The Race for Paris by Meg Waite Clayton

Author:Meg Waite Clayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

BAGNOLES-DE-L’ORNE, FRANCE

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23, 1944

In case you don’t know, eau de vie is a savage liquid made by boiling barbed wire, soapsuds, watch springs and old tent pegs together. The better brands have a touch of nitroglycerine for flavor . . . I think every American who connects with a glass of eau de vie should get a Purple Heart.

—Journalist Ernie Pyle in “Good-Will-Towards-Men Rang through the Air,” a June 24, 1944, dispatch from Barneville, Normandy

Liv and I were sitting in the jeep, our boot buckles loosened but our feet sweltering in the leather, our fatigues damp against the seats and my blond wave plastered to my forehead, when Fletcher reappeared, hurrying toward us from the press camp.

“The pistol has been shot, ladies!” he said as he leapt into the driver’s seat. “The starting gates are open!”

He gunned the engine and lurched onto the road.

Monk Dickson had come over from First Army headquarters to do the press briefing at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne—business as usual, more or less the same talk of what battles were where, more or less the same maps they’d been looking at for weeks. Then Dickson had looked up at the correspondents and smiled mischievously and said, “We may be in Paris tomorrow.”

Representatives of the FFI—the French Forces of the Interior—had informed General Bradley that the German commander in Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, had received orders to destroy the city if necessary rather than give it up, orders from Hitler himself. Von Choltitz appeared ready to defy Hitler if he could promptly surrender Paris to regular Allied forces. He’d secretly asked for an armistice to allow a peaceful retreat northward. Allied troops could take the city without a fight.

De Gaulle was rumored to have delivered a letter to Eisenhower saying if Eisenhower wouldn’t give the order to take Paris, he would. De Gaulle would not risk the possibility of the communists within the city taking charge of the liberation and staking a claim to the future rule of France he saw as his rightful place.

“That’s what my husband has always thought,” Liv said, “that de Gaulle would liberate Paris, that it would mean the war would be won and anyone who called himself a photojournalist ought to be there.”

That had been before, though, when she’d first started working for Charles, when she’d been his protégée but not yet his bride.

“Charles wanted to honeymoon in Paris,” she said, “but of course we hadn’t been able to, not with the war.”

It seemed that since that moment in the Dives River Liv was forever talking about Charles.

The threatening rain clouds had brought no relief from the heat and humidity as we entered Rambouillet, just thirty miles outside Paris. Our jeep was large and conspicuous on the town’s narrow cobblestone roads. The shops were all closed and wary, only the occasional flutter of curtains at upper-floor windows. Several journalists loitered outside the high iron gates of the Hôtel du Grand Veneur, a three-story, slate-roofed hotel designated as the press headquarters pending the march into Paris.

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