liberating Army, as Forward Base personnel set up camp, and troops passed through on their way to the battle zones further east. SHAEF headquarters was established close to the station in Reims, in part of the former Collège Moderne et Technique, and this became the nerve centre of future Allied military operations. With the defeat of Germany in May 1945, the military presence of the Americans did not diminish. Instead, more American troops poured into the region which became a redeployment zone for soldiers being brought back from Germany, and awaiting transportation onwards to the Pacific. Eight camps of this type were set up in a ring around the city of Reims, and each of them had a capacity for some 17,000 men who would be in transit, staying at the camps for a short period whilst transport was organized. In addition, 50,000 to 60,000 men were

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permanently at the camps (Mourmelon and Suippes) which the Germans had evacuated, and a further 7,000 military hospital patients and personnel were also transported through the area.1 The American military presence in the Marne, and the economic and social needs that it had, were to affect every aspect of the region’s life for well over two years after the Liberation. In employment terms alone, more than 8,000 French people in the Reims area were working directly for the Americans in March 1945.2 The Liberation of Reims was above all a military Liberation, replacing one large foreign army with another, even larger, foreign presence. This liberating army transformed the town and surrounding area into the key forward battle headquarters of the Allies in Europe, and then subsequently into a major military transit and redeployment zone. Unlike other parts of France, the Allied military stayed on in the Department until the end of 1946, with American soldiers who were keen to be demobilized and go home impatiently waiting for transport to get them back to the United States. It was in every way a unique, and particularly long goodbye. As the military attaché to the American Embassy tactfully expressed it in a meeting at Reims at the end of 1945, it was a little as if ‘a brother-in-law . . . rushes into his brother’s house with his family in tow in order to put out a fire, and then finds himself unfortunately forced to stay on after the fire.’3

Taking Over As the American forces marched into Reims on 30 August 1944, they were greeted by an ecstatic crowd. The Germans had largely fled from the city the day before, and the streets of Reims were already decorated with welcoming French and Allied flags. As one eye witness described it: At 11 o’ clock . . . in the midst of a crowd at fever pitch of enthusiasm, the main contingent of American troops came through. The tanks and vehicles had real difficulty in fighting their way through the crowd, and whenever the traffic stopped, groups of people threw themselves on the tanks. People were vying to kiss a soldier, or to give him a bottle of champagne, sweets, or a bouquet of flowers.4 There was evidence that French people in some parts of the Department were still inclined to mob passing American convoys as late as October 1944,5 although police reports suggested that in at least some of these cases it was as much a matter of children bothering American troops for

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Fig. 6.2 American soldier in Reims. An American soldier rests in a street of Reims, while people and children laugh and chat with him. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London: Keystone 482851 (SF11).

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free handouts as of continued unbridled joy at being liberated. 6 The Chief of Police at Reims indeed issued a note to all his forces pointing out the urgent need to stop this sort of behaviour which he felt could ultimately reflect badly on the local population: Since the Liberation of our town and the arrival of American soldiers, we have seen . . . large numbers of children, and even in some cases adults, who are bothering these troops and trying to get sweets or cigarettes from them. This sort of behaviour gives our Allies an extremely negative picture of French attitudes . . . It is vital that this begging ceases forthwith. 7 In the immediate post-Liberation weeks, the overall feeling seemed to be an understandable mixture of relief at being liberated and trepidation at what the future might bring. A large presence of Allied soldiers, the continuing battle close to the town, and the potentially seismic political changes which might come in the wake of Liberation were all causes of concern. Reports to the sub-prefect at Reims suggested that ‘the employers in general, and the bosses in Reims in particular have on the whole waited with joy for the day of Liberation, but it’s a joy mixed with some anxiety’.8 As in Cherbourg, the Allied military moved speedily to occupy buildings and camps recently vacated by the Germans. Quite apart from the need to find accommodation and office space for their Forward Command in the town, the Americans also requisitioned engineering and manufacturing workshops that could serve the needs of the Allied war-machine. In the well-known Usine Bauche et Bazancourt at nearby Châlons, the managing director complained bitterly that he had had to put up with the Germans requisitioning his factory from 3 February 1944 to 28 August 1944, only to find that it was now requisitioned by the Americans. He was particularly incensed at what he perceived to be the cavalier way in which the Americans had taken over his premises at the very moment when he was trying to get the factory restored and into full production: Unlike what occurred during the German requisition, there was absolutely no warning in advance . . . the American military personnel who came . . . had no official paper about the requisition; they simply told us what was going to happen, and in English. The takeover was immediately confirmed by the army placing sentries at the factory gates; none of them spoke French, but from the little information that we managed with some difficulty to get out of them, we think

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it’s to do with an artillery depot at Mourmelon, and they’re requisitioning our factory to do repairs for the depot.9 Besides houses and factories, the Americans also required social space for their troops, and in this, as in the requisitioning of factories, there was a strong similarity between the places that the Germans had taken over, and those which the United States authorities targeted for their personnel. The Opéra Paramount Cinema, for example, in Reims had been used exclusively by the Germans up to the Liberation, and then passed speedily into the hands of the Americans. As the cinema manager ruefully noted: ‘During the short period separating these two requisitions, we were able to restart our business as usual, from 20 September to 31 October, 6 weeks in all.’ 10 In Epernay, the Palace Theatre was similarly subject to a virtual monopoly by the Allied troops: ‘Occupation: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday each week. The American Army reserves the right to occupy it on Fridays, with 24 hours notice.’11 To many French people locally, the actual presence of the American Army in some of these key municipal sites would have precisely the same impact on them as that of the Germans had had before the Liberation. By the following year, the manager of the Epernay Palace Theatre had clearly reached the end of his tether in servicing foreign occupiers: ‘for 5 years my two operators and me . . . haven’t been able to have the pleasure of any days holiday, because we have had to be there, firstly for the Boches, and then for the Allied troops . . . we’ve had no payment at all for the Allied shows’. 12 Given the key military importance of the area, the army retained its right to have priority use of the communications network. The regional director of postal services, for example, found that even official French Government letters were difficult to deliver. He was forced to manage by using a complicated relay system of cyclists, since none of his van drivers were able to obtain the necessary travel warrants from the Allies. Within the Department of the Marne, private communication by mail was not permitted in the initial weeks of Liberation, and there was some discussion in early September 1944 about the possibility of persuading the Allied authorities to allow local people to communicate with postcards, an approach that had already been permitted in the Orléans and Paris regions. 13 An area like Reims, with such a high concentration of Allied military activity, clearly posed particular political problems for the newly installed Provisional Government in Paris. Whilst recognizing the

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paramount importance of supporting the continuing war effort, they also had to ensure that local officials behaved in ways which safeguarded the still precarious sovereignty and independence of France. In day-to-day relationships with the Allies, there could be a number of potential issues on which it would be sensible to give specific governmental advice, in order to guide the newly nominated Prefect. As the Ministry of Finance explained: agreements formulate the principles which have inspired the French Administration, that is to say, on one hand, respect for French sovereignty, with the sole exception of those powers necessary to the Commander in Chief in order to pursue military operations, and on the other hand, French participation in the common War effort as far as her current economic situation allows. It is however still clear that precise and detailed guidance would allow us to put the relationship between the French Administration and the Allied authorities on a more precise basis, and would do away with some somewhat debatable practices.14 At a local level, the Departmental Liberation Committee showed early on that it too intended to take a forceful role in monitoring relationships with the Allies. In such a traditionally conservative area, such incipient militancy might have seemed surprising. The position of the left-of-centre political groupings in Reims, however, had considerably strengthened in the wake of the Liberation, and the president of the Departmental Liberation committee, Michel Sicre, was actually a member of the Communist Front National, and represented the CGT (Confédération générale du travail) union on the Committee. Whilst only three out of ten of the members were Communists, Sicre’s key role as president gave the Committee a powerful counter-voice to the Prefect and Commissaire de Police in the early months of Liberation. His view, expressed in the local paper, was that the Departmental Liberation Committee should continue its work as the ‘emanation of the people’ well after the Liberation, getting rid of the collaborators, and ‘organising the country’.15 As the days wore on, it became apparent that Sicre, and his colleagues in the Departmental Liberation Committee, were going to be keeping a close eye on American activity in the region. At a public meeting on 8 October 1944, Sicre saluted the bravery of the Allies: ‘But we salute above all the tenacity of the glorious Red Army . . . without this tenacity, it is not certain that the Allies could have been ready in time.’ Greeting this with acclaim, the audience called for the Russian national anthem

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to be played alongside that of the Allies and the chant des partisans: ‘The announcer explained that it had not been possible to get hold of the Russian anthem, and so they had replaced it by the Resistance chant des partisans.’16 In the early months of their encounter in Reims, relationships between the French and the Americans were set within the context of the ongoing war that was being fought close by. Reims was just behind the fighting lines of some serious and hotly contested battles, and the priority of Allied Command was to ensure that there was no disruption or enemy action behind their troops that could endanger victory. At one point, Colonel Thrasher, the American commander, became so concerned about the security situation in Reims that he threatened the Commissaire de la République with more forceful military intervention: I feel that the security of the American troops in Reims and the surrounding region is not sufficient at the present. There is no doubt that enemy agents are hiding in the town. Each night flares are seen, particularly during the air-raid alerts. Flashing lights and signals are also made . . . I would be compelled to take over the military control of the town, and maybe of the Region, which would mean, of course, inconvenience to the French population.17 The colonel had already requested the French authorities to order a curfew of all civilians in the city between 9 at night and 6 in the morning. 18 The local population was understandably anxious about the geographical proximity of the battles being fought.19 As the fighting on the front yo-yoed between the Allied and German combatants, some Rémois seemed to take perverse comfort from the fact that the American Army was apparently not as immediately invincible as it might have seemed: ‘it’s like a sort of rehabilitation of the French Army which, in 1940, was also beaten . . . although everyone points out that we didn’t have the planes or the material, or the numbers that the Americans have’.20 In a way, the difficulties on the German front at the end of 1944 increased, rather than decreased, sympathy for the Americans. Interestingly enough, however, this early sympathy went hand in hand with a reawakening pride in the capability of a sovereign French Army: Contrary to the feelings expressed at the beginning of the German attack when there was no hesitation in criticising the American Army, the efficient resistance of the US forces has earned them a great wave of sympathy, although people feel that it’s increasingly desirable for

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the French to participate in the War, because our Army would never have allowed itself to be surprised if it had the material which the Americans have got. 21

Living together As the months passed, and the French and Americans became more used to each other’s presence, many of the difficulties between them which had been evident in Cherbourg and Marseille surfaced again in Reims. A large army presence in a relatively small area naturally stretched the physical infrastructure to breaking point. The requisitioning of buildings increased as the months went on, and more and more troops entered the region. By early 1945, the detailed list of American army occupation of buildings in Reims included 17 factories, 41 garages, 5 cinemas, 4 dance halls, 3 barracks, 2 hospitals, 68 hotels, 12 restaurants, 174 private houses, 122 flats, 260 rooms in private houses, 5 schools, the Stade Municipal, the municipal music conservatory, public gardens, and 6 of the major arterial roads in the city.22 Much the same was true for the neighbouring town of Châlons where the Police reported that the people were getting more and more upset by American demands on local accommodation. In particular, the fact that the US Army had taken over various barracks in the town, forcing French soldiers to regroup in noticeably less comfort in the fields outside, created a very poor impression. The final straw had been the American requisitioning of the only decent café left in Châlons, ‘despite the fact that they had bars in all the buildings they occupy and that this café was not needed for utilitarian purposes, but simply for their own pleasure’. The situation with accommodation had apparently become so acute that the Police warned that American actions were leading to a widening gulf between the local people and the US soldiers. 23 Certainly, the Reims Chamber of Commerce became so incensed by the situation in early February 1945 that it asked the sub-prefect if he could arrange a meeting with the Minister of Economic Affairs in Paris as soon as possible. It pointed out that American requisitioning of industrial and commercial premises now much exceeded anything seen during the German occupation of the town. 24 The strain on the day-to-day life of the city caused by the requirements of the military was evident in shortages of basic services. The watersupply, for example, was quite unable to cope with the demands placed upon it. The Americans had apparently set up a large number of pumps without telling the local water department, with the result that there was

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a real danger that the inhabitants would find themselves left without any water at all. The French authorities complained that they had written to the Allies on several occasions to draw their attention to the problem, but had never received a proper reply.25 The basic communications system of the town remained massively dominated by the US Army. The railway station was allocating only one platform, for 20 wagons, to the needs of local manufacturers, compared with 250 wagons before the war. Of the seven warehouses for goods shipment, six and a half were in use by the Americans. The same kind of problem presented itself for those wanting to receive or ship goods on the river. Telephone communication was extremely difficult because 800 telephone exchanges had been requisitioned, without any prior distinction being made between commercial and private users.26 Besides all these infrastructural difficulties, the day-to-day problems of smoothing relationships between army encampments and local people were not dissimilar to those encountered in Cherbourg or Marseille, but the sheer scale of the American presence multiplied the difficulties, and sometimes magnified their local significance. Naturally the Rémois police were at the sharp end of Franco-American incidents, and felt themselves to be grossly understaffed for such a role. In early January 1945, they were desperately requesting reinforcements to help them to do the job required: ‘policemen are workers like any other, they are . . . married, fathers . . . they have the right to a family life . . . you can’t consider them as conscript soldiers’.27 Some impression of the scale of the public order problems can be seen from the tally of monthly arrests – in April for instance, 106 people were arrested by order of the French police, and 41 by the American military police. 28 Even before this, in the first few weeks of the Liberation, the French police found themselves in the unenviable position of being forced to deal with American soldiers who had behaved in ways which the local population were already beginning to find excessive. The daily police reports of autumn 1944 speak of sorting out café brawls, dealing with traffic accidents caused by the military, and trying to stop troops selling army supplies to French black-marketeers. On the night of 14 September 1944, for instance, the French police were called to two cafés in the 3rd arrondissement where American soldiers were refusing to leave the premises, and were carrying on drinking. As they were ejected from the bars, ‘one of them observed to the officers that they were nothing at all to do with the French police’.29 Unpleasant incidents between drunken soldiers and local people had to be sorted out on a regular basis: ‘Mesdames Mercier and Prina . . . were victims of an attack by a drunken

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American soldier who hit them in the face, giving them superficial wounds. They received treatment for these at the Maison de la Retraite . . . from American hospital staff. The soldier concerned ran off before the Police could arrive.’30 On occasions, public order offences attracted considerable publicity in the region, as for example in the case of a young woman raped and threatened with death. On 18 September 1944, a seventeen-year-old girl from Fromentières had been abducted by three American soldiers, two black and one white, and then raped. Her enraged father claimed to the French police that the soldiers had intended to kill her, but that one of them, ‘very catholic, and wearing a rosary, had saved her life by telling his comrades not to do this’.31 Gradually, as the weeks wore on, and conditions for the local population did not noticeably improve, there were more and more complaints not just about the public behaviour of the Americans in the streets, but also about their apparent profligacy as consumers. A police report sent to the Ministry of the Interior in mid-January 1945 noted that those French people who were in regular contact with the Americans (railway workers, manual workers, charwomen) had a low opinion of their liberators: The Americans are pointlessly destroying bits of furniture taken from the Germans . . . which would be really helpful to the victims . . . in the town. They are wasting vast quantities of food, leaving bits of mortadello for the dogs, throwing coffee in the streams, etc. The public has the impression that they are executing orders given to them by their superiors for reasons which are moreover ill-defined.32 This growing anger at what was perceived as American over-provision in comparison with the severe shortages faced by the French was not, of course, limited to the Reims area. It was occurring in Marseille, and in many other parts of France. There were indeed a number of food demonstrations all over France in this period – the police recorded fiftyone in the mid-February to mid-March period.33 An opinion poll, asking French people whether the food situation in early spring 1945 was better or worse than the position before the Liberation, found 59 per cent of respondents claiming it was worse, and 79 per cent worse than it had been in October 1944.34 However, the tension in relationships was not a one-way affair. The Americans themselves became steadily more irritated at what they saw as the exploitative approach local tradesmen were taking towards them.

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The French police had already noted in mid-September that some businesses had been selling champagne to the Allied troops at exorbitant prices. 35 By October, the Americans had made an official complaint to the French authorities about the prices they were being charged and were threatening to intervene in the market by setting up military cooperatives to buy in bulk and drive prices down. The economic and political dangers which this perceived exploitation posed for Franco-American relations in the future were not lost on the French officials: The American authorities have also let it be known that, in certain cases, the prices being charged to their soldiers are noticeably higher than those charged to the French. There is in this practice, not only dishonesty and an infringement of the regulation on prices, but also a discourtesy towards our liberating Allies which is painful to all those whose delicacy of spirit has not yet been destroyed by an appetite for profit. 36 In addition, the Americans considered that the level of pilfering by French people in the area was quite unacceptable. The US authorities complained in January 1945 that a number of posts they had erected to support their telegraphic communications had been removed by locals, presumably for their personal use in rebuilding their houses or warming the insides of their homes.37 In some of the camp canteens operated by the Americans for their French workers, there was concern that quantities of food were being diverted by cooks with quite ulterior motives, a source of understandable French as well as American anxiety at a time of such widespread under-supply of food.38 In the docks at Reims, the American military police, accompanied by their French colleagues, engaged in spot searches of workers as they left the docks to try to counteract pilfering.39 Meanwhile, the very considerable dumps of out-of-date German food and medicine that the Americans were leaving in some places – reportedly sixty lorry-loads on one day in March – continued to attract the attention of desperate and hungry French people. 40 Finally, as in Marseille, the Americans seemed to feel that complaints about the level of disruption that French civilians were experiencing were entirely out of place, given the fact that the Allied armies were still engaged in fighting the enemy and driving on into Germany. Some of the growing irritation of the American authorities on this front could be discerned in a reported conversation between the sub-prefect of Reims and Colonel Thrasher, the American commander. The Frenchman had explained that the burden on Reims of the incessant arrival of more and

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more troops and military hardware in the city was becoming very difficult to handle. Thrasher agreed that he would do his best to alleviate the problems, but pointed out that there was a much wider campaign to be fought. ‘The General indicated to me’, reported the sub-prefect, ‘that in England the population had accepted restrictions that were a lot harder than those which our citizens were facing at the moment.’41 An example of some of the ‘on the ground’ bad blood between nationals of the two groups is provided by the police records of a quarrel between two American soldiers and a local trader. The Americans had entered an electrical shop in Reims to purchase an electric iron that they had seen in the window. An argument had broken out in the shop, and the interpreter accompanying the Americans had lodged a formal complaint with the police. The shop owner’s written affadavit argued first that the interpreter had started the whole quarrel when he observed that ‘at Reims we were all collaborators and that if they had been Germans coming in to buy something, we would have given them the iron’. The Frenchman admitted that he had then said: ‘The Germans had been as well-behaved as the Americans’, but he denied absolutely suggesting that they had been better behaved. He also denied that he had said, ‘that the Americans had only come to France to sell us their junk’, but he did admit that he had pointed out to the soldiers that ‘since the Americans were bringing a lot of junk into France, nothing prevented them from bringing in some electric irons.’42 These difficulties which had surfaced in Franco-American relationships in Reims would be considerably complicated, however, by two important developments in the spring of 1945. First, the political situation in Reims changed very markedly. In April 1945 the first postLiberation elections in France, municipal elections, took place. In the smaller rural communes around Reims, the result was not dissimilar to the patterns of pre-war voting. In Reims, however, there was a spectacular success for the Communist Party which, according to Intelligence Service sources, was as much a surprise to the Party as to the authorities: at Reims, the unexpected rise of the Communist Party which has put it very markedly in top place has caused great surprise. The Communist Party itself didn’t expect such a great success. In the Reims suburbs, the enthusiasm of the masses is very considerable. People think that everything is going to change and that there will be energetic reforms as far as food is concerned. In the bourgeois milieu, people are quite anxious, but are quite open in saying, ‘let’s let them try, and we’ll see whether they’re more capable than the others.’43

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After a lively political argument, the Communist, Michel Sicre, was elected as the mayor of Reims, much to the anger of the Socialist Party in the town, and the formerly all-powerful Radical Party, which had been completely trounced. Thus a Communist took over the running of a city which had been controlled by the Radicals and the Right without any interruption since 1919. In the other major towns of the region – Châlons, and Epernay – the Right was similarly in full electoral retreat. 44 Secondly, and between the two rounds of the municipal elections, the Germans surrendered, bringing the war in Europe to an end. The surrender document was signed in Reims at SHAEF’s Forward Headquarters in the Collège moderne et technique. The sub-prefect of Reims ordered the bells of the city to be rung, and recommended that the streets should be decorated with flowers and flags, and that there should be appropriate ceremonies at war memorials in the locality.45 Inevitably, in Reims, as elsewhere in France, celebrations for VE Day were actually less spontaneous and joyous than those which had greeted the Liberation the previous year. In Reims, there was a victory parade. The Intelligence Service reported to Paris, however, that local reactions dwelt mainly on what was perceived as the regrettable absence of English troops from the line-up, and the very slight participation of French soldiers in the march-past. Revealingly, the report argued that the public had been upset by the behaviour of the Communist Party in this parade, criticizing them for appearing poorly dressed and ill-shaven, and for giving the clenched fist salute as they had paraded. 46 With the final Allied victory in Europe, the people of Reims and the surrounding area might have expected the American military to move out, so that the independent social and economic life of their Department could resume again. As the Reims Chamber of Commerce pointed out, ‘all this inconvenience would be of slight importance if the stockpiling of the American Army was a temporary phenomenon, and if we could expect a return to normal conditions as soon as hostilities cease’. 47

The long goodbye Any hopes, however, that the Allied victory in Europe would bring a rapid departure of American troops was almost immediately dashed. The subprefect of Reims discovered some ten days after the signing of the surrender in the city that the Forward Headquarters of SHAEF was to be replaced by a vast network of camps which would serve for the regrouping of American personnel before they were sent on to other theatres of war

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or, when the war was over, were gathered together and prepared for embarkation back to their homes in the United States. So concerned did he become about the likely effect of all this on the area that he wrote a long letter to the American commander setting out his worries: ‘I am afraid that the plans which your department is currently preparing for the regrouping of American forces will be gravely prejudicial to the resumption of economic activity in Reims.’ He recognized that Reims had necessarily played a major role whilst hostilities lasted, but pleaded with the military to recognize that the town should not be called upon on its own to bear the full weight of the considerable infrastructure that would be needed to accommodate the numbers of American troops proposed.48 Despite this, preparations for US deployment of troops continued. By June, the French discovered that the American Assembly Area Command was intending to set up eight camps in the Mourmelon, Suippes area, just outside Reims. These camps, whose names were Cleveland, Pittsburg, Philadelphia and St Louis for Mourmelon, and Boston, New York, Baltimore and Brooklyn for Suippes, would each accommodate on average 17,000 men who would stay there some two to three weeks before being posted elsewhere or sent back home. This would be in addition to the 110,000 men who were already permanently stationed in these areas. To add to the numbers, it also appeared that the Mourmelon site would be housing a camp for Russian, Polish, Italian and Dutch prisoners whom the Americans had liberated during the recent campaign. Inevitably, the result of this huge concentration would be to submerge the towns nearby: ‘with a flood of American troops and foreigners who are mainly concerned to drink and meet women and whose behaviour towards the local population is not always what it should be’. 49 An already difficult situation was potentially worsened by the publicity which the French press outside Reims started to give to the installation of the American camps. The Commissaire de la République informed the Ministry of the Interior in Paris that press reports had made much of the wealth and resources that the Americans were putting into the area. This, he claimed, had already attracted a large number of people from the criminal underclass – black-marketeers, pimps and prostitutes – who were now gravitating around the American bases.50 The problem was not only the sheer size of the American military community now posted to Reims, but also the nature of the army units which it comprised. With the end of the fighting in Europe, the Allies were moving troops back from the front and posting them to the Pacific theatres of war. Inevitably, therefore, the units based in Reims changed

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with great rapidity as soldiers were brought back from Germany, stayed in France for a short period, and were then moved on, to be speedily replaced by other units following the same trajectory. In this situation, the job of French police in actually identifying American troublemakers in the city would be extremely difficult.51 From the French perspective, it seemed that the American military authorities had not prepared adequately for the likely public order problems that this vast deployment of soldiers would cause. In June 1945, the number of American military police allocated to deal with possible incidents was laughably small: for example, a camp in Mourmelon had been given 40 military police to manage a base where over 15,000 men were stationed.52 The French authorities accordingly begged the Americans to draft in reinforcements. When these came, however, they appeared to French observers to be largely composed of American soldiers who had been invalided out of the front, and whose capacity and appetite for the job of confronting recalcitrant colleagues was relatively small.53 With the ending of the war in the Pacific, it became evident that the ability of American commanders to exercise real influence on the behaviour of their troops in Reims was further diminishing. At this stage, troops arriving in the bases around the city were expecting to be demobilized and sent back home to the USA. As they waited, ‘demob happy’, for the logistics to be sorted out so that they could travel on, there was relatively little with which the American authorities could threaten them in order to enforce good behaviour. In October 1945, the American commander issued all his officers in the area with a circular on ‘Decorum of troops’ which was read out to the men, and then posted up in the barracks and bases around Reims. The note was strong on exhortation – urging the soldiers to behave well – but weak on the punishments they would actually receive if discipline broke down. In effect, the only threat available to the commander was that of delaying a soldier’s return to the USA, which meant in reality keeping likely troublemakers even longer in the locality in which they had been disruptive: Although we are on our way home and about to leave the Army we cannot let down from our previous high standard of discipline and conduct, and until that day arrives when we leave the Army, we must uphold those standards . . . Our country looks to the American soldier as an ‘Ambassador of Good Will’ and as an example of the ‘American Way of Life’ to others less fortunate than ourselves . . . there are a few who cast reflections upon the rest of us by the

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offenses they commit against the public welfare. The conduct of some of our soldiers has severely strained relationship with the civilian authorities and has a tendency to discredit us . . . The Commanding General must take action to bring to account this small percentage of men responsible for such incidents . . . To GI Joe, it simply means that where court martial is necessary, the offender . . . will be detained and removed from the unit when it sails . . . Men may not be allowed to sail for home . . . Soldier – Don’t miss the boat.54 In an attempt to develop a coordinated approach to incidents which might occur between the local population and the Americans, the two police forces agreed a division of future responsibilities. Whilst they would be jointly responsible for public order, the French authorities undertook to investigate crimes related to prostitution and commerce. In July 1945, two edicts were issued making it an offence to offer alcohol over eighteen degrees to any French or American person within a 10 km radius of the camps, or to consume it in this area. Despite this, however, alcohol continued to be at the root of many of the local disturbances. Illegal selling of strong drink continued in the vicinity of the camps with sellers making exorbitant profits, and the American military authorities seeming, from the French perspective, to be turning a blind eye to the trading. People from outside the region appeared to be driving around with suitcases full of cognac which they sold to the Americans, or exchanged for cigarettes, soap or food. The gendarmes at Mourmelon, for example, intercepted a lorry which was regularly making the run from Paris to Reims, carrying 1,088 bottles of Armagnac destined for 24 local sellers. The bottles were originally priced at 400 francs, but were being resold clandestinely for 850.55 Whatever the official position on alcohol might have been, therefore, troops tended to think that they would easily get hold of any alcohol they needed somewhere in the vicinity. For these reasons, the police noted, American soldiers took to marching into local cafés, and even sometimes into people’s homes, demanding cognac. 56 The inhabitants of Mourmelon and Suippes, close to the camps, found that troops were coming into their towns late at night, and knocking on the doors of any buildings which had lights on: ‘they insist that we open up, and often this leads to fights, and the breaking of windows’.57 Another area in which official edicts seemed to have no impact on actual behaviour was that of sexual relations between the troops and the local population. The approach taken by the American Army in order to safeguard its image with the French people, and protect its

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soldiers’ health from venereal disease, had been first to ban any relationships between troops and local women, and secondly to put all brothels in the area off-limits for troops. At the outset, the Reims police had advised the American Provost-Marshall that this strategy would not succeed, and was likely to have grave repercussions for Rémois and those in the surrounding communes. As early as September 1944, the French warned that banning legal brothels would be bound to increase clandestine prostitution which the local police would find almost impossible to stop. There were clearly major cultural differences here between the French and the Americans. The former argued that, rather than banning brothels, the American Army should ‘authorise the organisation of a well-controlled and regulated legal prostitution’.58 The city of Reims had had three brothels before the war which the Germans had taken over for their own use throughout the Occupation. The American military authorities not only banned any use of these establishments, but patrolled them regularly to ensure that no American soldiers went in. The result, as the French authorities had predicted, was an enormous growth in unregulated prostitution which meant that thousands of American soldiers came into the city every night in search of women. A report prepared for the mayor of Reims in late August 1945 calculated that the number of prostitutes had risen from 50 in June 1944 to 157 that month. In some streets, private houses had queues of men waiting outside, and parks, and benches in public squares were very often used. The French police, accompanied by the military police, made regular forays into the cafés and squares, picking up fifteen to twenty women on each trip who were then taken in for medical examination. According to official reports, numbers treated for venereal disease increased from a pre-war monthly average of six (and eleven during the German Occupation) to eighty in August 1945.59 In other parts of the region, in the vicinity of the camps, the situation was equally as bad. In Mourmelon, the municipal authorities were forced to close the cemetery to stop it from being used by troops, and the police reported that Polish and Russian prostitutes and American soldiers were coupling in the fields all round the commune, ‘under the eyes of the farmers and their families who were working in the land at the same time’. 60 Small communes, as much as larger towns like Reims and Châlons, regularly found themselves full of American soldiers searching for prostitutes for the evening. This was bound to cause major annoyance to local people since, as the authorities suggested, ‘the Allied soldiers have a tendency to generalise, they are accosting all the women they meet in

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the street, and not understanding why they are being refused’. 61 Unsurprisingly perhaps, people in the area became more and more angry about the danger they were running simply by walking in their own streets or villages. An unsigned letter from a group of ‘indignant Fathers’ in August 1945, for example, suggested that some people were now prepared to turn to vigilante activity to protect themselves: We are a small group of former prisoners and FFI, and we have decided that we can no longer tolerate the vulgarity and attacks perpetrated against our women and girls by the American soldiers . . . Since the muncipal and military police seem unable to provide proper security, we are going to try to do so, but we shall certainly not be wasting time in pointless talk. We shall be going straight to the problem. 62 To be fair to the Americans, however, it was clear that anger had reached such a pitch in some places that any of their intentions towards women were regarded as suspect. In August 1945, for example, the commander of the American military police wrote to the mayor of Epernay officially complaining about what he described as the ‘hateful’ attitude of sections of the local population towards Americans who were going out with French women. The commander claimed that a majority of these soldiers seen publicly with French girls were married or engaged to them, but had still been insulted by French people in the street: ‘These civilians make very discourteous remarks to our men . . . We hope that like us the population of Epernay is not wanting to create difficult incidents which might have highly regrettable repercussions for us all.’ It was time, the commander suggested, to take rigorous measures against that minority of the local population which was ‘antiAmerican’.63 It seemed to some of the American authorities at least that the French often gave excessive publicity to problems caused by troops, but totally ignored or minimized bad behaviour on the part of the civilian population. In any event, by mid-1945 Franco-American relationships on the ground had badly deteriorated. In Châlons, for example, it was reported that surveys of the local population indicated a ‘veiled hostility’ towards the troops.64 The police in Reims claimed that the bad behaviour of Americans was becoming ‘the talk of the town’.65 It was clear to the French authorities that people in the area were now likely to impute any difficulties they were having to the presence and attitude of the United States forces.66 By September, reports were describing a situation which was becoming increasingly tense, and was widely perceived as

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a foreign occupation: ‘The inhabitants of Reims are waiting impatiently for the day which will bring the American occupation to an end . . . The situation between the locals and the Americans is tense.’67 Whilst there was a realization in some quarters that the position might have been much the same with any large concentration of soldiers, including those from the French army,68 relationships between the two groups had evidently reached a nadir by the middle of 1945. On the American side, it certainly appeared to the Information and Education Division of the US European Theater of Operations (ETO) that many of the GIs who had fought in Europe had become markedly more hostile to the French after VE Day. Their troops’ survey identified just 16% of respondents in August 1945 who liked the French, as opposed to 48% who liked the British, and a surprising 23%, in comparison, who were positive about the Germans.69 Increasingly, incidents in Reims between French people and American troops came to be represented as deliberate assaults on French national sovereignty and integrity by an ill-disciplined foreign Army of Occupation. Senior French officials reported that they had been harassed in the streets by American soldiers. The Regional Director for Information, for example, claimed that he himself had been attacked by two Americans in the Place d’Erlon in Reims, after refusing to buy a watch which the soldiers had been trying to foist on him. This was apparently the second time that he had personally been accosted, and his assistant, he reported, had similarly been attacked by three American soldiers a month before. 70 At Châlons in July 1945, a dance for American troops, which the city had allowed to be held in one of the rooms of the Hôtel de Ville, went disastrously wrong when drunken soldiers started forcing entry to other parts of the building and insulting town councillors who were holding an official meeting at the same time. The local paper headlined the incident, ‘Things are going too far’, and argued that the affair was symptomatic of a broader and highly regrettable lack of respect on the part of the Americans: When the Mayor is forced to put on his mayoral sash in order to have his prerogatives accepted, we seem to have reached the position when it might be better for us all to shut ourselves away in our houses . . . Isn’t it time that someone senior talks to the American authorities and tells them that the Hôtel de Ville is a sanctuary respected by the French and that repeated incidents like this can only cause major difficulties in the relationship between the French population and its liberators?71

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The next day incidentally, the paper noted that the American authorities deeply regretted what had happened, and had punished those responsible. An American official had been to see the (slightly) injured French man in hospital and had asked the populace, ‘not to judge the USA on the basis of the misdeeds of a few over excited people’. 72 As the months wore on, and the American Army presence remained at this very high level, meetings between French and Americans could easily become polarized name-calling encounters between antagonistic national communities. In Châlons, for example, a large and very drunk American soldier produced a fracas in the town’s Café de la Paix. The local inhabitants drinking at the bar threw the man out, and a fight developed in the street outside. By the time the military police had arrived to sort it out, there were about a hundred Frenchmen watching who were’ highly critical of the behaviour of the American soldiers, going so far as to say that they behaved themselves much worse in France than the Germans had’.73 In another incident in the town, a fight broke out at a ball organized by the Secours Populaire. In the watching crowd, a French soldier made some pejorative remark about the Americans which was, unfortunately for him, overheard by an American soldier who spoke French. A huge fight between the two groups then developed, with soldiers and spectators being pushed against the balcony, and thrown down the stairs.74 Inevitably, given the political complexion of the town councils in the area, difficulties in the Franco-American relationship became more and more politicized as time went on. To begin with, professional groups started voicing their discontent and demanding that local French authorities should take a stronger line with the Allied Army. A meeting of technicians and engineers in the town hall at Reims in August 1945, for instance, called on the Prefect to persuade the Americans to release scrap metal from the camps that they were occupying so that it could be put to use by the French in order to get local industry back on its feet.75 For the same reason, there were demands that the French authorities should ‘derequisition’ buildings taken over by the US military so that French businesses could have a chance to trade properly again. 76 As the October electoral campaign gathered momentum, political parties in Reims became more overtly involved in the burgeoning Franco-American disputes. The Christian Democrat Party in the city, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), sent a letter of protest to the Army Commander about the ways in which the Rémois were being harassed and assaulted by American troops in the locality.77 The Communist mayor of Reims, Michel Sicre, went even more public with his

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complaints, sending the local press a long letter that he had addressed to the American commander. Sicre pointed out that French citizens were tired of the crimes of American soldiers, and had asked him, as mayor, to voice their concerns: ‘For several months, I have been subject to frequent complaints from the citizens about the excesses of American soldiers in our town.’ Besides the forced entry into private houses by drunk soldiers, there were rapes, fights with French police, and daily traffic accidents. The mayor requested the American authorities to take some speedy action to respond to these complaints, like stopping all their troops entering the town after 9PM. To reinforce the point, a list of ‘Acts of banditry by soldiers wearing American uniform’, was subsequently published in the local paper, with a communiqué from the mayor pointing out that he had as yet received no response from the American authorities and that a delegation from the town council would therefore be going in person to the American headquarters to insist that the requested 9 PM curfew (which had still received no reply) was changed to a curfew from nightfall. The political temperature was clearly rising. The mayor told an election rally that if he did not receive a proper response from the Americans, he was going to urge everyone to demonstrate, and he would also be considering setting up a supplementary police force to patrol the town. The reaction of the American Army was to refuse the idea of a sunset curfew, and propose instead that they should declare Reims off-limits. As the local police indicated, ‘the matter is still unresolved’.78 During the months after the elections, there were official attempts on both sides to calm the situation, and bring the two national groups into a more fruitful dialogue. The French police strove to make the joint French/ military police formations work more efficiently, producing bilingual forms which might make it easier to deal with both the perpetrators and the victims in the continuing traffic accidents in the area.79 The local police force was increased from 500 to 600 men, and French officials claimed that public disorder involving American soldiers was going down dramatically– for every 10,000 troops who came into the area in the evening, there were said to be only 25 reported incidents per night.80 The Americans made efforts to respond positively to requests from the French authorities for essential equipment and materials – captured Italian camouflage cloth that could be recycled for French military purposes,81 and medical supplies for French civilian hospitals.82 More purposefully, US authorities sought to manage the news more skilfully by arranging press conferences which would ‘let the French public know the situation and real needs of the American Army’.83 The American

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Service of Information provided films which were designed to portray positive images of American life: ‘A friendship, whether personal or international, must be based on knowledge and understanding.’ 84 On the French side, an exhibition of ‘good neighbourliness’ was mounted in Reims in November 1945, in an attempt to aid mutual understanding. Some twenty French and American officials toured the photographic exhibition at its formal opening, although the mayor of Reims, Michel Sicre, was significantly absent, letting it be known that he had not been invited in time. The exhibition was reported as showing: ‘the historical links between France and the USA, the price France had paid in the War in both military and economic terms, the chronic problems of security of a country invaded three times in the space of a generation, hopes for reconstruction, and the achievements of France just one year after Liberation’.85 All these official efforts to increase mutual understanding, however, had come several months after the area had been saturated with American troops, and after relationships at street level had hardened into encounters between two largely antagonistic, and consciously national, groups. On the next Bastille Day, 14 July 1946, a fight broke out in Châlons between drunken American troops and a crowd of shouting local civilians: ‘The public massed in the Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville started jeering at the Americans, and the street had to be cleared by the police . . . the American soldiers could have been lynched by the crowd.’ 86 Although the Americans and the French in Reims had in effect withdrawn into two separate confrontational groups, nationals from both sides met together in a work context throughout this period. Almost immediately after the Liberation, more than 7,000 Rémois were being employed by the US authorities. Such employment was a good deal more attractive to the local workforce than working for French companies. The Americans paid a significantly higher wage (15 francs an hour as opposed to 12.80), and provided additional benefits which were particularly welcome to workers at this time – one to three meals a day at a specially favourable price. In these circumstances, local commerce found itself losing not only manual workers, but also skilled and clerical employees.87 Relations had not always been smooth between employer and employee. On 12 October 1944, for example, eighty-three of the local workers employed by the Americans in the docks at Reims refused to continue working until they received a pay-rise. The workers then clearly surprised the Americans by occupying the premises for the whole day. The next morning, however, when they returned to work, the Americans refused to let them come in. The workers concerned marched out in a group

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and made for the Bourse de Travail where they set about organizing a protest rally. The French authorities were left to mediate in this dispute and try to work out some sort of compromise.88 Despite these differences in employment cultures, mirroring in a small measure what had already happened in Marseille, the US Army remained a major employer in the region during this period. When the military began to scale down the numbers of French workers it was employing in June 1946, there was considerable trouble. The Rémois might not particularly like the Americans, but they were most unwilling to give up their jobs, and particularly to lose them to other non-French nationals. At the Courcy camp, for example, where an immense amount of surplus American supplies was stored, the US had been gradually laying off their staff. In mid-June, however, a row erupted when 150 Frenchmen were sacked without warning, and apparently replaced by Polish workers. The reaction on the part of the French workmen was immediate. Some 200 to 300 workers demonstrated in the centre of Reims that night, and involved the mayor and the sub-prefect in the dispute. The day after, the demonstration had grown to 500 and the mayor was declaring that it was ‘inadmissible for the American authorities to employ Poles, some of whom intended to go home, and others of whom were considered as undesirable on French territory, since they were depriving a large number of families in Reims of their means of existence’. The mayor argued that the Americans had exhibited bad faith in all this, and that the whole town council stood shoulder to shoulder with the workers. General Lewis, passing through Reims, apparently showed a mounting American exasperation with French behaviour: ‘He seemed a bit irritated with these continual problems in Reims. He would have wanted to sack all the French workers without exception, get rid of the Poles, bring back troops from Germany, and declare Reims off-limits.’ As the dispute worsened, it was clear that local antagonism towards the Americans could easily be extended to other foreign groups, especially those which threatened the livelihoods of French workers. A procession of about 1,200 French strikers gathered in the Place du Forum in Reims, and paraded through the town. The police reported that when the demonstrators met Poles on their route they jeered at them, and two journalists were attacked for having shown some sympathy towards the Poles who, by then, were facing crowds of Frenchmen shouting, ‘Work for the French! Poles, go back to Poland!’89 In the end, a compromise was worked out between the American employers and the redundant French guards, but the incident illustrated

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both the fears of unemployment that an eventual American withdrawal would bring, and the tendency, at this stage of the post-Liberation, for sections of the local population to react negatively towards any foreigners – the huge presence of Americans, or the smaller numbers of Poles in the area. The French local administration had been trying for several months before this to get the Americans to give them a list of the approximately 25,000 Poles who were apparently working for the US in the region. From a French point of view, such people, who had been brought by the Americans from Germany, had no right to be on national French territory without the express agreement of the French authorities, and they urged the Army to inform them immediately, ‘any time that foreigners are freed . . . foreigners are moving around without any proper papers and without any kind of inspection of their activity being possible’. 90 The process by which the American military finally withdrew from Reims was marked by complex arrangements to indemnify the French for damage that had been caused by the Army to French buildings and premises. 91 As late as 1950, the Prefect at Châlons was still dealing with sums credited to the town of Reims as compensation. From this purely economic perspective, the occupation of the city by the Germans, and by the Americans, seemed to roll into one extended compensation for ‘damage caused’.92 Looking back on the whole experience in mid-1946, the French Intelligence Service argued that the relationship between the Americans and the French had deteriorated quite badly locally, and that there had clearly been faults on both sides. In a measured report, they concluded that After the period of euphoria . . . relationships between the population and the Army became tense. The Military did not always have the impression that they were in a friendly country, with extremely high prices being charged for food . . . The population . . . was disappointed, expecting as they were that there would be improvements which were not forthcoming. They then had a tendency to put the blame for this onto the Americans who presented to them a daily spectacle of waste and lack of understanding.93 Earlier in the relationship, the French had persuaded their American colleagues to hold a full inquiry about persistent local reports that the American Army was thoughtlessly destroying large quantities of edible food and usable products. A French liaison officer based with the American

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Army, and clearly caught in the middle of this argument, suggested that the inquiry which had taken place had actually illustrated the very different mindset of the two communities at that particular time: In fact it’s really a matter of a difference of interpretation which is very difficult to bridge between the Americans on one side, and the French on the other over the value and possible use of rubbish and articles of equipment which are in a bad state. It is clearly very difficult for an American to ‘get inside the skin of a Frenchman in 1945’. So it is possible that, with the best will in the world, some articles have been destroyed which might possibly have been things that a Frenchman today would have very much liked to have had. 94 The gap between these two different viewpoints, French and American, had widened since the Liberation, and become a virtually unbridgeable gulf by the time the American Army was starting to disengage from Reims. The longer the Americans stayed in the area, and the more troops they brought in, the more difficult relations between them became. A military Liberation had rapidly replaced a German Occupation of the Marne with an American one, as Reims became the headquarters of the Allied Forward Zone. Early gratitude to the Liberators could not mask the fact that American systems for requisitioning property and controlling the local communications network produced much the same results for the local people as German systems had done during the Occupation. Whilst the war in Europe continued, day-to-day difficulties between the Americans and the French were kept within reasonable bounds. With the defeat of Germany, however, the Rémois had expected a return to something like normal, with a relatively rapid withdrawal of American troops. What they found, however, was a vastly increased American presence, comprising troops who were passing through on their way to the Pacific war, and later waiting impatiently in France for the transport to take them home to civilian life in the USA. In this situation, Reims and the surrounding communes were saturated with American soldiers, and would remain so for at least two years after the Liberation. Attempts to limit alcohol and ban prostitution seemed to create a whole series of problems which impacted badly on the local population. As the gap between the French and Americans widened, the difficulties of the relationship became part of the political campaigns of 1945, with the mayor of Reims playing an especially key role in raising the negotiating stakes. In this situation, late attempts by officials on both sides to rebuild Franco-American relations were doomed to failure. Local people and

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American soldiers increasingly communicated by taking antagonistic national positions, in which ill-disciplined behaviour on the streets could be represented as intended insults to the nation concerned. Inevitably perhaps, other foreigners in the region became drawn into these disputes, appearing to be working with the Americans to undermine the French, and possibly rob French workers of their jobs. The numbers of American troops involved, and the extreme length of their stay in Reims, produced a situation in which local people and US personnel moved into two nationalistic, and increasingly antagonistic blocs. The long goodbye in Reims took place in an atmosphere which was acknowledged to have been not only tense, but also increasingly ‘xenophobic’.95

7 Liberated and Liberators

Case studies The thesis underlying this book is that multinational communities are part of the patchwork of Liberation in France, and are relevant to our ongoing discussions of the events of 1944/1945. The five case studies (Normandy, Cherbourg, Marseille, the Pyrénées-Orientales and Reims) have attempted to bring together the often separate narratives of Liberation told by Liberated and Liberators. They are sites in which the protagonists met together – sometimes briefly, sometimes over a period of years – and developed a relationship. In the Liberation ‘on the move’ in Normandy, the two sides gained fleeting impressions of each other as the Allies travelled from the Landing beaches towards their military objectives in the east and west. Liberated and Liberators generally viewed each other from a distance: the soldiers from the top of a tank, or from a look-out position; the French from the bottom of a ditch, or from the side of the road, as armoured vehicles rolled through their communes. Both Anglo-Americans, and the French themselves, represented the local inhabitants as passive onlookers in a Liberation to which they had not noticeably contributed, peripheral to the action and movement of Allied armies. Liberation came at a very considerable cost to the whole area, and Liberators passing through, as much as the Liberated who stayed on after, were both aware of the enormous damage that had been done. Stunned bereavement at the martyrdom of towns like Caen and Saint-Lô was an integral part of the Liberation experience for many French people in this area, so that responses to the Liberators on the move were often mixed, and sometimes stonily hostile. The context of this first Liberation established unequal positions for the protagonists – the mobile, active Allies, 175

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and the static, passive French – and these were positions implicitly accepted by both sides. The French were represented by the Allies as victims: people who needed to be saved and protected by a stronger outside force. In a landscape in which young Frenchmen were virtually absent, it was unsurprising that the Allied depiction of their brief relationship with the locals should increasingly take on the symbolic form of protective foreign soldier and weak young French woman. For both sides, the victim status of the French – being done to, rather than doing, as it were – was the key to their brief encounters. This understanding of the Allies as the active force, moving through and leaving the largely passive local population suffering in their wake, is one that has marked the memorialization of events on both sides. In Normandy, over the past ten years, there has been a conscious attempt to valorize and accept the position of suffering and victim-hood implicit in this particular Liberation relationship. A series of books has examined the whole experience of what it termed, ‘Norman towns under the bombs’. A video project with survivors talking about what they felt about Liberation – suggestively entitled, ‘the Other Memory’ – has been undertaken by the Musée Mémorial at Caen. 1 In Britain, the famous Overlord Embroidery at Portsmouth, commissioned to celebrate ‘D’ Day, also displayed the same acceptance of fundamentally unequal power positions. The Panel on the Liberation (Panel 34), for example, shows British troops on the move, marching away down a road in France. At the side of the road, a man lies injured, with three people, including an old woman, bending over him. The caption reads: ‘Normandy has been retaken. Bereaved members of the French Resistance watch British infantrymen advancing eastwards towards Europe, where eight months of hard fighting still lie ahead before the Allies win the War.’ The representation of Allied action and movement, and French passive and static suffering, endures in both accounts. In Cherbourg, too, the Allies liberated the area largely through their own military action, with the local population taking virtually no part. But here, the army stayed on, providing a context in which French and Americans were to live together for over a year after Liberation. In this small port town, the Allies requisitioned a large number of buildings, and assumed control of the docks and the Arsenal. For the first five weeks, Allied Civil Affairs administered the town, before handing over responsibility to local French officials. Even at this point, however, the presence of American personnel continued to be considerable, and highly visible in the streets of Cherbourg, and within the surrounding communes. The circumstances of Liberation, and the fact that the Americans stayed

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on afterwards, made it impossible for the inhabitants of the town to establish a post-Liberation identity by regaining possession of their own urban space. In this context, it became apparent that the only space that was easily available for the delineation of national identity was that of the historic and permanent past of France. The adoption of this space necessarily involved drawing a complementary space for the American visitors: that of a young, rootless community in transition, a space that the Americans on the whole accepted and endorsed. Two different time-clocks – ‘French time’ and ‘American time’– marked the days of the Franco-American encounter in Cherbourg. In the Landings in the South of France, a very different situation developed. The French in Marseille liberated the town and its surrounding area largely through their own activity. The local space was recaptured by French efforts, and the Allied forces were welcomed as honoured and helpful guests by hosts who were confident and politically committed. Gradually, however, the host community became frustrated at what it saw as the failure of the Americans to interact with them positively, to ‘get to know’ them. Expectations on both sides of this relationship were very different. The French had expected urgent and material support in the necessary rebuilding of French national identity. The Americans envisaged a purely pragmatic set of relationships designed to deliver certain services – the reopening of the port of Marseille, the provision of rest and recuperation facilities for their troops – which they considered to be vital for the pursuit of the war. As the days went by, the gap in perceptions between the two communities was symbolized by the separate, but parallel existences which they were leading, existences in which the disparity in wealth and opportunity between the two was highly visible, and deeply resented. Articulate left-wing journalists and politicians increasingly politicized the disappointment felt by the local population. A relationship of luxury tourists and disappointed host community gradually developed, with the frustrations and mutual suspicions which such encounters often breed. In the frontier community of the Pyrénées-Orientales, there was a much greater identity of view between the Allies and the French about what constituted reasonable support for the enhancement of French national identity. Significantly, the agreement between them, in this area isolated from events in the capital and further north, focused on the treatment of a third party in the community, the ex-Spanish Republican fighters who had joined local Resistance groups, and indeed largely dominated them at the Liberation. British, American and Spanish officials from over the border criss-crossed the frontier to talk to the new post-Liberation

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authorities in Perpignan. For all of them, the Spanish guerrilleros, with their project of continuing ideological war, and their proud occupation of Spanish consular buildings in the Department, constituted a threat to the reassertion of desirable pre-war national frontiers and identities. A mutually supportive relationship developed as a tacit alliance against the foreigner ‘within’. Gradually, the Spanish maquisards moved from being represented as heroes of the Liberation to a position not unlike the one they had occupied in the Pyrénées-Orientales before and during the war: outsiders from the national community, an exile group dependent on the uncertain goodwill of the hosts. ‘Inflammable material’ of the type personified by the Spanish resisters was superfluous to the creation of any post-Liberation national community envisaged by either the French or the Allies. The encounter between the Americans and the French in Reims was the longest, and the most intense, of any of these meetings. Reims became the Forward Base of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, in effect replacing one massive foreign occupation in the town (that of the Germans) with another. Instead of leaving the area to the Rémois at the end of the war in Europe, however, the Allies stayed on, and indeed markedly increased the size of their presence. For two long years, the home community was swamped by a vast number of American troops, many of whom were briefly passing through France on their way to the Pacific, or back to the United States. Systems for requisitioning property and controlling the local economy, which had been just about tolerated for the duration of the war, became ever more unacceptable to the French when the immediate necessities of fighting the enemy were past. The social and economic requirements of the Allied Army imposed huge and widely resented burdens on the local population. In this situation, the two communities retreated to an increasingly xenophobic set of positions, where street brawls could be interpreted as insults to national status, and where other foreigners in the region were drawn into disputes about the nature of national sovereignty. To the problems of being unable to reclaim urban space, which the Cherbourgeois had faced, was added the serious difficulty of the duration of this encounter, and the sheer size of the continued foreign presence. What emerged was not so much two different time-clocks, as two very different mindsets: occupier and occupied, with antagonism between the two increasingly expressed in strongly nationalistic terms. Overall, the varied circumstances of Liberation in these five areas seemed to stimulate the development of rather different Liberated– Liberator relationships, with distinct perceptions and representations of

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the ‘other’. The fleeting encounter in Normandy created a series of kaleidoscopic images on both sides, underpinned by an agreed grammar of the Allies as actors and agents, and the French as passive and victims. The experience of sharing a confined urban space in Cherbourg encouraged both communities to look for self-definition outside the overcrowded geographical space that they were forced to inhabit together. The apparently more equal partnership in the liberated south was in fact built on very different expectations, and these soon forced the two communities into a semi-detached, parallel sort of existence. The resulting framework of mutual tensions and disappointments were characteristic of a relationship which has failed but not yet completely broken apart. In the contentious frontier regions, Allies and French could finally agree, and form a temporary alliance against a third party. This third party group, formed of co-Liberators, was represented by both of them as extraneous to each of their national communities. In Reims, the Allies outlasted their welcome, in a stay that was prolonged well beyond the end of the war. Two communities forced to live together over a long period, with the guest community vastly outnumbering the hosts, increasingly embraced nationalistic and antagonistic representations of each other. The patchwork of Liberation experiences in France affected the types of relationship that grew up between Liberated and Liberator, as much as it produced a variety of encounters within the French community itself.

Understanding the ‘other’ Some of the mutual perceptions which grew up in the course of these relationships were undoubtedly related to the wartime experiences of the protagonists, and to the emotional baggage which they had brought with them from this period. As tensions mounted, particularly in those areas like Cherbourg and Reims where the French lived in forced proximity with a large number of Allied troops, there was a tendency for the host community to relate incidents of American ill-discipline to images of the US which had been sedulously cultivated during the Occupation. Vichy depictions of the United States as a decadent, mongrel society, without civilized values and standards of behaviour, were to some extent carried on in the register of angry condemnation of troop misdemeanours, which at best could be described as, ‘childish pranks’, and at worst as animal-like in their extremes: ‘they behave worse than beasts’; ‘Scenes of savagery and bestiality’; ‘vulgarity and attacks’.2 Particularly horrific and well-publicized cases of rape, at La Pernelle close to Cherbourg, and

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at Fromentières, near Reims, added to the impression of a violent wave of disorder which could be seen as indicating precisely the kind of societal breakdown that the Vichy regime had sought to associate with the United States. In many of these cases, popular representation framed the events as at least partly instigated by black American soldiers, who were often depicted as being the most likely of all the Americans to behave in socially unacceptable ways – firing their guns into people’s windows, and threatening and attacking passers-by: ‘I have often seen a sailor come back with a knife wound he had from a negro.’ 3 On the whole, however, the misbehaviour of white Americans was represented as being on a continuum with the misconduct of black troops: ‘We are over . . . run by negroes . . . The whites are continually drunk; there is no discipline at all.’ 4 One of the most difficult issues with which resisters within and outside France had had to deal before the Liberation was the Allied bombing campaign, and the resultant loss of life, and damage to property. Vichy propaganda had made much of the Allies’ presumed intentions to lay waste large tracts of the country in the process of liberating it. During the Liberation, the continued bombing of towns in northern Normandy often provoked real anger and indignation, with French people particularly incensed at what seemed to be the quite gratuitous destruction of communes that apparently had little or no relevance to military operations. In the ground war too, French civilians could gain the impression that the liberating armies were prepared to destroy large tracts of the country in order to win apparently insignificant objectives. Early expressions of grief and bereavement at what had been inflicted on towns like Caen and Saint-Lô speedily gave way to a sharper and more critical attitude towards Allied battle plans among many of the local inhabitants. By early August 1944, reports among the general public about French casualties in a place like Cherbourg had apparently reached such a level of intensity, with people talking of 8,000 fatalities, that Allied public relations officers felt obliged to step in to scotch the rumours. 5 Pre-Liberation suspicions about the true intentions of the AngloAmericans towards France, as alive in Free French–Resistance circles as in Vichy propaganda, were undoubtedly reawakened in the months following Liberation, when conditions for French people in many areas did not seem to have noticeably improved. Impatient with the low level of food supplies, and frustrated at the length of time it had taken to recognize the Government of France, and support her new army, many French people started to express what SHAEF called, ‘popular misgivings about the Allies’. 6 In the political climate of Marseille, these misgivings

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were described more forcibly in terms of national humiliation and disappointment. 7 In April 1945, the Allied High Command became so concerned about the negative press which the Anglo-Americans were receiving that they mounted a press campaign to try and put an alternative, and more positive view of their activities. By this time, however, suspicions had reached such a level that the French press largely ignored the case that the Allies were putting. The US Ambassador in Paris sought to stem the apparent tide of anti-Americanism by sending American journalists a detailed note on the food problems in France, and this at least received positive coverage in the French press. Le Populaire, however, commented sourly that articles of this sort had still to be followed up by the actual arrival of long-promised supplies of condensed milk, fat, rice and medicine.8 In the first days of Liberation, the arrival of American culture in the form of Hollywood films, previously banned altogether under Vichy, had excited considerable interest and enthusiasm: ‘Yesterday, the Marseillais queued outside the cinemas to inaugurate the new era of American films which we’ve been deprived of for two years’.9 In mid-September 1944, cinemas were showing a wide range of Anglo-Saxon films – Pacific Express, The Revenge of Zorro, Walt Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and Bulldog Drummond, all within one week in Marseille.10 By the beginning of October 1944, however, comments were appearing, especially in the Communist press, bemoaning the fact that films made in France were not more widely available to the public: ‘we seem to have forgotten the part that France played in world production of cinema before the Berlin–Vichy period’.11 The fear of monocultural domination, which several sections of the French community had expressed before the Liberation, surfaced once more in some quarters as part of a wider suspicion of Allied intentions in post-Liberation France. The British, who had been generally sympathetic to a strong and independent France, were keen to see the French take control of their national borders themselves, particularly in frontier areas like the PyrénéesOrientales where disturbances might have caused problems for Allied communication lines further north. As Franco-American relations started to deteriorate, the British found themselves increasingly positioned by French Government representatives as potentially more suitable allies than the United States, although allies who were still not entirely trustworthy. A Foreign Office official visiting Paris in March 1945 detected real animosity towards the Americans, but also perplexity on the part of some of the French that the British Government was not ‘as confiding with France as our mutual interests demanded’.12

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From the British perspective, one of the principal pre-Liberation concerns had been that troops from Britain would actually behave themselves in France a great deal worse than the German Occupiers had done. In the early days of Liberation in Normandy, there were certainly examples of British soldiers pillaging and stealing from war-torn houses, and of local people angrily comparing them with the better-behaved German troops who had preceded them: ‘I dislike the Germans’, thundered one Normandy farmer, ‘but in four years the Germans stole nothing, in four days the English take everything’.13 With the advance of 21st Army Group into Belgium and Holland, however, British commitments in France had largely passed to American forces, so that the opportunity for extended Franco-British encounters in the Liberation was inevitably more limited. The Americans, on the other hand, stayed in France, and did so in large numbers. The USA had come to France with a much less developed political position, but with an apparent belief, mediated to its troops before they disembarked on French soil, that Americans were likely to be popular with the people of France: ‘Mostly, the French think Americans act square, always give the little fellow a helping hand, and are goodnatured, big-hearted and kind.’14 Whilst they, like the British, were keen to support the reassertion of French national identity in areas like the Eastern Pyrenees, where disorder could have impacted on their war effort, they often found the continued French emphasis on sovereignty and independence very wearisome, particularly when it was evident that the USA was receiving public blame for many of the difficulties (especially food supply) which de Gaulle’s Government was experiencing. By early 1945, the American authorities were the butt of what SHAEF described as, ‘world-wide controversy and comment’, 15 much of this, they surmised, fanned by the press in France. These conflicts were played out at a local level, in encounters between US and French officials. The Americans typically claimed that they were simply pursuing their war aims, and the French typically argued that they needed urgent help to support their own suffering population. On occasions, US authorities responded with pointed comparisons between the more helpful attitudes they claimed to have found in Britain, and the negative ones they were now meeting in France. In Reims, for example, Colonel Thrasher pointed out to the sub-prefect that the restrictions the Rémois were being put under in December 1944 were as nothing compared to those which had already operated in Britain. 16 In Marseille, the Americans reacted to continuing criticisms about food supply by telling the French public that: ‘There are lots of other

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countries which have suffered just as much, and they mustn’t be forgotten either.’17 In two particular areas – attitudes to employment and to sexual relations – it became apparent that the French and the Americans were often working within very different cultural frameworks. Several of the encounters described in this book involved quite considerable numbers of local French men and women being employed by the Americans: in the docks in Cherbourg and Marseille, and in the army camps around Reims. Very soon it was clear that French approaches to employment, formed by the struggles of the interwar period, and now strongly defended by the powerful parties of the Left, favoured a system in which social security and insurance payments were institutionalized, and in which trade unions were expected to play an important, and fully recognized role. The American attitude, on the other hand, was traditionally more liberal, according a minor place, if one at all, to collective negotiations for workers’ rights. The very urgent necessities of war – clearing ports, unloading and moving vital supplies – tended to reinforce the prevailing view among American military employers that all efforts should be focused on the job at hand. Discussions with workers about their terms of employment were seen as, at best, a waste of time, and at worst, potentially destructive of the war effort. Inevitably, this clash of attitudes provoked real difficulties on the ground. In Marseille, there were initial problems in negotiating wage levels and conditions, and then in delivering pay to the workers on time. The response to this among the workforce was immediate, and there were spontaneous stoppages in the docks in September 1944. Workers demanded to be given adequate work clothes – raincoats and boots for example – and insisted on having the traditional two-hour lunch break. All this clearly infuriated the military employers.18 On occasions, relationships were further strained when American military policemen used their guns to maintain discipline, or when, as in Reims, the authorities sacked workers without notice, or sought to cope with worker unrest by locking out men who had walked off the job in protest. Whilst some of these problems were doubtless provoked by a military mentality that expected unquestioning obedience to orders given, it was evident that there was an enormous gulf between the French approach to workers’ rights, and that generally adopted by US employers. In the Haute-Saône, for example, the Americans faced a strike after they had sacked the local secretary of the building union against the explicit advice of the French Prefect.19 As one of the American officers in Marseille explained to his French colleagues, trade union

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delegates in the USA were not expected to operate actually ‘on site’, within docks and building yards. 20 With such a large number of soldiers concentrated in relatively small areas, it was evident that a major problem was going to be that of sexual relations between the troops and the local population. Here, French and American approaches to forestalling possible difficulties were markedly different. The American Army issued a number of edicts banning relationships between troops and local women, and explicitly putting all brothels in the vicinity of their camps off-limits. The French authorities cautioned against this, arguing that the result would inevitably be a huge increase in clandestine and uncontrolled prostitution, and the likely terrorizing of innocent neighbourhoods. The alternative, they suggested to the Americans, was for the military to endorse an official and well-organized system of prostitution which would safeguard both the health of their troops and that of the women concerned. Most importantly, it would deter the growth of unregulated brothels. In Reims, for example, the Germans had followed this procedure during their own occupation, taking over the three existing brothels in the town, and setting up a special hospital for prostitutes. The Americans, on the other hand, resolutely refused to do this. The result, according to the local police, was a predictable rise in unregulated prostitution – they estimated that there were over 150 women operating in this way in the city in mid-1945- and an increase of some 80 per cent in venereal disease in comparison with levels during the Occupation.21 Above all, small communes found that they were swamped with American troops, descending on their cafés and bars, searching indiscriminately for sexual partners, and harassing and angering local inhabitants in the process.

Liberated and liberators To an extent, of course, the presence of a large concentration of troops in any area is likely to cause major difficulties for the local population, and there was a recognition within some circles in France that the effect of billeting soldiers from their own army in some of these localities would have provoked many of the same military/civilian type problems. There were, however, certain facets to the specific relationship of Liberated–Liberator which made interaction in these communities vastly more complicated. As Liberators, the Anglo-Saxons entered France with certain clear objectives that went well beyond their stay on French territory, and were perceived by them as transcending any of the exigencies of present host–guest relationships. They were in all senses

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‘passing through’, and France was as much a staging-post for them in a longer journey, as it was for the Spanish Republican Liberators in the Pyrénées-Orientales. Unlike the guerrilleros, however, who were manifestly a minority, ultimately dependent on the national community, the Allies had an enormous military and economic might, and were engaged in a struggle to which the new French Government was clearly keen to contribute. In military, economic and political terms therefore, the French had relatively little choice in determining the framework of the relationship, or in influencing the details of its development. As the two groups met in some of the Liberation communities in France, it was apparent that the clash of objectives, and the obvious disparity in power positions, could produce reactions from the hosts which the Liberators regarded as ungracious and unhelpful. Americans complained that their troops were being economically exploited by local inhabitants, with prices artificially inflated for the soldiers. This seemed to be so extreme in some places that the US authorities complained officially, and threatened in Reims, for example, to intervene in the market and set up their own military cooperatives to buy in bulk and drive prices down. 22 As the French increasingly looked towards the Anglo-Americans to support the country’s regeneration in urgent and practical ways, and expressed bitter disappointment when this aid was not forthcoming, so the irritation of the Liberators increased and spilled over into their public relationships with the inhabitants. The mantra repeated by the Allied military was that the French had to recognize that the war was still being fought, and that priorities at a local level had to reflect this primordial necessity. Even when the war in Europe was over, American officers could still become extremely irritated at what they regarded as minor problems in places like Reims, problems whose importance paled into insignificance for them in comparison with the wider political and social issues in the rest of Europe. 23 In several of these Liberation communities, the feeling developed amongst Americans that they were being treated with marked ingratitude by the French: already written out of the Liberation script in some cases, and speedily designated as ‘foreigners’, rather than as Allies and friends. In Marseille, for instance, the American authorities complained about the tenor of press coverage in local papers: ‘Our Allies expressed some regret that the aid they had given France for her Liberation should have been ignored so completely. The term “foreigner” which seemed to be directed at them suggested a sort of hostility that they found difficult to understand and which they regretted.’ 24

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This act of defining ‘foreignness’, however, to which the Americans took such exception, was arguably one of the key ways in which Liberated communities could begin to reclaim their own independent identity. If the Liberators were focused on short-term objectives largely beyond France, the Liberated were engaged in the difficult business of rebuilding national identity at a time when significant parts of their territory were under foreign control. Given that the physical space of France was not yet fully reclaimable, it was important to find other grounds on which new identities could be defined. One of the more available approaches to imagining an identity for post-Liberation France was to define it by its opposites, by what it was not – the elements of ‘non-Frenchness’ which might with impunity be excluded from the national community. The Epuration, and the punishment of those who were alleged to have collaborated with the Germans, was one means of defining an internal group of this sort which could be excluded from the identity of New France. Inevitably though, the Purge was a problematic and disputed process which might well produce a new set of problems for the nation. Defining ‘Frenchness’ by excluding those more loosely attached to the national community was in many ways a more available tactic, and one more likely to attract political consensus, and less likely to damage the future civic and administrative structures of the country. Redefining the borders of national identity in opposition to those foreigners who had been Allies was easiest of all when the Allies were a minority group within the local and national community. The fate of the Spanish co-Liberators in the Pyrénées-Orientales was a clear example of the way in which geographic as well as metaphorical lines could be redrawn to exclude groups from the national community, whatever their role in recent Liberation fighting might have been. From the establishment of a foreign-free zone on the border with Spain, through to the eviction of the guerrilleros from Spanish diplomatic territory in the Department, and on through the repositioning of the exile community as stateless victims, dependent on the charity of the host nation, the frontiers of a French identity were delineated in relation to a foreign, ‘non-French’ community. The careless ease with which the authorities in Perpignan proposed to flatten a cemetery in which Spanish exiles had been buried was merely the last stage in an administrative process which had removed Spanish Republican resisters from the visible national community. It was a good deal less easy to define ‘Frenchness’ in opposition to more powerful Allies whose role in the regeneration of the country was vital. In the Liberation communities studied in this book, a general pattern began to emerge in which the first foreigners designated for implicit

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exclusion from the working definition of ‘national community’ were those who had clearly been enemies of France, and were still within the country. Early on, there was considerable hostility towards the presence of German prisoners of war, and anxiety that they might end up by being treated better than the native French population. At Toulon, rumours spread that German officers were actually being employed by the Americans to oversee French dock-workers. There were consistent complaints in all these communities that the Americans were giving their German prisoners far too much to eat. In defence, US authorities pointed out that they were simply applying international conventions, although they agreed at Marseille, for example, to apply, ‘international conventions in a less ostentatious way’.25 Similar disagreements arose in relation to the employment of Italian prisoners of war whom the Americans were keen to bring into Marseille in large numbers to address their labour shortage problems. Again, the French insisted that, symbolically, they should be separated from the local community, garrisoned away from major urban centres. Above all, it was vital that they should not be given better food rations than those currently available to the French.26 After the early hostility towards enemy prisoners of war working for the Allies, some French people in these Liberation communities appeared to turn against other nationalities in the locality who were working for the Allies. Usually these were men and women who had been displaced from their home countries as refugees, or who had been liberated by the Allies, and then subsequently brought into France. The clearest examples of this growing cleavage between the French community and such foreigners in their midst was in Reims, where the employment of Polish guards in American Army camps, in preference to French workers, provoked major demonstrations in the city.27 In Marseille, French authorities sought to use the presence of American ships in the port to remove groups of foreigners in the city whom they felt were, ‘uselessly in the way’28: Vietnamese, Russians, Madagascans and Senegalese. In a situation in which French territory was not fully available to be reclaimed, the construction of a national identity appeared to depend, at least partly, on excluding groups who were on the periphery of Allied activity, and could be easily designated as ‘foreign’. As regards the Allies themselves, local inhabitants were generally more circumspect. Early descriptions did not tend to represent Anglo-Saxon Liberators as explicitly outside the national community in the way that Spanish Republicans, former enemies, and other nationalities were positioned. Nevertheless, the persistent condemnation of black Americans, a repeated theme in Cherbourg and in Reims, perhaps carried with it an

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implication that there were at least certain identifiable members of the Allied forces who were infinitely more foreign and less welcome than others. As time went on, sections of the population in some areas began to suggest that there was a clear equivalence between the German and American occupations: ‘The Germans had been as well-behaved as the Americans.’29 Any positioning of the US visitors in the same role as that of the German Occupiers necessarily implied that the Americans were ultimately, like the Germans before them, fundamentally alien elements in the French national community. In two particular areas, space and food, the different agendas of Liberated and Liberators were in clear and sometimes violent conflict. Space was of major importance to both sides. For the Allies, it was vital to secure any space that could provide the troops on the ground with a tactical advantage, whether it was fields and hedgerows painfully crossed in northern Normandy, a strategically important port like Cherbourg or Marseille, the border in the Pyrenees which would safeguard communications’ lines, or at Reims, the eastern flank of the ongoing battle in Europe. Once the space in question was secured, it was equally vital to occupy it, to establish the offices and local infrastructure that would permit the Allies to continue their war effort. In the Pyrénées-Orientales, the Spanish ex-Republicans had tried to continue their own war with Spain by occupying strategic areas – setting up bases in French frontier villages, establishing offices in Perpignan, and taking over Spanish Government buildings on the French side of the border. In Cherbourg, Marseille and Reims, American forces requisitioned large numbers of buildings as offices, distribution centres and social clubs. In Cherbourg, places which the Germans had vacated days before were almost immediately taken over by American forces. Often additional buildings were commandeered into use, and French pleas to have particularly prestigious local sites, like the Rattis Department store, exempted from the requisitioning process were generally refused. In a place like Reims, which became the Allied Command’s Forward Headquarters, the level of requisitioning remained extraordinarily high well after February 1945, with factories, garages, cinemas, dance halls, barracks, hospitals, restaurants, schools, private houses, public gardens and even the Stade Municipal, being continuously occupied by the Army.30 For the French, this occupation of space was a great deal more than a physical inconvenience. The ability to control local space was intimately bound up with notions of independence and power. In the PyrénéesOrientales, it rapidly became clear that the French believed they would only be able to assert their national integrity when the frontier with

Liberated and Liberators 189

Spain, and the Spanish Consulate in Perpignan were both cleared of foreign occupiers. With the large concentrations of Allied forces elsewhere in France, the need to reclaim local space was even more sensitively felt. At the beginning of the Franco-American relationship in Cherbourg, for example, it was apparently acceptable for Allied Civil Affairs officers to ceremoniously return to the Cherbourgeois sites previously occupied by the Germans, like the Omnia Cinema, and the hospital. In this situation, the Americans appeared to be acting towards the French in the guise of intermediaries, returning what was rightfully theirs to local people in the area. The longer the Americans remained in the space themselves, however, without handing it back, the more difficult it became for local inhabitants to feel that the area was theirs. In Reims, local industry was badly affected by the prolonged occupation of key manufacturing plants. A process which the French called ‘derequisitioning’ was urgently demanded by the town council in the summer of 1945,31 but the level of American occupation of buildings and factories remained high. French authorities commented in April 1945 that the Americans were then in the position of being unable to employ more than the 8,827 Rémois currently working for them because all available premises in the city had already been requisitioned.32 There was no spare manufacturing space in Reims which the Americans had not themselves acquired. For the French, this occupation of their own territory was a crucial impediment to re-starting the normal life of the community, and re-establishing an independent existence. To the Allies, the occupation of French space was a necessity of war, a temporary phenomenon which had to be seen in the context of a much broader international picture. Another major area in which the agendas of Liberated and Liberator were at cross-purposes was in the provision of food supplies. Establishing the means to feed people was clearly a basic duty of any new French government. In many ways, it was an early test of the national competence of post-Liberation France. However, given the damage that had been inflicted on the French countryside in the north, and the chronic inadequacy of the whole communications system, the achievement of this key national objective was virtually impossible. The only way in which large areas of France would receive adequate food supplies was via Allied agencies – landing Liberty ships from North Africa, setting up massive food distribution plans, and providing the wherewithal to transport supplies all over the country. Allied Civil Affairs officers worked hard to ensure that immediate food problems which arose at the Liberation were planned for and tackled as quickly as possible. After the initial few weeks, however, it was evident that the attention of the

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Allied military would necessarily shift to the requirements of the next area to be liberated, and this would increasingly be towns and villages outside the borders of France. For the Allies, the key requirement was to respond to the most obvious and immediate need – what an American officer in Marseille described as, ‘the exigencies of the times’. 33 In this perspective, France was only one of several countries whose food supplies had to be organized and supported by the Allies. From the French viewpoint, the Allies appeared to be engaged in a deliberate exercise to promise much and deliver little. There were extreme food shortages in several parts of France, and these worsened as the days went by. In Marseille, the press became scathing on Allied failures: ‘We were told that 4,000 tons of American food supplies had been delivered to southern France. The American Army HQ has asked us to give the precise details: 11,524, 340 kilos. Note that: 11,524,340 kilos of goods, and the population of southern France hasn’t seen a single ounce of it yet.’34 The critical state of French food supplies in comparison with that of their Allies was daily underlined in Liberation communities in which local people lived in close proximity with Allied troops. The lifestyle of American troops living in the vicinity, with separate food stores, and their ‘bellies . . . full’ was a subject of understandable and constant complaint.35 In a very real way, attitudes to food were symbolic of some of the difficulties in local relationships. To many observers, the Americans seemed more willing to feed their enemies (German POWs) than they were to feed their friends. US troops could be observed shopping at well-stocked American food stores, and eating in apparently lavish ways. In some places, they were accused of throwing out vast quantities of perfectly edible produce. The Commissaire de la République in the Marne complained officially about what he regarded as deeply provocative acts in which, ‘American soldiers were burning, destroying or burying equipment, shoes, tools, tins of food, right under the eyes of the local population which is in desperate need of these things. These actions are extremely provocative, and the Allied authorities do not seem to realise how grave this is.’36

Living with the Liberators Inevitably, Liberated and Liberators in France were working towards very different objectives. For the French, the overriding concern was to re-establish national identity, affirm national sovereignty, and reconstruct a viable nation-state. For the Liberators, the key objective was to

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secure territory, occupy sufficient space to ensure the successful prosecution of the war, and move on. France was a staging-post in a wider and longer conflict. For liberated communities, which had in some cases been forced to play a secondary role in their own Liberation, the re-establishment of national identity was closely related to removing the Liberators from the territory they now occupied, ‘derequisitioning’ the space. Where this was not immediately possible, national identity would be reasserted in a variety of alternative ways: adopting the metaphorical space of past history, redrawing borders, and defining ‘Frenchness’ in opposition to designated foreign communities. For Liberators, the position of external friend was clearly fraught with difficulties. Allied objectives positioned the Liberators as a community in transit whose involvement and investment in the host community would necessarily be slight. Inevitably perhaps, there was an enormous gulf between the expectations of many of the French and the willingness and capacity of the Allied forces to deliver. ‘Disillusionment’ for the French, and ‘ingratitude’ as far as the Allies were concerned, became characteristics in their separate descriptors of this relationship. Within these multinational Liberation communities, defining ‘foreignness’ was often part of the process of taking back space occupied by others. What is particularly interesting about the relationships which were formed in these communities, however, is the relatively slight influence which general national stereotypes appeared to have had in producing the representations of ‘the other’ which emerged. In Normandy, in Cherbourg, Marseille, the Pyrénées-Orientales and Reims, both sides involved in the relationship seemed to develop their understanding of the other more obviously in relation to the particular contexts in which they were living, and the specific circumstances of the Liberation. In Normandy, a moving Liberation, largely directed by the Allied military, produced fleeting images for both the French and the Allies, and a shared vocabulary that positioned the two parties unequally in the relationship. In Cherbourg, the Americans and the French lived together in a confined and crowded urban space, managed and controlled by the military. Here, the two groups implicitly moved to occupy a more abstract space, in which the French could relate to their past history and heritage, and the Americans accept the complementary notion of themselves as a much younger and less rooted community. In Marseille, Liberation was effected by the French themselves who met the Allies in a more normal host–guest relationship, seeing them as likely to provide some much-needed modernizing for French society. With expectations

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different on both sides, the stage was set for a separation between the two communities, with each treating the other as in a foreign tourist– foreign host relationship. In the Pyrénées-Orientales, Allies and French united against a third group of protagonists, who were also Liberators, with an agreed strategy to maintain the frontiers of the nation-state. In Reims, an extremely lengthy encounter between the Americans and the French left the host community in the numerical minority for a two-year period. As time went on, the two groups retreated to occupy increasingly antagonistic positions in which conflicts in their relationship could be expressed in terms of national status. One of the objectives of this book has been to begin the process of bringing together Anglo-American and French narratives of the Liberation. In some of the multinational communities which developed during the events of 1944/45, we have an opportunity to see how people ‘on the ground’ in these encounters set about the difficult, and often painful, business of living together. The ways in which they developed their understanding of ‘the other’ make a contribution, I believe, to the record of Liberation and to the patchwork of experiences which it tells. More fundamentally perhaps, these tentative conclusions argue for a continued understanding that the specific contexts and circumstances of our meetings with foreigners will play a fundamental part in our understanding of who they are and how we react to them.

Notes

Abbreviations AD AN IWM NA PRO

Archives Départementales Archives Nationales, Paris Imperial War Museum, London National Archives, Washington, DC Public Record Office, London (now the National Archives)

Quotations from French sources have been translated by the author.

Introduction 1. For example: M. Hastings, Overlord: ‘D’ Day and the Battle for Normandy (London: Michael Joseph, 1984); J. Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From ‘D’ Day to the Liberation of Paris 6 June–25 August 1944 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982); S. Ambrose, ‘D’ Day: June 6, 1944: the Climactic Battle of World War II (New York, London: Simon and Schuster, 1994); R. Miller, Nothing Less than Victory (London: Michael Joseph, 1993). 2. F. Kersaudy, Churchill and de Gaulle (London: Collins, 1981); A. Funk, Hidden Ally: The French Resistance, Special Operations and the Landings in Southern France (New York: Greenwood Press, 1981); H. Footitt, and J. Simmonds, France, 1943–45 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988). 3. The Hachette series includes: M. Baudot, La Libération de la Bretagne (Paris: Hachette, 1972); P. Bécamp, La Libération de Bordeaux (Paris: Hachette, 1974); P. Bertaux, Libération de Toulouse et sa région (Paris: Hachette, 1973); R. Bourderon, Libération du Languedoc méditerranéan (Paris: Hachette, 1974); E. Dejonghe, and D. Laurent, Libération du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais (Paris: Hachette, 1974); Y. Durand, and R. Vivier, Libération des Pays de Loire (Paris: Hachette, 1974); G. Grandval, and A. Colin, La Libération de l’Est de la France (Paris: Hachette, 1974); P. Guiral, Libération de Marseille (Paris: Hachette, 1974); F. L’Huillier, Libération de l’Alsace (Paris: Hachette, 1975); H. Ingrand, Libération de l’Auvergne (Paris: Hachette, 1974); F. Rude, Libération de Lyon et de sa région (Paris: Hachette, 1974). 4. Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, La Libération de la France: Actes du colloque international tenu à Paris du 28 Octobre au 31 octobre 1974 (Paris: CNRS, 1976); C.-L. Foulon, Pouvoir en Province à la Libération: les commissaires de la République, 1943–46 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1973); G. Madjarian, Conflits, Pouvoirs et Société à la Libération (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1980). 5. F. Virgili, La France ‘virile’: des femmes tondues à la Libération (Paris: Payot, 2000); S. Courtois, D. Peschanski, and A. Rayski, Le sang de l’étranger: les immigrés de la MOI dans la Résistance (Paris: Fayard, 1989); D. Peschanski, La France des camps: l’internement 1938–1946 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002); L. Capdevila, Les Bretons au lendemain de l’Occupation: imaginaires et comportements d’une sortie de guerre 1944–45 (Rennes: Presses Univ., 1999); A. Brossat, Libération, fête folle, 6 juin 1944–mai 193

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1945: mythes et rites, ou le grand théâtre des passions populaires (Paris: Editions Autrement, Série Mémoires, no. 30 1994); H.R. Kedward, and N. Wood, The Liberation of France Image and Event (Oxford: Berg, 1995). 6. See evidence of P.H. Teitgen, in Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, La Libération de la France p. 101. 7. ‘Consultable record’ quoted from C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana Press, 1993), p. 30. 8. G. Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 5.

1

Welcoming the Liberators

1. PRO FO 898 495 l’Amérique en guerre, no. 14, 24 August 1944. 2. F.S.V. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government, NW Europe 1944–46 (London: HMSO, 1961), p. 75. 3. IWM, Sound Archives 17985/4. 4. IWM, Sound Archives 13375/4. 5. Quotations from A. Thomson, ‘Over there 1944–45. Americans in the Liberation of France: Their Perceptions of, and Relations with, France and the French’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis: University of Kent, 1996), pp. 63, 56. 6. IWM 85/12/1. 7. IWM 82/32/1. 8. IWM 78/35/1. 9. R. Herval, Bataille de Normandie, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions de Notre Temps, 1947), p. 173. 10. Musée de la Poche de Royan, 1940–45. 11. R. Paxton, ‘Anti-Americanism in the years of Collaboration and Resistance’ in D. Lacorne et al. (ed.), trans. G. Turner, The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 56. 12. L. Rebatet, Les Décombres (Paris: Denoël, 1942), p. 602. 13. L’Echo de la France, 25 May 1944. 14. L. Rebatet, Les Décombres, p. 601. 15. La Gerbe, 31 October 1940. 16. See for example: Prefect of Ariège, AN F1C III 1141, 30 October 1940. 17. H.C. Shulman, The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–45 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 176. 18. France Actualités, No.23, CO1 518, IWM viewing notes. 19. P. Laborie, L’Opinion française sous Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 20. Tract, Musée Leclerc, Paris. 21. P. Laborie, L’Opinion française, p. 244. 22. P. Bourdan, ‘Carnet de Retour’, in Pierre Bourdan vous parle (Paris: Editions Magnard, 1990), p. 168. 23. J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘La Bataille des Glières et la guerre psychologique’. Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, no. 99, 1975. 24. P. Laborie, L’Opinion française, pp. 313, 325. 25. J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.) Les Voix de la Liberté: Ici Londres, vol. 2 (Paris: La Documentation française, 1975), p. 67. 26. Défense de la France, no. 40, 25 October 1943. 27. Combat, no. 41, February 1943. 28. Les Cahiers Politiques, no. 8, April 1944.

Notes 195 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

AN F1a 3831 23 October 1943: Report by Laroque, 14 September 1943. PRO PREM 3 182/3, 4 June 1944. PRO CAB 65/46 019146, Cabinet meeting, 5 June 1944. Quoted in H. Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance en France, vol. 5 (Paris: Laffont, 1981), p. 28. Défense de la France, no. 47, August 1944. W.S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1949), p. 191. P.M.H. Bell, France and Britain, 1940–49: The Long Separation (London: Longman, 1997), p. 22. P.M.H. Bell, ibid., p. 23. P. Donnelly (ed.), Mrs Milburn’s Diaries: An Englishwoman’s Day-to-Day Reflections 1939–45 (Glasgow: Fontana, 1980), p. 53 (24 June 1940). P. Bourdan, ‘Perpléxités et grandeur de l’Angleterre’, in Pierre Bourdan vous parle (Paris: Editions Magnard, 1990), pp. 344, 346. The Times, 7 June 1944. H. Footitt, ‘Visual Ethnography and the Liberation of France’ (unpublished paper at University of Stirling Conference, 2002). The Times, 12 July 1944; Daily Mail, 7 July 1944; The Times, 11 August 1944. The War Illustrated, no. 188, 1 September 1944. New Statesman, 7 December 1940. See H. Footitt, and J. Simmonds, France 1943–45 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), pp. 10, 11. N. Atkin, ‘Une communauté hétéroclite: les Français’ in F. Poirier (ed.), Londres 1939–1945: Riches et pauvres dans le même élan patriotique: derrière la légende (Paris: Editions Autrement, Série Mémoires, No. 36, 1995), p. 87. R.T. Thomas, Britain and Vichy: The Dilemma of Anglo-French relations 1940–42 (London: Macmillan, 1979). NA 851 R20/49 Matthews to Sec. of State on meeting with Eden, 8 January 1944. PRO FO 371 36036, 23 September 1943. PRO FO 371 36036, 15 March 1943; also PRO CAB 65 (38)WM. 53 (43)2, 13 April 1943. PRO FO 371 40362, PM to FS, 13 March 1944. See examples of procrastination: PRO FO 371 40363, 15 April 1944, and 9 April 1944; PRO FO 371 40364, 20 April 1944. PRO FO 898 478, 30 August 1943. PRO FO 898 478, 25 August 1943. IWM, Information Booklet on France, issued to Allied Servicemen, 35. W. Donovan, and E. Mowrer, Fifth Column Lessons for America (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1941). H. Louis, ‘Réactions américaines à la défaite française de 1940: témoignages et enseignement’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, no. 119, 1980. See, for example, NA 851 33/211, Roosevelt to Pétain, 13 December 1941; Donovan to Roosevelt, 24 December 1941. See PRO CAB 65 (38) WM 75 (43)1, 23 May 1941; PRO FO 371 36047, 24 May 1943). PRO FO 898 495, 18 May 1944, Histoire d’une amitié – la France et l’Amérique, p. 61. Washington Post, 4 July 1944.

196

Notes

61. A. Kaspi, ‘Les soldats américains et la société française’, in J.J. Becker et al., Les Sociétés européennes et la guerre de 1914–18 (Paris: Centre d’Histoire de la France contemporaine, Université de Paris X-Nanterre, 1990). 62. PRO FO 898 495, 18 May 1944, Histoire d’une amitié – La France et l’Amérique, p. 46. 63. Washington Post, 3 September 1944. 64. Stars and Stripes, 19 June 1944. 65. Stars and Stripes, 2 September 1944. 66. Stars and Stripes, 15 June 1944. 67. NA 494–1 Record Group 332, A Pocket Guide to France, pp. 2, 10. 68. Ibid., pp. 7, 28. 69. PRO FO 898 495, 18 May 1944, Histoire d’une amitié – la France et l’Amérique, p. 3. 70. Stars and Stripes, 29 June 1944. 71. Stars and Stripes, 24 August 1944. 72. NA 494–1 Record Group 332, a Pocket Guide to France, p. 12. 73. Stars and Stripes, 15 June 1944. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Stars and Stripes, 27 July 1944. 79. Stars and Stripes, 7 September 1944, 11 September 1944. 80. Stars and Stripes, 19 September 1944, 21 September 1944, 22 September 1944, 25 September 1944, 26 September 1944. 81. Stars and Stripes, 28 September 1944. 82. PRO CAB 78, 3 Misc.29 (42), 23 June 1942, War Office note, 12 June 1942. 83. PRO CAB 66, 34/WP (43) 78, 8 March 1943. 84. PRO WO 171 365 CA 30 Corps, Staff Intelligence Summary, no. 1, 15 May 1944. 85. NA M/H file M1244 Roll 13, 15 March 1943; PRO FO 371 41879, 10 May 1944. 86. US State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943, vol. 2 (Washington: State Department, 1964), p. 23, Roosevelt to Churchill, 1 January 1943. 87. A.D. Chandler, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years, vol. 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p. 1896, Eisenhower to AGWAR, CCS, 11 May 1944. 88. AN F1a 3836, Secrétariat du comité de la défense nationale, Lion, 10 April 1944.

2

Liberation on the Move

1. M. Hastings, Overlord: ‘D’ Day and the Battle for Normandy (London: Michael Joseph, 1984), p. 12. 2. Quoted in J. Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From ‘D’ Day to the Liberation of Paris. 6 June–25 August 1944 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 83. 3. IWM Sound Archives, 10792/3. 4. Quoted in R. Miller, Nothing Less than Victory: The Oral History of ‘D’ Day (London: Michael Joseph, 1993), p. 252. 5. Quoted in Hastings, Overlord, p. 95.

Notes 197 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

IWM, Sound Archives, 10783/2. IWM, G. Foulkes, Sound Archives, 18839/2. IWM 95/15/1. IWM (1991). PRO WO 171 3566, CA Detachment 203 Report, 8 June 1944; J.J. Maginnis, (ed. R.A. Hart) Military Government Journal: Normandy to Berlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971) pp. 10, 11; NA CAD 014 Fr (3–8–43)(1) (3), Report of recce by Lt Col. D.R. Ellias, 9–12 June 1944; PRO WO 219 3729, report by E.J. Bolton in US Army area; see also PRO PREM 3 339/723, PM to FS, 12 June 1944. See PRO CAB 66 (51) WP 44–337; PREM 3 17718, 22 June 1944. Service d’Information Français in Le Jour, Montreal, 24 June 1944. IWM, R.J. Hutchings, 98/3/1. IWM, M. Gow, Con. shelf; S. Procter, 97/1/1; A. Fieber, 84/50/1. Stars and Stripes, 1 July 1944. IWM 92/37/11. IWM, A. Fieber, 84/50/1. IWM, Sound Archives 18024/5, Stars and Stripes, 14 June 1944. Quoted in Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy, p. 184. Stars and Stripes, 28 June 1944. Illustrated London News, 12 August 1944. PRO WO 171/252. War Diary of Civil Affairs 2nd Army, report for fortnight ending 19 August 1944. IWM, T.N. Seckle, 82/32/1. Maple Leaf (Canadian forces in Britain), 6 June 1945. Quoted in Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy, 183. IWM, J.Y. White, 90/6/1, 22 July 1944. IWM 85/12/1, 18 August 1944. J.J. Maginnis, R.A. Hart (ed.), Military Government Journal, p. 9. Washington Post, 26 June 1944. IWM 87/23/1. Stars and Stripes, 19 June 1944. IWM, M. Gow, Con. Shelf. IWM 92/37/1. Figures from: M. Boivin et al., Villes Normandes sous les bombes (juin 1944) (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 1994). E. Fouilloux, and D. Veillon, ‘Mémoires du débarquement en Normandie’, in F. Bédarida (ed.) Normandie 44 : Du débarquement à la Libération (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987), p. 226. Boivin, Villes Normandes, p. 196. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid. p. 92 (Bernard Goupil) D. Maestrali, Caen 1944: l’autre mémoire, 1994 (video). Gille Painel, in R. Herval, Bataille de Normandie: récits de témoins, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions de Notre Temps, 1947), p. 81. Liberté de Normandie, 9–13 July 1944.

198 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Notes IWM, J.T.S. Rex, 87/39/1. IWM, M. Crawford, 94/34/1. IWM, D. Dewar, 84/36/1. K. Tout, Tanks, Advance! Normandy to the Netherlands (London: Robert Hale, 1987), p. 45. Quoted in The Standard, Montreal, 15 July 1944. Daily Mail, 11 July 1944. Daily Sketch, 11 August 1944. Gerald Clark, The Standard, Montreal, 17 June 1944. IWM, M. Crawford, 94/34/1. Stars and Stripes, 12 June 1944. IWM, W.E. Mason, 89/13/1. IWM, A. Fieber, 84/50/1. IWM 87/44/1. IWM, C.J. Charters, Con. shelf; M. Gow, Con. shelf. Washington Post, 3 September 1944. IWM, R.J. Hutchings, 98/3/1. IWM, M. Crawford, 94/34/1; C.J. Charters, Con. shelf. IWM 87/39/1. IWM, J.F.S. Rex, 87/39/1. IWM, C.J. Charters, Con. shelf. IWM, R. Gladman (1991). The Standard, Montreal, 17 June 1944. IWM, R.J. Hutchings, 98/3/1; J.M. Thorpe, 84/50/1. IWM 89/13/1. G.G. Blackburn, The Guns of Normandy: A Soldier’s Eye View, France 1944 (London: Constable, 1998), p. 460. IWM, J.F.S. Rex, 87/39/1. IWM, J.M. Thorpe, 84/50/1. IWM 87/44/1. IWM, J. Lappin, 85/12/1; A. Fieber, 84/50/1. IWM 87/23/1. P. Desprairies, in Herval, Bataille de Normandie, p. 49. IWM 78/35/1. Guernier-Trévières, in Herval, Bataille de Normandie, p. 69. P. Ferrary, in Herval, Bataille de Normandie, p. 39. S. Rose, in Herval, Bataille de Normandie, p. 22. L. Le Marinel, and C. de La Morandière, in Herval, Bataille de Normandie, pp. 153, 197. Mortgat, in Herval, Bataille de Normandie, p. 205. Chanoine Simon in, R. Herval, Bataille de Normandie: récits de témoins, vol. 2 (Paris: Editions de Notre Temps, 1947), p. 64. IWM, J. Lappin, 85/12/1. IWM, Brownlie, 92/37/1. IWM, A. Fieber, 84/50/1. IWM, C.J. Charters, Con. shelf; J.F.S. Rex, 87/39/1. IWM, H.M. Baker, 87/44/1. IWM, A. Fieber, 84/50/1. Le Commandant Mouton, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 420.

Notes 199 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

Abbé Cadel in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 177. J. Delacotte, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 367. G. Painel, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 81. P. Desprairies, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 39. P. Levert, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 165. G. Hubert, A. Paillette, Timothée in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 335. P. Despraires, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 49. Guernier-Trévières, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 70. Ibid. C. Brisson, in Herval, vol. 2, Bataille de Normandie, p. 179. R. Meslin, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 264. A. Gosset, and P. Lecomte, Caen pendant la bataille (Caen: Ozanne, 1946), p. 51. Le Jour, Montreal, 29 July 1944. C.P. Stacey, Official History of the Canadian Army in the 2nd World War, vol. 3 (Ottawa: Dep. of National Defence, 1960), p. 109. André Bauman in Le Jour, Montreal, 10 June 1944. A.V. De Walle, in Herval, vol. 2, Bataille de Normandie, p. 141. Abbé Cadel, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 183. IWM 89/13/1. IWM Con. shelf. IWM, A.S. Gardiner, 90/6/1; J.Y. White, 90/6/1; J.F.S. Rex, 87/39/1. IWM, J.M. Thorpe, 84/50/1. IWM, A.J. Lane, 88/19/1. IWM 94/34/1. IWM 78/35/1. IWM, R.F. Songhurst, 86/24/1. IWM, J. Lappin, 85/12/1. Blackburn, The Guns of Normandy, p. 444. PRO WO 171 252. War Diary of Civil Affairs Branch, 2nd Army Group, 1 July–31 July 1944. IWM, J.M. Thorpe, 84/50/1. IWM, J.F.S. Rex, 87/39/1. IWM, J. Lappin, 85/12/1. IWM 87/44/1. IWM, J.Y. White, 90/6/1. IWM, J.F.S. Rex, 87/39/1. The Times, 19 June 1944, 5 August 1944; Daily Mail, 12 July 1944, 23 June 1944. Daily Mail, 26 June 1944. Daily Mail, 13 June 1944. Daily Mail, 1 August 1944. J. Buisson, and G., in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 238. P. Ferrary, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, pp. 44, 45. A. Tirard, in Herval, vol. 1, Bataille de Normandie, p. 353. Sunday Pictorial, 11 June 1944. Sunday Chronicle, 11 June 1944. See for example, M. Baudot, ‘La contribution de la Résistance à la Libération de la Normandie’ in F. Bédarida, Normandie 44, pp. 166–80. IWM 91/21/1.

200

Notes

135. H. Footitt, and J. Simmonds, France 1943–45, p. 73. 136. IWM, J.M. Thorpe, 84/50/1. 137. P. Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 26.

3

Meeting Private Ryan

1. See details in A. Picquenot, Cherbourg sous l’Occupation (Cherbourg: Ouest France, 1983). 2. NA Rept. CA Detachment A1A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts, Cherbourg, Jkt 1. 3. R. Lerouvillois, 32 trains pour Le Mans. 1944. Cherbourg, porte de la Liberté (Cherbourg:Isotète, 1994), p. 83. 4. Hastings, Overlord, p. 165. 5. The Standard, Montreal, 1 July 1944. 6. NA Rpt. CA Detachment A1 A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts, Cherbourg, Jkt 1. 7. IWM, R.L.H. Nunn, Con. shelf. 8. Lerouvillois, 32 trains, p. 105. 9. IWM, R.L.H. Nunn, Con. shelf. 10. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 1, 3 July 1944. 11. NA Rpt, CA Detachment A1 A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts, Cherbourg, Jkt 1. 12. Picquenot, Cherbourg sous l‘Occupation, p. 43. 13. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 14, 18 July 1944. 14. IWM, R.L.H. Nunn, con. shelf. 15. A. Brossat, Libération, fête folle, p. 8. 16. Quoted in A. Thomson, Over There, p. 84. 17. NA Rpt CA Detachment A1 A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts, Cherbourg, Jkt 1. 18. IWM, R.L.H. Nunn, Con. shelf. 19. NA Rpt CA Detachment A1 A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts, Cherbourg, Jkt 1. 20. The Standard, Montreal, 1 July 1944. 21. Bibliothèque Prévert, file Anciens de Radio Cherbourg: Broadcast of Herbert Clarke, 30 June 1944. 22. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6 CA summary of field rpts. No.7, to 28 July 1944. 23. NA Rpt CA Detachment A1 A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts, Cherbourg, Jkt 1. 24. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (0-s) 850/6, CA summary no. 4, up to 7 July 1944. 25. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 62, 12 September 1944; no. 63, 13 September 1944. 26. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 77, 29 September 1944. 27. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 47, 25 August 1944. 28. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 29, 4 August 1944. 29. NA Rpt CA Detachment A1 A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts, Cherbourg, Jkt 1. 30. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 5, 7 July 1944. 31. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 6, 8 July 1944.

Notes 201 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 6, 8 July 1944; no. 12, 15 July 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 44, 22 August 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise , no. 63, 13 September 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 10, 12 July 1944. IWM, R.L.H. Nunn, con. shelf. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 17, 21 July 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 1, 3 July 1944. IWM, R.L.H. Nunn, con. shelf. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 1, 3 July 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 18, 22 July 1944. NA Rpt CA Detachment A1 A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts, Cherbourg, Jkt 1. PRO WO 2193529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6, CA summary no. 5, to 14 July 1944. Ibid. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 1, 3 July 1944. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) CA summary no. 4, up to 7 July 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 58, 7 September 1944. Bibliothèque Prévert, Anciens de Radio Cherbourg, file Seconde Guerre mondiale. Picquenot, Cherbourg sons l‘Occupation, p. 122. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6, CA summary no. 4, up to 7 July 1944. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6 CA summary no. 5, up to 14 July. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6, CA summary no. 4, up to 7 July 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 16, 20 July 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 5, 7 July 1944. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6, CA summary no. 6, up to 20 July 1944. For example, La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 9, 12 July 1944. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6, CA summary no. 7, up to 28 July 1944. NA Rpt CA Detachment A1 A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts, Cherbourg, Jkt 1. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6, CA summary no. 7, up to 28 July 1944. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6 CA summary no. 8, up to 4 August 1944. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6, CA summary no. 5, up to 14 July 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 35, 11 August 1944. See Picquenot, Cherbourg sons l’Occupation; Lerouvillois, 32 trains. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6 CA summary no. 8, up to 4 August 1944. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 27, 2 August 1944. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6 CA summary no. 9, up to 11 August 1944. Ibid. Ibid.

202

Notes

69. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G-5 (ops) 850/6 CA summary no. 11, up to 26 August 1944. 70. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 2064, 30 September 1944. 71. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1627, 15 October 1944. 72. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1582, 18 October 1944. 73. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1832, 4 October 1944. 74. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1580, 12 October 1944. 75. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1304, 9 October 1944. 76. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1578, 11 October 1944. 77. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1830, 11 October 1944. 78. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1835, 4 October 1944. 79. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 74, 26 September 1844. 80. NA European Civil Affairs division papers; records of SHAEF, Record Group 331, Detachment A1 A1 Report on Communications Services, 27 June– 1 August 1944, entry 613. 81. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 297, 15 October 1945. 82. Lerouvillois,32 trains, p. 94. 83. Stars and Stripes, 21 July 1944. 84. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 12, 15 July 1944. 85. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 4, 6 July 1944. 86. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 6, 8 July 1944. 87. La Presse Cherbourgeoise , no. 38, 15 August 1944. 88. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 54, 2 September 1944. 89. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 63, 13 September 1944. 90. Ibid. 91. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 7, 10 July 1944. 92. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 57, 6 September 1944. 93. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 11, 14 July 1944. 94. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship Civil Communications, Record 2064, 30 September 1944. 95. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 92, 17 October 1945. 96. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 17, 21 July 1944. 97. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 92, 17 October 1944. 98. PRO FO 898 495 l’Amérique en Guerre, no. 2, 26 July 1944. 99. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 92, 17 October 1944. 100. PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship of Civil Communications, Record 1507, 2 September 1944. 101. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 13, 17 July 1944. 102. Bibliothèque Prévert, J.W. Mead, ‘This is Cherbourg’, File Seconde Guerre Mondiale.

Notes 203 103. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 105, 4 November 1944. 104. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 106, 5 November 1944. 105. La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 297, 15 October 1945.

4

The Politics of Disappointment

1. A. Maury, ‘Le Groupe de commandos d’Afrique dans la Libération de la région toulonnaise, Provence Historique, vol. 36, no. 144, avril-mai-juin 1986, p. 143. 2. M. Morsy, ‘La part des troupes maghrébines dans les combats de la Libération’, Provence Historique, vol. 36, no. 144, avril-mai-juin 1986, p. 171. 3. PRO FO 898 456 Anvil AF 140, Maitland Wilson’s announcement. 4. NA, CAD 014 Fr (3–8–43)(1) (5), AFHQ to Commanding general 7th Army, 8 Jan. 1944; also, NA CAD 014 Fr (3–8–43)(1) (95), SHAEF to SACMED, 14 may 1944. 5. Donnison, Civil Affairs, p. 93. 6. NA, CAD 014 Fr (3–8–43)(1) (5) G5 6th Army Group Historical Report, SHAEF G5 504, 6th Army Group Field Reports. 7. AN 72AJ 89, Reports of JED teams LEE and COLLODIAN-LOCH in the Donovan Report. 8. Wings Abroad, Royal Canadian Airforce Newspaper, 24 August 1944. 9. H.L. Coles, and A.K. Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors (Washington DC: Dept. of the Army, 1964), p. 757, CAO 36th Div. Weekly Report, SHAEF files, G5 17.17, Hist. Rpts. 10. Funk, Hidden Ally, p. 102. 11. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 757, CAHQ 7th Army Rpt, 18 August 1944, SHAEF files, G5 17.17 Hist. Rpts. 12. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, pp. 760, 761. 13. PRO WO 32 11422 54A Report by SACMED to CCOS on operations S. France, August 1944, HMSO, 1946, p. 37. 14. Donnison, Civil Affairs, p. 93; NA SHAEF G5 17.17, History of Civil Affairs Operations for S. France, part IX. 15. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, 23 – 30 August 1944. 16. Ibid. 17. La Marseillaise, 24 August 1944. 18. M.-P. Bernard, ‘A Propos de la situation à Marseille à la veille de la Libération’, Provence historique, vol. 36, no. 144, avril-mai-juin 1986, p. 188. 19. La Marseillaise, 24 August 1944, 25 August 1944, 26 August 1944. 20. La Marseillaise, 30 August 1944. 21. See for example, P. Guiral, Libération de Marseille (Paris: Hachette, 1974), p. 44. 22. Ibid, p. 72. 23. Quoted in Ibid, p. 74. 24. Ibid. 25. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, p. 62. 26. Table in Ibid, p. 70. 27. PRO WO 220 69 SHAEF weekly summary, no. 17, week ending 5 October 1944. 28. J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac, (ed.) Les Voix de la Liberté: Ici Londres, vol. 5 (Paris: La Documentation française, 1975), p. 198, 20 August 1944. 29. PRO WO 220 69 SHAEF CA weekly summary, no. 17, week ending 5 October 1944.

204 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Notes Bernard, ‘A propos de la situation’, p. 184. Quoted in Guiral, Libération de Marseille, p. 33. NA SHAEF G5 17.17, History of CA operations for S. France, Part 3. Quoted in, Guiral, Libération de Marseille, p. 88. La Marseillaise, 30 August 1944. Jean Mareston, quoted in Guiral, Libération de Marseille, p. 91. Le Provençal, 27 August 1944. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 761, Memo Parkman, 25 August 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA semi-weekly summary, S. France, no. 2, 2 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA report S. France, 14–16 September 1944. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 762. PRO WO 220 69 CA Report S. France, 14–16 September 1944. Midi-Soir, 14 September 1944. Quoted in Thomson, Over There, p. 140. Midi-Soir, 20 September 1944. Midi-Soir, 3 October 1944. Midi-Soir, 13 October 1944. Midi-Soir, 7 September 1944. Midi-Soir, 10 September 1944. Ibid. La Marseillaise, 1 September 1944. La Marseillaise, 3 September 1944. La Marseillaise, 10 September 1944. Midi-Soir, 7 September 1944. Rouge-Midi, 7 September 1944. Midi-Soir, 7 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, 31 August-6 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA semi-weekly summary, S. France, no. 2, 2 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, 16–23 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 SHAEF CA Report S. France, 7–13 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 SHAEF CA weekly summary no. 17, week ending 5 October 1944, Appendix A Political conditions in the Dept of Alpes-Maritimes. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 770. PRO WO 220 69 SHAEF weekly summary no. 16, week ending 28 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 CA Report S. France, 18–23 August 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, week ending 30 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France 16–23 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 CA Report S. France, 18–23 August 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, 14–16 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France 23–30 August 1944. PRO WO 220 69 SHAEF CA weekly summary no. 13, week ending 8 September 1944. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA semi-weekly summary S. France, no. 2, 2 September 1944.

Notes 205 71. AD 150W 178 XVII, undated. 72. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ Supplement to CA Report S. France, 31 August– 6 September 1944. 73. La Marseillaise, 8 September 1944. 74. AD 149W 182 Gross to Cochet, 8 September 1944. 75. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 796. 76. Midi-Soir, 27 November 1944. 77. AD 150W 178, 6 November 1944. 78. AD 150W 178, 20 November 1944. 79. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, 14–16 September 1944. 80. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 752. 81. PRO WO 220 69 CA Report S. France, week ending 14 October 1944. 82. PRO WO 220 69 SHAEF CA weekly summary, no. 16, week ending 28 September 1944. 83. PRO WO 220 69 CA Report S. France, week ending 21 October 1944. 84. AD 150W 178, CA meeting, 9 November 1944. 85. AD 150W 178 CA meeting, 4 December 1944. 86. AD 150W 178 CA meeting, 11 December 1944. 87. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, 23–30 August 1944. 88. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 762. 89. Ibid, p. 777. 90. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, 31 August–6 September 1944. 91. AD 149W 182, Report from Gross. 92. AD 149W 182, Chef du Service régional, 2 October 1944. 93. AD 15-W 178, note from Prefect, 31 October 1944. 94. AD 149W 182 Report on Service des Relations avec l’ Extérieur et Alliés, 16 January 1945. 95. AD 149W 182 CA Conference, 18 December 1944. 96. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 778. 97. La Marseillaise, 28 August 1944. 98. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, 16–23 September 1944. 99. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, week ending 30 September 1944. 100. Rouge-Midi, 25 September 1944. 101. PRO WO 220 69 CA Report S. France, week ending 14 October 1944. 102. Midi-Soir, 20 November 1944. 103. AD 150W 178 13 September 1945, Prefect of Alpes-Maritimes to Commissaire Régional de la République, Marseille. 104. AD 150W 178 Mayor of St-Victoret to Prefect, 18 June 1945. 105. AD 149W 182 Commissariat des Ports, 11 January 1945. 106. See for example: Le Populaire, 25–26 February 1845; L’Aube, 16 March 1945. 107. PRO WO 219 1599 SHAEF Mission (France) Internal Security in France, Report no. 8, 16 June 1945. 108. PRO WO 219 169 SHAEF Public Relations Division, ‘Allied Aid to France’, 2 March 1945; AFP statement, 3 April 1945. 109. PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA Report S. France, week ending 30 September 1944. 110. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 779. 111. AD 150W 178 CA meeting, 6 November 1944.

206

Notes

112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

AD 150W 178 CA meeting, 9 November 1944. PRO WO 219 169 Confidential Report, R. Hannegan (FEA), Tabf, footnote 17. La Marseillaise, 2 November 1944. Midi-Soir, 7 September 1944. La Marseillaise, 2 November 1944. La Marseillaise, 9 November 1944. AD 149W 183 Ministère de l’Information to Prefect, 11 August 1945. La Marseillaise, 2 November 1944.

5

Removing Inflammable Material

1. Pike, D.W., In the Service of Stalin: The Spanish Communists in Exile 1939– 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 233. 2. PRO FO 660 212, Templewood to FS, 3 September 1944. 3. Le Cri Cérétan, 9 September 1944. 4. PRO FO 660 212, 9 October 1944. 5. PRO FO 660 212, 3 September 1944. 6. PRO FO 371 39817, 28 August 1944. 7. Le Cri Cérétan, 9 September 1944. 8. Pike, In the Service of Stalin, p. 186. 9. Combattre, Provence FFI, 3 September 1944. 10. AD 26W 20 undated. 11. P. Héricourt, Pourquoi mentir? L’Aide franco-soviétiqe à l’Espagne rouge (Paris: Baudinière, 1937), p. 21. 12. E. Salgas, ‘L’Opinion publique et les représentations des réfugiés espagnols dans les Pyrénées-Orientales (janvier-septembre 1939)’, J. Sagnes, and S. Caucanas (eds), Les Français et la guerre d’Espagne (Perpignan: CREPF, Université de Perpignan, 1990), p. 186. 13. See, for example, G. Dreyfus-Armand, ‘Les mouvements migratoires dans l’exil’, L. Domergue (ed.) L’Exil républicain espagnol à Toulouse, 1939–1999 (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1999), p. 25. 14. Dreyfus-Armand, ‘Les Mouvements migratoires’, p. 28. 15. Quoted in R. Grando et al., Camps du mépris: des chemins de l’exil à ceux de la Résistance 1939–1945 (Perpignan: libres del Trabuscaire, 1991), p. 66. 16. Grando, Camps du mépris, p. 67. 17. Quoted in D. Peschanski, La France des camps, pp. 478, 479. 18. J.-C. Villegas (ed.). ‘Plages d’exil: les camps de réfugiés espagnols en France en 1939’, Hispanista, xx, 1989, BDIC, p. 157. 19. Salgas, ‘L’ Opinion publique’, p. 190. 20. L’Indépendant, 3 February 1939. 21. See, for example, G. Dreyfus-Armand, and E. Témime, Les camps sur la plage, un exil espagnol (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1995), p. 77. 22. Le Populaire, 13 February 1939. 23. L’Indépendant, 17 February 1939. 24. L’Indépendant 11 March 1939. 25. A. Bausil, ‘Rapport sur le préjudice causé du fait des réfugiés espagnols aux boisements de la plage d’Argelès-sur-Mer au point de vue de l’esthétique et de l’agrément’, in Villegas, ed. Hispanista, p. 148. 26. Peschanski, La France des camps, pp. 478, 479.

Notes 207 27. A. Boitel, Le Camp de Rivesaltes 1941–42: du centre d’hébergement au ‘Drancy de la Zone Libre’ (Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2001). 28. Dreyfus-Armand, ‘Les Mouvements migratoires’, p. 31. 29. A. Grynberg, and A. Charaudeau, ‘Les camps d’internement’, P. Milza, and D. Peschanski (eds), Exils et migration: Italiens et Espagnols en France, 1938–1946 (Paris: L’ Harmattan, 1994), pp. 139–61. 30. Grando, Camps des mépris, pp. 153, 154. 31. P. Laborie, and J.-P., Almaric, L’Exil républicain espagnol à Toulouse, 1939–1999 (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1999), p. 15. 32. Ibid. 33. Le Travailleur Catalan, 2 December 1944. 34. AD 26W 20 Comité France–Espagne, Roussillon, to CDL, 22 June 1945. 35. Le Travailleur Catalan, 3 February 1945. 36. PRO FO 371 39817 31 August 1944. 37. AD 26W 20 5 September 1944. 38. J.-L. Dufour, and R. Trempé, ‘La France, base arrière d’une reconquête républicaine de l’Espagne: l’affaire du Val d’Aran’, Domergue, L’Exil républicain espagnol, pp. 261–70. 39. Combattre, Provence FFI, 11, 3 December 1944. 40. PRO FO 371 39817 SHAEF G3 to Head of SHAEF Mission France, 13 September 1944. 41. PRO WO 219 2748 PS SHAEF 44/54, Second Draft of Study ‘Hiatus area of SW France’, 19 October 1944. 42. PRO FO 371 39817 Barcelona to FS 28 August 1944. 43. Reported in PRO FO 371 39817 Farquhar to FS 20 September 1944. 44. PRO FO 371 39817 8 September 1944. 45. PRO FO 660 212 13 October 1944. 46. PRO FO 660 212 undated. 47. PRO FO 660 212 British Embassy, Madrid, 30 October 1944. 48. PRO FO 660 212, reported in Peake to Duff Cooper on telegram, 20 October 1944. 49. PRO WO 220 69 CA weekly summary no. 21, week ending 4 November 1944. 50. C. Brinton, French Historical Studies, vol. II, no. 2, 1961, p. 140. 51. PRO FO 371 39818 12 October 1944. 52. PRO FO 371 39817 Farquhar to FS 20 September 1944. 53. PRO FO 371 39818 Peake to FO 20 October 1944. 54. PRO FO 660 212 Dorchy to attaché Madrid, 9 October 1944. 55. PRO FO 371 39817 Barcelona to FS 28 August 1944. 56. PRO FO 371 39817 FO to Paris 4 September 1944. 57. PRO FO 660 212 Templewood to FS 3 September 1944. 58. PRO FO 371 39817 Roberts to Holman 4 September 1944. 59. AD 26W Inspecteur-chef de la 3e section to Commissaire Spécial des Services Politiques 5 September 1944. 60. AD 26W 20 Commissaire Spécial to Chef du Service de Sécurité at Perpignan 21 September 1944. 61. AD 26W 20 15 September 1944. 62. AD 26W 20 MUR to Prefect 14 September 1944. 63. Le Travailleur Catalan, 25 November 1944.

208 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

Notes PRO FO 371 39817 Barcelona to FS 28 August 1944. Le Travailleur Catalan, 2 December 1944. PRO FO 371 39817 Note on Massigli meeting 28 August 1944. PRO FO 371 39817 British Embassy to FO 21 September 1944. PRO FO 371 39817, SHAEF G3 to Koenig: Koenig’s note 22 August 1944. PRO FO 660 212 Conversation with Koenig, 16 October 1944. Col. Teyssier, quoted in J. Dufour and R. Trempé, ‘La France, base arrière’ p. 277. France Libre, 31 October 1944. Quoted in J. Dufour, and R. Trempé, ‘La France, base arrière’, p. 279. PRO FO 660 212 Telegram US Ambassador to Madrid to State Dept, 12 September 1944. Le Travailleur Catalan, 17 March 1944. For example, Vernet-les-Bains, AD 26 W 20 20 March 1945; Villemolaque, AD 26W 20 19 March 1945. AD 26W 20 18 March 1945. AD 26W 20 Battalion D to CDL 21 March 1945. Le Cri Cérétan, 30 December 1944. AD 26W 20 Ministère des Prisonniers, Déportés et Réfugiés to CDL 29 May 1945. Le Travailleur Catalan, 9 June 1945. AD 26W 20 Bataillon D to CDL 21 March 1945. AD 26W 20 14 June 1945. Le Travailleur Catalan, 9 June 1945. A. Bechelloni, ‘Italiens et Espagnols dans la presse française de septembre 1944 à décembre 1946’, P. Milza, and D. Peschanski, Exils et migration, p. 291. Le Cri Cérétan, 12 May 1945. Le Travailleur Catalan, 17 March 1945. Le Travailleur Catalan, 3 February 1945. Le Travailleur Catalan, 3 March 1945. AD 26W 20 Cabinet du Commissaire Central to CDL 7 November 1944. Le Cri Cérétan, 28 July 1945. AD 26W 20 April 1945.

6 The Long Goodbye 1. AD 16W 268 Renseignements Généraux to Commissaire de la République, 26 June 1945. 2. J.-P. Husson, La Marne et les Marnais à l’épreuve de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, vol. 1 (Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 1995), p. 310. 3. AD 16W 266 Report Sara Lamport, 5 November 1945. 4. E. Lallement, quoted in J-P. Husson, La Marne et les Marnais à l’ épreuve de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, vol. 2 (Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 1995), p. 77. 5. AD 16W 266 Ministère de l’Intérieur to Commissaire de la République, 12 October 1944. 6. AD 130W 9 Police Report, 23 September 1944. 7. AD 130W 9 Chief of Police, 11 September 1944. 8. AD 130W 9 Renseignements Généraux to Sub-Prefect, 25 September 1944. 9. AD 16W 269 to Ingénieur en chef, 7 November 1944; 3 November 1944.

Notes 209 10. AD 6WR 4835 file Opéra Paramount Reims: Occupation américaine, 9 December 1944. 11. AD 6W 4835 18 December 1944. 12. AD 16W 4835 Epernay Palace to Prefect, 3 July 1945. 13. AD 16W 266 Directeur Régional des Services Postaux to Commissaire de la République, 11 September 1944. 14. AD 130W 53 Note d’information, Ministère des Finances, undated. 15. L’Union Champenoise, 27 September 1944. 16. AD 130W 9 Police Report on meeting 8 October 1944. 17. AD 126W 266 Thrasher to Commissaire de la République, 30 December 1944. 18. AD 16 W 266 Thrasher to Commissaire de la République, 22 December 1944. 19. AD 130W 9 Renseignements Généraux, 20 December 1944. 20. AD 130W 9 Renseignements Généraux, 28 December 1944. 21. AD 130W 9 Renseignements Généraux, 23 December 1944. 22. AD 3Z 874 Service d’Aide aux Forces Alliées de la Mairie de Reims to subprefect, 8 May 1945. 23. AD 161W 323 Renseignements Généraux, 23 February 1945. 24. Ibid. 25. AD 3Z 444 Renseignements Généraux, 15 May 1945. 26. AD 16W 266 Note to sub-prefect from Chamber of Commerce, 4 May 1945. 27. AD 130W 10 Note to sub-prefect, 4 January 1945. 28. AD 130W 10 Renseignements Généraux monthly report, 24 April 1945. 29. AD 130W 9 Daily police report, 14 September 1944. 30. AD 130W 9 Daily police report, 13 October 1944. 31. AD 16W 268 Gendarmerie Nationale report of incident file, 20 September 1944. 32. AD 130W 10 Renseignements Généraux to Paris, 16 January 1945. 33. AN 72AJ 384 Gendarmerie Nationale Report Synthèses no. 18, 15 February– 15 March 1945, Annexe 2. 34. Quoted in PRO WO 219 1599 SHAEF Mission (France) Internal Security Report no. 3, 31 March 1945. 35. AD 130W 9 Police Report, 14 September 1944. 36. AD 16W 266 Commissaire de la République to sub-prefect of Reims, 20 October 1944. 37. AD 16W 266 Commissaire de la République to Commander 6th Legion Gendarmerie, 23 January 1945. 38. AD 130W 10 Renseignements Généraux report on meeting of Syndicat du Bâtiment, 29 January 1945. 39. AD 130W 10, 1 March 1945. 40. AD 130W 10, 9 March 1945. 41. AD 16W 266 sub-prefect of Reims to Prefect of Marne, 15 December 1944. 42. AD 130W 10, Police report 17 March 1945. 43. Quoted in J.-P. Husson, vol. 1, La Marne et les marnais, p. 297. 44. Ibid. La Marne et les marnais, p. 299. 45. Quoted in Husson, vol. 2, La Marne et les marnais, p. 91. 46. AD 130W 10 Renseignements Généraux, 12 May 1945. 47. AD 16W 266 Note to sub-prefect from Chamber of Commerce, 4 May 1945. 48. AD 16W 266 sub-prefect to General Lee, 18 May 1945.

210

Notes

49. AD 16W 268 Chef du Service Départemental des Renseignements Généraux to Commissaire de la République, 26 June 1945. 50. AD 16W 266 Commissaire de la République to Ministère de l’Intérieur, 13 August 1945. 51. AD 16W 268 Chef du Service Départemental des Renseignements Généraux to Commissaire de la République, 26 June 1945. 52. Ibid. 53. AD 161W 323 Service Départemental des Renseignements Généraux, 6 July 1945. 54. AD 161W 323 Circular from Thrasher, 24 October 1945. 55. AD 16W 266 Commissaire de la République to Ministère de l’Intérieur, 13 August 1945. 56. AD 161W 323 Service Départemental des Renseignements Généraux, 6 July 1945. 57. AD 16W 268 Service Départemental des Renseignements Généraux to Commissaire de la République, 26 June 1945. 58. AD 130W 9 Police to Provost-Marshall at Reims, 16 September 1944. 59. AD 130W 11 Report to Mayor of Reims, 28 August 1945. 60. AD 16W 268 Service Départemental des Renseignements Généraux to Commissaire de la République, 26 June 1945. 61. AD 161W 323 Service des Renseignements Généraux, 6 July 1945. 62. AD 16W 266 unsigned letter to Mayor of Troyes, 8 August 1945. 63. AD 161W 323 Commander of MP Epernay, 27 August 1945. 64. AD 161W 323, 7 August 1945. 65. AD 161W 323 Note from Renseignements Généraux, 22 October 1945. 66. AD 130W 11 Renseignements Généraux to sub-prefect, 17 August 1945. 67. AD 130W 11 Renseignements Généraux to sub-prefect, bimonthly report 15–30 September 1945. 68. AD 130W 11 Renseignements Généraux report of Cartel rémois d’action morale, 30 November 1945. 69. NA Records of the Office of Secretary of Defense: Record Group 330, Report no. ETO-102 ‘Changes in attitudes of soldiers in the European Theater towards our Allies: from April to August 1945’. 70. AD 130W 11 Regional Director of Information to Commissaire Central, 13 July 1945. 71. Union Républicaine, 29/30 July 1945. 72. Union Républicaine, 31 July 1945. 73. AD 161W 323 Daily Report, 18–19 August 1945. 74. AD 161W 323, 7 August 1945. 75. AD 130W 11 Note on meeting, 6 August 1945. 76. AD 130W 11 Renseignements Généraux to sub-prefect, bimonthly report, 1 August 1945. 77. AD 161W 323, 12 October 1945. 78. AD 161W 323 Note from Renseignements Généraux, 22 October 1945. Letter Sicre to Thrasher, 17 October 1945. 79. AD 130W 10 Police 3e arrondissement, 30 June 1945. 80. AD 16W 266 Report Sara Lamport, 5 November 1945. 81. AD 16W 266 Thrasher to Commissaire de la République, 25 October 1945. 82. AD 16W 267 Thrasher to Commissaire de la République, 23 August 1945.

Notes 211 83. AD 16W 266 Commissaire de la République to Lt Colonel de Messy, 11 June 1945. 84. AD 16W 266, 18 October 1945. 85. AD 16W 266 Report Sara Lamport, 5 November 1945. 86. AD 161W 323, 14 July 1946. 87. AD 16W 266 note to sub-prefect from Chamber of Commerce, 4 May 1945. 88. AD 130W 9 Police Report, 13 October 1944. 89. AD 132W 276 Renseignements Généraux, 15 June 1946. 90. AD 16W 266 Captain Sellier to Commissaire de la République, 5 September 1945. 91. AD 6WR 4835 Western Base Section American Forces European Theatre, 17 June 1946. 92. AD 6WR 4835 Prefect, 11 May 1950. 93. AD 132W 276 Renseignements Généraux, 25 June 1946. 94. AD 16W 266 Lt Colonel de Messy to Commissaire de la République, 19 September 1945. 95. AD 132W 276 Renseignements Généraux to sub-prefect, 25 June 1946.

7 Liberated and Liberators 1. D. Maestrali, Caen 1944: l’autre mémoire, 1994. 2. AD 130W 11, Renseignements Généraux to sub-prefect, bimensuel, 17 August 1945; La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no. 92, 17 October 1944; PRO WO 219 1792B Censorship of Civil Communications, Record 1507, 2 September 1944; AD 16W 266 unsigned letter to mayor of Troyes, 8 August 1945. 3. PRO WO 219 Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1830, 11 October 1944, Cherbourg. 4. PRO WO 219 Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1578, 11 October 1944, Isigny-sur-Mer. 5. PRO WO 219 3529 SHAEF G5 (ops) CA summary, no. 8, up to 4 August 1944. 6. PRO WO 219 1599 SHAEF Mission (France) Internal Security in France, Report no. 8, 16 June 1945. 7. La Marseillaise, 2 November 1944. 8. PRO WO 219 169 S.Reber to COS, 18 March 1945; Le Populaire, 25–26 March 1945; Le Monde, 12 April 1945; Le Populaire, 5 April 1945. 9. Rouge-Midi, 7 September 1944. 10. Rouge-Midi, 14 September 1944. 11. Rouge-Midi, 1 October 1944. 12. PRO FO 371 49073, Harvey to FS, 30 March 1945. 13. IWM, J. Lappin, 85/12/1. 14. NA 494–1 Record Group 332, A Pocket Guide to France, p. 7. 15. PRO WO 219 SHAEF PR division, ‘Publicizing of Allied Aid to France’, 3 February 1945. 16. AD 16W 266 sub-prefect to Prefect, 15 December 1944. 17. La Marseillaise, 9 November 1944. 18. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 778. 19. AN F1cIII 1225, Prefect’s Report, February 1945. 20. AD 149W 182 CA Conference, 18 December 1944. 21. AD 130W 11 Commissaire Central to Mayor of Reims, 28 August 1945.

212

Notes

22. AD 16W 266 Commissaire de la République to sub-prefect of Reims, 20 October 1944. 23. AD 132W 276 Renseignements Généraux, 15 June 1946. 24. AD 149W 182 Gross to Cochet, 8 September 1944. 25. AD 150W 178 CA meeting, 6 November 1944. 26. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers, p. 779. 27. AD 132W 276 Renseignements Généraux, 15 June 1946. 28. AD 150W 178 CA meeting, 9 November 1944. 29. AD 130W 10 Police Report, 17 March 1945. 30. AD 161W 323 Renseignements Généraux, 23 February 1945. 31. AD 130W 11 Renseignements Généraux to sub-prefect, 1 August 1945. 32. AD 130W 10 Comment by Inspecteur Divisionnaire du Travail, Châlons on report from Groupement Interprofessionel des Syndicats patronaux de Reims et de la Région, 30 April 1945. 33. La Marseillaise, 9 November 1944. 34. Rouge-Midi, 25 September 1944. 35. AD 150W 178 Mayor of St Victoret to Prefect, 18 June 1945; AD 149W 182 Commissariat des Ports, 11 January 1945. 36. AD 16W 266 Letter Commissaire de la République to Col. De Messy, 8 August 1945.

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Books S. Ambrose, ‘D’ Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (New York, London: Simon and Schuster, 1994). N. Atkin, ‘Une communauté hétéroclite: Les Français’, in F. Poirier (ed.), Londres 1939–1945. Riches et pauvres dans le même élan patriotique: derrière la légende (Paris: Editions Autrement, Série Mémoires, no. 36, 1995). M. Baudot, ‘La Contribution de la Résistance à la Libération de la Normandie’, in F. Bédarida (ed.), Normandie 44: du débarquement à la Libération (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987). M. Baudot, La Libération de la Bretagne (Paris: Hachette, 1972). P. Bécamp, La Libération de Bordeaux (Paris: Hachette, 1974). A. Bechelloni, ‘Italiens et Espagnols dans la presse française de septembre 1944 à décembre 1946’, in P. Milza and D. Peschanski (eds), Exils et migration: Italiens et Espagnols en France, 1938–1945 (Paris: I’Harmattan, 1994). P.M.H. Bell, France and Britain, 1940–49: The Long Separation (London: Longman, 1997). M.-P. Bernard, ‘A propos de la situation à Marseille à la veille de la Libération’, Provence Historique, vol. 36, no. 144, 1986. P. Bertaux, Libération de Toulouse et sa région (Paris: Hachette, 1973) G.G. Blackburn, The Guns of Normandy: A Soldier’s Eye View, France 1944 (London: Constable, 1998). M. Boivin et al., Villes normandes sous les bombes (juin 1944) (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 1994). P. Bourdan, Pierre Bourdan vous parle (Paris: Editions Magnard, 1990). R. Bourderon, Libération du Languedoc méditerranéan (Paris: Hachette, 1974). A. Brossat, Libération, fête folle, 6 juin 1944-mai 1945: mythes et rites, ou le grand théâtre des passions populaires (Paris: Editions Autrement, Série Mémoires, no. 30, 1994). L. Capdevila, Les Bretons au lendemain de l’Occupation: imaginaires et comportements d’une sortie de guerre 1944–45 (Rennes: Presses Universitarie, 1999). A.D. Chandler, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years, vol. 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970). W.S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1949). H.L. Coles and A.K. Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors (Washington DC: Dept of the Army, 1964). Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, La Libération de la France: Actes du Colloque international tenu à Paris du 28 octobre au 31 octobre 1974 (Paris: CNRS, 1976). S. Courtois, D. Peschanski and A. Rayski, Le Sang de l’étranger: les immigrés de La MOI dans la Résistance (Paris: Fayard, 1989). J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté: ici Londres, vol. 2 and vol. 5 (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1975). J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘La Bataille des Glières et la Guerre psychologique’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, no. 99, 1975. E. Dejonghe and D. Laurent, Libération du nord et du Pas-de-Calais (Paris: Hachette, 1974). G. Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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P. Donnelly (ed.), Mrs Milburn’s Diaries: An Englishwoman’s Day-to-Day Reflections 1939–45 (Glasgow: Fontana, 1980). F.S.V. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government, NW Europe 1944–45 (London: HMSO, 1961). G. Dreyfus-Armand, ‘Les Mouvements migratoires dans l’exil’, in L. Domergue (ed.), L’Exil républicain espagnol à Toulouse, 1939–1999 (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1999). G. Dreyfus-Armand and E. Témime, Les Camps sur la plage, un exil espagnol (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1995). J.-L. Dufour and R. Trempé, ‘La France, base arrière d’une reconquête républicaine de l’Espagne: l’affaire du Val d’Aran’, in L. Domergue (ed.), L’Exil républicain espagnol à Toulouse, 1939–1999 (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1999). Y. Durand and R. Vivier, Libération des Pays de Loire (Paris: Hachette, 1974). H. Footitt, ‘Visual Ethnography and the Liberation of France’ (Unpublished paper, University of Stirling Conference, 2002). H. Footitt and J. Simmonds, France, 1943–45 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988). E. Fouilloux and D. Veillon, ‘Mémoires du débarquement en Normandie’, in F. Bédarida (ed.), Normandie 44: du débarquement à la Libération (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987). C-L. Foulon, Pouvoir en province à la Libération: les commissaires de la République, 1943–46 (Paris:Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1973). A. Funk, Hidden Ally: The French Resistance, Special Operations and the Landings in Southern France (New York: Greenwood Press, 1981). C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana Press, 1993). A. Gosset and P. Lecomte, Caen pendant la bataille (Caen: Ozanne, 1946) R. Grando et al., Camps du mépris: des chemins de l’exil à ceux de la Résistance 1939–45 (Perpignan: libres del Trabuscaire, 1991). G. Grandval and A. Colin, La Libération de l’est de la France (Paris: Hachette, 1974). A. Grynberg and A. Charaudeau, ‘Les camps d’internement’, in P. Milza and D. Peschanski (eds), Exils et migration: Italiens et Espagnols en France (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994). P. Guiral, Libération de Marseille (Paris: Hachette, 1974) M. Hastings, Overlord: ‘D’ Day and the Battle for Normandy (London: Michael Joseph, 1984). P. Héricourt, Pourquoi mentir? L’Aide franco-soviétique à l’Espagne rouge (Paris: Baudinière, 1937). R. Herval, Bataille de Normandie: Récits de Témoins, vol. 1, 2 (Paris: Editions de Notre Temps, 1947). J.-P.Husson, La Marne et les Marnais à l’épreuve de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, vol. 1,2 (Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 1995). H. Ingrand, Libération de l’Auvergne (Paris: Hachette, 1974) A. Kaspi, ‘Les soldats américains et la société française’, in J.J. Becker et al. (eds) Les Sociétés européennes et la guerre de 1914–18 (Paris: Centre d’Histoire de la France contemporaine, Université de Paris X-Nanterre, 1990). H.R. Kedward and N. Wood, The Liberation of France: Image and Event (Oxford: Berg, 1995).

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J. Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From ‘D’ Day to the Liberation of Paris 6 June– 25 August 1944 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982). F. Kersaudy, Churchill and de Gaulle (London: Collins, 1981). P. Laborie, L’Opinion française sous Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1990). P. Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). R. Lerouvillois, 32 trains pour Le Mans, 1944: Cherbourg, porte de la Liberté (Cherbourg: Isotète, 1994). F. L’Huillier, Libération de l’Alsace (Paris: Hachette, 1975). H. Louis, ‘Réactions américaines à la défaite française de 1940: témoignages et enseignements’, Revue d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale, no. 119, 1980. G. Madjarian, Conflits, pouvoirs et société à la Libération (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1980). A. Maury, ‘Le Groupe de Commandos d’Afrique dans la Libération de la région toulonnaise’, Provence Historique, vol. 36, no. 144, 1986. R. Miller, Nothing Less than Victory (London: Michael Joseph, 1993). M. Morsy, ‘La part des troupes maghrébines dans les combats de la Libération’ Provence Historique, vol.36, no.144, 1986. H. Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance en France, vol. 5 (Paris: Laffont, 1981). R. Paxton, ‘Anti-Americanism in the Years of Collaboration and Resistance’, in D. Lacorne et al. (eds) trans. G. Turner, The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception (London: Macmillan, 1990). D. Peschanski, La France des camps: l’internement 1938–1946 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). A. Picquenot, Cherbourg sous l’Occupation (Cherbourg: Ouest France, 1983). D.W. Pike, In the Service of Stalin: The Spanish Communists in Exile 1939–1945 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993). F. Rude, Libération de Lyon et de sa région (Paris: Hachette, 1974). E. Salgas, ‘L’Opinion publique et les représentations des réfugiés espagnols dans les Pyrénées-Orientales (janvier–septembre, 1939), in J. Sagnes and S. Caucanas (eds), Les Français et la guerre d’Espagne (Perpignan: CREPF, Université de Perpignan, 1990). H.C. Shulman, The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–45 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). C.P. Stacey, Official History of the Canadian Army in the 2nd World War, vol.3 (Ottawa: Dept of National Defence, 1960). R.T. Thomas, Britain and Vichy: The Dilemma of Anglo-French Relations 1940–42 (London: Macmillan, 1979). A. Thomson, ‘Over There 1944–45. Americans in the Liberation of France. Their Perceptions of, and Relationships with France and the French’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Kent, 1996). K. Tout, Tanks, Advance! Normandy to the Netherlands (London: Robert Hale, 1987). J.-C. Villegas (ed.), ‘Plages d’exil: les camps des réfugiés espagnols en France en 1939’, Hispanista, xx, 1989. F. Virgili, La France virile des femmes tondues à la Libération (Paris: Payot, 2000).

Index Africa, North 18, 23, 27 Agence France Presse 117 alcohol 25, 57, 84–5, 157–8, 164 Alençon 37, 46 Algiers agreement, 13 November 1942 27 Allied bombing 15, 22, 44, 45–6, 101, 180 Allied Forward Zone headquarters 148–50, 161–2, 173, 178 Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory (AMGOT) 2, 19, 34 Allied servicemen guidance on conduct for 25–6, 31–3, 163–4 numbers in France 3, 38, 66, 95 preparation of US troops for Liberation of France 29–33 Amélie-les-Bains 127 American Centre de Repos de la Riviera 113, 116 American culture 13–14, 181 American Friends Service Committee 26 American Red Cross 73, 90 American regrouping camps 161–3 American Revolution 28 American Service of Information 169–70 Amerique en Guerre, L’ 90–1 Anglo-American studies (historical) 1–2 anti-Allied propaganda 13–14, 15, 101 anti-Fascist exiles 102 Argelès-sur-Mer 127, 129 Arles-sur-Tech 122

Arromanches 40–1 Atkin, Nicholas 22 Auberjondois, Captain Fernand 79 Aubrac, M. 98, 108 ‘Autre Mémoire’ video project 46–7, 176 Bagnoles-de-l’ Orne 61 Baker, Lieutenant-Colonel 50, 52, 60 Balleroy 54 banks 75 Barcarès 127 Barcelona British Consulate press attaché 123–4, 134 barter 57–8 Battle of Britain 21, 22 Bayeux 10, 41 BBC 14, 133 Bechelloni, Antonio 142–3 begging 58, 150–2 behaviour, troops’ 179–80, 182 Cherbourg 84–7, 91 guidance for American troops 31–3, 163–4 information booklets for British troops 25–6 Marseille 112–16 Reims 157–8, 163–9 Bell, Philip 20 Béziers 122 black American soldiers 73, 85, 91, 180, 187–8 black market 112, 157, 162 Blackburn, George 51, 59 bombing, Allied 15, 22, 44, 45–6, 101, 180 Bormes 110 Bourdan, Pierre 16, 21 Bowyer, Major 117 bread, white 57 217

218

Index

Brinton, Crane 133 Britain, post-Liberation 181–2 Foreign Office 24, 132–3, 135 information for British troops 25–6 pre-Liberation perspectives on France 20–6 Brossat, Alain 72 brothels 165, 184 Brownlie, Lieutenant-Colonel 42, 45 Buckmaster, LieutenantColonel 25 buildings, damaged 43–5, 103 Cadel, Abbé 54, 57 Caen 37, 45, 49, 59, 60, 175, 180 ‘Autre Mémoire’ video project 46–7, 176 destruction 44 French Canadians 56 Calvados 10–11, 58, 59 Canadian soldiers, French 55–7 Canebière, La 103 Cannes 99, 115, 116 Carentan 44 casualties Allied forces 37, 98 French civilians 45–6, 81, 180 Catalonia 132, 134 cemetery at Perpignan 146, 186 Cerdagne 128 Céret 122, 124, 125, 143, 144, 145 Châlons 147, 156, 161, 166, 167–8, 170 Chambéry 15 Chappuis, Colonel 103 Charlottesville military government training school 34 Charters, Captain 51, 57 Chartres 15 chateaux 43–4 Cherbourg 5, 44–5, 66–94, 105, 112, 176–7, 179 battle for Cherbourg 67–71 early meetings 77–82

living with the liberators 93–4, 191 return of Cherbourgeois 67, 74–7 time zones 87–93, 177 urban space 71–4, 188, 189 working and living together 82–7 Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC) 34 children 61, 90–1 churches 43–4 Churchill, Winston S. 14, 19, 20, 23–4 cinema 14, 88, 107, 181 Civil Affairs 56, 189 Cherbourg 68, 81, 176, 189; cooperation with French authorities 77–8; food distribution 76–7; handover ceremony 82; looting problem 76; occupation 73; requisitioning 72 southern France 96, 97–8, 108; Franco-American relations 111–12; Marseille 102, 103–4 training 19, 33–4 civilian casualties 45–6, 81, 180 Clark, General 27 Clark, Gerald 51 Clay, General 92–3 Cochet, General 111 Col de Perthus 122 collaborators 12, 13, 14 punishment of female collaborators 53–4, 81 wildcat justice against 78, 107–8 Collège Moderne et Technique 149, 161 Collins, Major-General Joe 68, 70–1, 89 Collobrières 110 Colombelles 22 colonies 24 Combat 18, 115

Index

Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (CFLN) 97, 137 Comité Général d’Etudes 18 Committee of Mercy Inc. 26 communications 3, 123–4, 153, 157 Communist Party Pyrénées-Orientales 130, 133, 136, 142 Reims 154, 160–1 southern France 101 communities of Liberation 2–4 community networks, rebuilding 89–90 compensation 172 concentration camps 127–9 Condé-sur-Noireau 45 conduct see behaviour, troops’ Confaron 110 Confedération Générale du Travail (CGT) 114 Continental Base Section (CBS) 104 control points 71 cordon sanitaire 139–40 corn, ripening 43 Courcy camp 171 Courseulles 51, 64 Coustouges 125 Coutances 45 Crawford, Colonel M. 49, 58 Cremieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis 16 Croix des Pyrénées-Orientales, La 127 culture cultural differences: Cherbourg 90–2; labour relations 114–15, 170–2, 183 cultural exchange circle 91 French depicted as culturally sophisticated 30 French views of American culture 13–14, 181 sexual relations 165, 184 curfew 71, 169 currency, Allied version of ‘French’ 15, 19

219

D Day 37–9, 45 planning for 33–6 Daily Mail 61 Darlan, Admiral 18, 27 Davies, Bernard 40 de Gaulle, Charles 12, 64, 118 Allied ‘French’ currency 19 Britain and 22–3, 64 USA and 27 visit to Marseille 105 dead cattle 42, 70 ‘Decorum of Troops’ circular 163–4 Défense de la France 17–18, 20 Defferre, Gaston 103 Delacotte, Abbé 54 democracy, American 28 demonstrations, mass 100–1, 171 Dening, Greg 9 Departmental Liberation Committee Cherbourg 77–8 Pyrénées-Orientales 130, 135–6, 142, 144, 146 Reims 154 southern France 102–3 deportees 113, 141–2 derequisitioning, demand for 168, 189 Desprairies, Pierre 52 destruction of food/usable products 172–3, 190 devastation of landscape 42, 43–8 Digne 98 disappointment 54–5 politics of in the south 115–21, 177 discipline see behaviour, troops’ disillusionment 191 ditches 43 Dolan, Captain Patrick 79 Domfront 46, 54–5 Donovan, William 27 Draguignan 97

220

Index

Eastern Pyrenees see Pyrénées-Orientales economic exploitation 158–9, 185 Eden, Anthony 24 Eisenhower, General Dwight D. 19, 34–5, 148 elections 160–1, 168–9 electrical trader 160 employment 150 Cherbourg 84, 89 cultural differences 183–4 Marseille 113–15 Reims 170–2 Spanish ex-Republicans 142 Epernay 161, 166 Palace Theatre 153 equipment 107 ethnocentrism 2 ethnographic approach 2–4 European Theater of Operations (ETO) 167 Evrecy 46 Evreux 57 exclusion zone 139–40 exploitation, economic 158–9, 185 external Resistance 4, 12, 17–20, 22–3, 27 factories, requisitioning of 152–3 Fall of France 1940 12, 20, 25, 26 families, fragmentation of 76 Ferrary, Pierre 61 fights 168, 170 First American Army concert 91 First World War 28–9, 147 Flers 45 food 180–1 destruction of in Reims 158 problems in Pyrénées-Orientales 134–5 rationing in Cherbourg 82 shortages in Normandy 58 southern France: criticism of Allied efforts 115–16; demonstrations 100–1; distribution 110–11 stocks in Cherbourg 68; looted 76–7

football match 58 Forces Françaises de l’Interieur (FFI) 53, 54, 102–3, 108–10, 122, 137–8 foreignness 8, 185–8 Americans described as ‘foreigners’ in La Marseillaise 111 Foster Parents Plan for War Children 26 Fourth Major Port of Embarkation Group 70 France Libre 134 Franco, General 130, 132, 144 Franco-Spanish Committee 125 Free French 4, 12, 17–20, 22–3, 27 Fréjus 97 French Army 95, 155 French Army of Africa 5, 103 French Canadian soldiers 55–7 ‘French’ currency 15, 19 French Foreign Legion 138 French Intelligence Service 172 French perspectives, pre-Liberation 12–20 French prisoners of war 113 French historical studies 2 Fromentières 158, 180 Front National, Communist 101 Georges, Daniel 119, 121 German Occupation 12–15, 147, 188 German prisoners of war 81, 117–18, 187 German surrender document 6, 148, 161 Gerona, Civil Governor of 132, 134 gifts 55, 57 Gilchrist, Donald 40 Giraud, General 18, 27, 129 Gladman, Private 40–1 Gold Beach 37, 38, 40 ‘good neighbourliness’ exhibition 170 Gosling, Captain 24 Grandcamp-les-Bains 61

Index

Groupes de Travail Etranger (GTE) 129 Guernier, Madame 52, 55 guerrilleros see Spanish ex-Republicans Hachette series 2, 193 Hastings, Max 39, 68 Haute-Saône 183 Henriot, Philippe 16 Henry, Lieutenant Richard H. 119–20 Héricourt, Pierre 126 Hôpital Pasteur, Cherbourg 78 hospitality 10–11 hosts and guests 10–12, 105–7, 191–2 Hôtel de Ville dance, Châlons 167–8 Hôtel de Ville reception, Cherbourg 92–3 housing 69, 75 Howley, Lieutenant-Colonel Frank O. 68, 77, 78, 82 Illustrated London News 43 images 88 imaginaire social, l’ 2 Indépendant, L’ 126, 127, 128 Information Booklets on France 25–6 infrastructure 3, 74–5, 87, 123–4, 153, 156–7 ingratitude 185, 191 internal frontier 139–40 internal Resistance see Resistance International Brigade 126 internment camps 127–9 Isigny-sur-Mer 86 Italian prisoners of war 117–18, 187 Jary, Sydney 42 Juno Beach 37, 38, 40 Jupp, Captain 63 Kaspi, André 28 Koenig, General 138

221

Laborie, Pierre 15–16, 130 labour relations 113–15, 170–2, 183–4 see also employment Lagrou, Pieter 65 landscape impact of refugee camps 128 Normandy 22, 39–48 language 32–3, 105–6, 152 Lappin, Captain 11, 44, 59 lassitude 15–16 Lattre, General de 95 Lavilleon, Colonel 109 Le Havre 45 League of the Wounded of the Spanish Civil War 125 Lee, General 93 legal system 78 Légion d’Honneur 147 Levandier, M. 76 Lewis, General 171 liberated–liberator relationships 4, 6–9, 10–36, 175–92 American pre-Liberation perspectives 26–33 British pre-Liberation perspectives 20–6 facets producing complications 184–90 French pre-Liberation perspectives 12–20 hosts and guests 10–12, 105–7, 191–2 living together 190–2 preparation for D Day 33–6 understanding the ‘other’ 179–84 varied experiences of Liberation 175–9 Liberation 3, 175–9 Cherbourg 66–71, 176–7 historical perspectives on 1–2 Normandy 37–9, 175–6 planning for 19, 33–6 Pyrénées-Orientales 122 –5, 177–8 Reims 147–50, 178 southern France 95–105, 177; French role 98–102; Marseille 98–100, 102–5

222

Index

Liberty ships 110–11, 115, 189 Life magazine 26 Lisieux 45, 53 looting 58–9, 75–6, 84–5, 182 Louis, Henriette 27 Lyon 15 Madagascans 118, 187 manufacturing industry 152–3, 168, 189 Maple Leaf 44 Maquis 4, 6, 12, 16, 62, 124–5, 129–30 see also Resistance Marie, Robert 46 Marseillaise, La 104, 107, 111, 119 Marseille 3, 5–6, 95–121 passim, 177, 188, 191–2 diverse population 102 food problems 110, 115, 119, 190 Italian POWs 117–18, 187 labour relations 113–15, 183–4 Liberation 98–100, 102–5 press coverage of Allies 106–7, 111, 185 understanding the ‘other’ 180–1, 182–3, 183–4 Martin, Major 114 Mason, Lieutenant 51, 57 mediation 134–5 meetings Cherbourg 77–82 Normandy 55–62 memorialization 46–7, 144–5, 176 Meslin, Roger 56 Metz 148 Midi-Soir 105, 106, 107 Milices Patriotiques 101 military police 163 joint policing 164, 169 Millett, Rachel 10 Ministry of Finance 154 missing persons 76 Montferrat 97–8 Montoire meeting 14 Moore, Captain 40

Mortain 61 Moulin, Jean 101 Mourmelon 162, 164, 165 Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) 168 Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR) 136 Mowrer, Edgar 27 municipal elections 160–1, 168–9 Nancy 148 national identity 116–19, 186–7, 190–1 and Spanish ex-Republicans 143–5, 186 national sovereignty 138–9 New Statesman 22 Nice 102, 115, 116 Normandy 1, 5, 37–65, 175–6, 179, 180, 191 first Liberation 37–9, 175–6 landscape 22, 39–48 Liberation as movement 37–9, 48–55 meeting each other 55–62 North, Rex 41–2 North Africa 18, 23, 27 Nunn, Major Rupert L.H. 68–70, 70–1, 72, 73–4, 77 objectives liberators/liberated 190–1 occupation French perceptions of occupation by Allies 73–4, 166–7, 188 German Occupation 12–15, 147, 188 Office of Strategic Studies (OSS) 97 Omaha Beach 37, 38, 39, 40 Omnia Cinema, Cherbourg 88 Opéra Paramount Cinema, Reims 153 Operation Overlord 37 Orléans 15 Osseja-Palau-de-Cerdagne 144 ‘other’, understanding 179–84 Overlord Embroidery 176

Index

‘Pacifique’ Festival 1945 120 Painel, Gille 47–8, 54 parachutes 71 Paris 3, 31 Parkman, Colonel 98, 105 Patch, General 95, 97, 109 Patton, General 147 Paul, Abbé 11 Périers 46 Pernelle, La 85, 179–80 Perpignan 122, 123–4, 125, 134 cemetery 146, 186 Spanish Consulate 130–1, 140 Peschanski, Denis 128 Pétain, Marshal 12, 14–15, 20 Phillips, Norman 40 pilfering 112, 159 pillaging 58–9, 75–6, 84–5, 182 planning for Liberation 19, 33–6 ‘Pocket Guide to France’ 30 police 157 joint French/military policing 164, 169 military police 163 Polish workers 171–2, 187 Political Warfare Executive (PWE) 24 Populaire, Le 181 ports, restoring Cherbourg 70, 82–4, 90, 93 Marseille 104, 113 Postal services 153 posters 12–13 Prades 125, 141, 144, 153 Prats-de-Mollo 127 press American press conferences 169 British 22 Cherbourg 78–9, 80 Marseille 104, 106–7, 111, 116, 190 negative about Allies 111, 116, 181, 190 Presse Cherbourgeoise, La 78–9, 82

223

prices 159 prisoners of war (POWs) 81, 113, 117–18, 187 propaganda American 10, 28 anti-Allied 13–14, 15 prostitution 165–6, 184 Provençal, Le 103, 104 Provisional Government 3, 116, 134, 137, 153–4 public disorder 86–7, 91, 157–8, 164, 167–9, 179–80 punishment of female collaborators 53–4, 81 Purge, the 107–8, 186 Pyle, Ernie 42, 88 Pyrénées-Orientales 6, 122–46, 177–8, 179, 182, 188–9, 192 foreigners in 126–30 frontier Liberation 122–5, 177–8 liberation of Spain 130–1 national identity 143–5, 186 removal of Spanish ex-Republicans as inflammable material 135–46 security of the border 131–5 Radical Party 147, 161 Radio Cherbourg 79–80 railways 90 rapes 85, 91, 158, 179–80 rationing 82, 110, 115 Rattis Store 73, 188 Rayner, Major 45, 52 Rebatet, Lucien 14 reclaiming buildings/ space 72–3, 168, 189 Red Cross 73, 90 refugees 56 Normandy 59–60 southern France 110 Spanish in Pyrénées-Orientales 126–30, 141, 143 regulation and restrictions 71

224

Index

Reims 6, 147–74, 178, 179, 182, 183, 192 derequisitioning demanded 168, 189 economic exploitation 158–9, 185 labour disputes 170–2, 187 living together 156–61 long goodbye 161–74 military Liberation 147–50, 178 requisitioning 152–3, 156, 188 sexual relations 164–6, 184 taking over 150–6 Reims Chamber of Commerce 156, 161 Renault, Dr 70–1, 77, 78 requisitioning 188 Cherbourg 72, 188 Reims 152–3, 156, 188 southern France 112–13 Resistance 4, 12, 27 and the Allies 17–20 Britain and 23 external 4, 12, 17–20, 22–3, 27 French public opinion and 16 Maquis 4, 6, 12, 16, 62, 124–5, 129–30 Normandy 53, 54, 62 Pyrénées-Orientales 122, 124–5, 129–30, 136 southern France 6, 96–7, 97–8, 100, 101–2, 106; Marseille 102–3, 103–4 rest and recreation zone 113, 116 Rex, Major J.F.S. 50, 51, 59, 60 Ridgeway, General 39–40 Rivesaltes 128–9 road signs 72 Robles, Antoine 144 Roger, Jean 46 Rommel, Field-Marshal 68 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 14, 19, 23–4, 27, 34–5 Rose, Simonne 52 Rouge-Midi 104 Roule, Fort du 68 rowdiness 86 see also public disorder

ruined buildings 43–5, 103 Russia 154–5 Russians 118, 187 Saint-Cyprien 127, 129, 135–6 Saint-Floxel 45 Saint-Hilaire-du-Harcouët 45 Saint-Laurent-de-la-Salanque 131, 135 Saint-Lô 37, 45, 46, 175, 180 Saint-Marsal 125 Saint-Raphaël 97 Saint-Tropez 97, 101–2 Schlieben, General 68 Salgas, Emmanuelle 127 Schmidt, M. 90, 92 schools 89 Schumann, Maurice 17 Scott, John 67–8 Seckle, T.N. 11 Secours National 76, 110 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) 97 Senegalese 118, 187 Senegalese Regiment 134 Sète 122 sexual relations 184 guidance for American troops 32–3 Reims 164–6, 184 Sicre, Michel 154, 161, 168–9, 170 Simon, M. 77 Sisteron 98 Slaughter, John 40 social encounters 57, 58 Socialists 100, 104, 161 southern France 5–6, 95–121, 177, 179 Franco-American relations 111–15 French Liberation 98–100 governing independently 107–11 hosts and guests 105–7 Landings 95–8 Liberation of Marseille 98–100, 102–5 political context 100–2

Index

politics of disappointment 115–21, 177 see also Marseille space 71–4, 188–9 Spain 6 Allies’ mediation between local officials in France and 134–5 and border incidents 132–3 CFLN and 137 German soldiers’ flight into 131–2 recognition of Franquist Spain 143–4 Spanish ex-Republicans’ determination to liberate 130–1 Spanish Civil War 126, 127 Spanish D Battalion at Prades 141 Spanish ex-Republicans 6, 122–46, 177–8, 179, 185, 186 frontier Liberation 122–5 intention to liberate Spain 130–1 refugees 126–30, 141, 143 security of the border 131–5 seen as inflammable material to be removed 135–46 see also Pyrénées-Orientales Spanish Republic anniversary ceremony 145 Special Operations Executive (SOE) 97 Stacey, Jack 49 Stars and Stripes 28–9, 30, 31, 32–3, 49–50, 106 Strasbourg 148 Suippes 162, 164 Suisse Normande 54 summary executions 108 Sunday Pictorial 62 Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) 116–17, 118, 132, 180, 182 Forward Headquarters 148–50, 161–2, 173, 178

225

surrender document 4, 148, 161 Sword Beach 37, 38, 40 technical expertise of Americans 107 theft 112, 159 Thomas, Vaughan 101–2 Thrasher, Colonel 155, 159–60, 182 time zones 87–93, 177 Times, The 20, 21 Tirard, Alfred 61 Todt Organization 68, 70, 81, 129 Toulon 110, 117, 187 Toulouse 122 tourist information 50 towns, destruction of 44–5 trade unions 114–15, 183–4 traffic 71–2, 112 tram system 112 Travailleur Catalan, Le 136–7, 142 travel restrictions 71 tricolore flag presentation ceremony, Cherbourg 70–1 20-km exclusion zone 139–40 UNESCO 144 unexploded bombs 75 Union Lyrique Musicale 89 Unión Nacional Española (UNE) 136–7 United Nations (UN) 144 United States of America (USA) conflicts with French due to cultural differences 90–2, 114–15, 165, 170–2, 182–4 culture 13–14, 181 democracy 28 French perceptions of 13–14, 29–33, 179–81 guidance on troops’ behaviour 31–3, 163–4 pre-Liberation perspectives on France 26–33

226

Index

urban space 71–4 Usine Bauche et Bazancourt 152–3 utilities 75, 156–7 Val d’Aran invasion 131 VE Day celebrations 161 Verdun 147 Vernon 58 Vichy Government 4, 12 and Spanish ex-Republicans 128–9 UK and 20, 23 and USA 13–14, 27, 179, 180 victim status 60–2, 63–5, 176 Vietnamese 118, 187 vigilantism 166 Vigneral, Anne de 11, 52, 58 vilification of Maquis 16 Vimoutiers 45 Vire 45 Voice of America 14

wages 84, 113, 170 late payment and labour dispute in Marseille 114–15 War Bond adverts 28 War Illustrated, The 22 Washington Post 50 welcome of liberators 10–12, 55–7, 150 White, J.Y. 60 white bread 57 wildcat justice 78, 107–8 Wilson, John Lee 10 Wimbledon School for Civil Affairs training 19, 33–4 women punishment of female collaborators 53–4, 81 rapes 85, 91, 158, 179–80 sexual relations with troops 164–6, 184; guidance for troops 32–3 victim status 60–1 Wurmlinger, Jacqueline 46 Yon, David

79